Barbara could not help herself and asked, "Earhart?"
"Yes, the one and only," Jackie said with a smile. "We're old friends from our Bendix races. Anyway, we heard a radio report that a transport plane had disappeared enroute from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. Amelia asked if I could locate it, psychically. I did some heavy concentration and after two hours said I saw mountain peaks, roads, and transmission lines. I concluded that the plane went down in the mountains near Salt Lake City. The plane had disappeared in winter, and the following spring, when the snow melted in those mountains, wreckage of the transport emerged. It was found only two miles from where I had envisioned it would be."
"A lucky guess?" Alma Velut asked.
"A few weeks later, Amelia called me about another missing plane," Jackie said. "It had disappeared enroute to Los Angeles. I concentrated and saw the body of the plane pointing down a mountainside. Some of the passengers were dead, others injured. Search parties found the plane where I said I had 'seen' it."
Barbara believed her, but some of the other guests looked skeptical.
"Ask her about it, next time you see her," Jackie said.
"Too bad she said she couldn't be with us today. She's busy planning another attempt to circle the world."
Barbara had not had a drink, but was becoming intoxicated on the conversation.
When she and her hostess had a chance to sit and talk by themselves, Jackie asked about her background. They soon learned they had much in common. Barbara had been fatherless as an infant, and Jackie had been orphaned at an early age and didn't even know her birth date. They both had worked their way to where they were.
After Barbara told her story matter-of-factly, Cochran told hers the same way. She was born in Pensacola, Florida and lived with poor foster parents in the sawmill towns of Florida and Georgia. She slept on the wooden floor because she had no bed. For the first seven years of her life, she had worn dresses made from cast-off flour sacks. She had no shoes until she was eight years old and went to work in a cotton mill in Georgia for six cents an hour and was able to buy her own first pair of shoes. In her spare time, she read. Later she opened a beauty shop she parlayed into a successful cosmetics business, then learned to fly a plane and was becoming one of America's leading women pilots.