page_title: Jacqueline Cochran
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Jacqueline Cochran / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Jackie (Jacqueline Cochran) as a child, undated
context_page_description: Jacqueline "Jackie" Cochran was an American pilot and business executive. She pioneered women's aviation as one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation. She set numerous records and was the first woman to break the sound barrier on 18 May 1953. Cochran was the wartime head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, which employed about 1000 civilian American women in a non-combat role to ferry planes from factories to port cities.
context_section_description: Jacqueline Cochran, born Bessie Lee Pittman, in Pensacola, (some sources indicate she was born in DeFuniak Springs) in the Florida Panhandle, was the youngest of the five children of Mary (Grant) and Ira Pittman, a skilled millwright who moved from town to town setting up and reworking sawmills. While her family was not rich, Cochran's childhood living in small-town Florida was similar to those in other families of that time and place. Contrary to some accounts, there was always food on the table and she was not adopted, as she often claimed.
  In about 1920, (she would have been 13 or 14), she married Robert Cochran and gave birth to a son, Robert, who died in 1925 at the age of 5.  After the marriage ended, she kept the name Cochran and began using Jacqueline or 'Jackie' as her given name.  Cochran then became a hairdresser and got a job in Pensacola, eventually winding up in New York City. There, she used her looks and driving personality to get a job at a prestigious salon at Saks Fifth Avenue.
  Although Cochran denied her family and her past, she remained in touch with them and provided for them over the years. Some of her family even moved to her ranch in California after she remarried. However, they were instructed to always say they were her adopted family. Cochran apparently wanted to hide from the public the early chapters of her life and was successful in doing so until after her death.
  Only later did Cochran meet Floyd Bostwick Odlum, founder of Atlas Corp. and CEO of RKO in Hollywood. Fourteen years her senior, he was reputed to be one of the 10 richest men in the world. Odlum became enamored of Cochran and offered to help her establish a cosmetics business.
  After a friend offered her a ride in an aircraft, Cochran began taking flying lessons at Roosevelt Airfield, Long Island in the early 1930s and learned to fly an aircraft in just three weeks. She then soloed and within two years obtained her commercial pilot's license. Odlum, whom she married in 1936 after his divorce, was an astute financier and savvy marketer who recognized the value of publicity for her business. Calling her line of cosmetics Wings to Beauty, she flew her own aircraft around the country promoting her products. Years later, Odlum used his Hollywood connections to get Marilyn Monroe to endorse Cochran's line of lipstick.
caption: Cochran as a child c. 1908[1]
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