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the remaining members of the Mercury 13 when he attended the space shuttle launch in 1999 after astronaut Eileen Collins be- came the first female shuttle commander.
Hallonquist became an informal manager for some members of the group, running a website devoted to their stories and acting as a mediator when reporters and people from the entertainment industry made contact. “There have been tons of people preying on the girls,” Hallonquist says. “Every time the public has remembered them, people come out of the woodwork and try to get things out of them. I’ve tried
to help vet people and protect them.” All kinds of characters have popped up
over the years. A producer who optioned their story rights in the 1990s dubbed the group the Mercury 13 and then did nothing else with the material. David Adair, an AM radio host who espouses various conspiracy theories about space, including claims the moon is hollow, befriended the remaining members of the Mercury 13 beginning in the 1990s. He eventually purchased the rights to their stories and co-wrote a screenplay he’s been shopping around Hollywood for years. (In 2016, Hidden Figures, a film about African-American female mathematicians who worked for NASA during the Space Race, won several Oscar nominations.)
Some of the women had already died, but those who remained were becoming a part of history as they aged, and they had a story to tell.
Except for Cobb. A woman named Ruth Lummis became her representative and began to handle all visitors, phone calls, and emails to the point that no one was able to contact Cobb without going through Lummis.
The two settled in Sun City Center, a se- nior retirement community 27 miles south of Tampa, shortly after Glenn’s launch. Jack Symonds lived across the street for a few years beginning in 2001, and he and Cobb, always wearing her trademark ponytail while she worked in her yard, struck up a friendship. They would sit on Cobb’s porch talking. When the conver- sation turned to flying, Cobb invariably grew angry about NASA all over again.
“She really wanted to do it, to get in there, and she knew that it was never go- ing to happen after Glenn went back up and she still wasn’t allowed,” Symonds recalls. “She was so proud of what she had done and was certain she could have gone to space. She was bitter, just vehe- ment, about Glenn’s part in all of this.”
Adair, the radio host, hired a private in- vestigator to track Cobb down in 2012 when she was being inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame. He persuaded local law enforcement to conduct a welfare check on her and tagged along. The officers pulled up to a neat yellow house surrounded by brightly colored butterfly-attracting bushes.
Cobb, a small elderly woman with short brown hair, answered the door. She stood there, confused by the presence of sheriff ’s deputies and Adair and strug- gling to understand them because of se- vere hearing loss. Once she realized what they were asking, she told them she was fine and simply wished to be left alone.
“She was a fabulous pilot, but that was never enough,” Adair says. “I think she just said screw it, and I can’t say I blame her.”
New Times attempted to contact Cobb through Lummis for weeks. Lummis po- litely maintained that Cobb was in the Amazon jungle, out of reach of even the most basic forms of communication and unlikely to return anytime soon. But oth- ers who know the 87-year-old questioned that story, so a reporter visited Sun City Center, where almost every resident is at least 54 years old. Nobody answered the door, and the blinds were tightly shut.
Neighbors confirmed Cobb lived there, but declined to say much more. One woman said, “You get out of here. None of us are going to tell you anything.” Another added, “She’s not in the jungle and she’s getting older, as we all are, but Jerrie is of sound mind. Jerrie is just a private person. I can’t tell you anything else. I will not violate her privacy.” Mary Strehar, a longtime friend and neighbor, said, “I think 90 percent of the people on this block have no idea who she really is... It’s not her nature to be open. She’s proud of her accomplish- ments, but there are the books where you can read about that. She does not wish to talk about it. That’s all I can tell you.”
The others are less mysterious. Jessen has continued to fly, still runs a flight school with her husband in Ohio, and has written a number of books about her experiences and about female pilots. But she’s never written about being one of the Mercury 13. “It was never going to happen and I knew that. And when it didn’t happen, that was hard, but I got over it. I moved on.”
Ratley says she hasn’t let it define her either. “I always had my hopes that NASA would change its mind and I would get to go, but I also went on with my life,” Ratley says. “There was more to my life than some- thing that didn’t happen. There had to be.”
Funk lives in a house in Grapevine, Texas, so close to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport that huge passenger airliners al- ways buzz overhead. She has turned her home into an ad hoc museum. Memorabilia from her childhood, her career in aviation, and her quest to get into space occupies every available surface. A TV tuned to the NASA station plays 24 hours a day.
After NASA rejected Funk’s final as- tronaut application, she went to Star City, Russia, where the cosmonauts train, in the early 2000s. (In a video filmed by the Travel Channel, Funk is seen in a zero-gravity plane, pushing off from the floor and thrusting her- self so high she touches the ceiling as a burly Russian scrambles to guide her so she won’t fall or hit anyone else on her way down.)
When Richard Branson announced Virgin Galactic would offer private flights to space, Funk paid $200,000 to secure her spot. She already knows which seat she prefers (the one closest to the pilot’s), but it’s still unclear when or if she will get to go. Branson recently announced the company plans to start flights next year, but he’s made similar claims in
the past. Asked what she will do if she never goes to space, Funk, her eyes widening and beginning to fill, replies, “I don’t know. I don’t think about it. I’m going, end of story.”
Editorial@MiamiNewTimes.com
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