Chapter 3 Lt. Comdr. Donnie Cochran 1989 Black Engineer of the Year Donnie Cochran always wanted to fly. Growing up on a family farm near Pelham, in Georgia’s southwestern section, young Donnie, the fifth of 12 children, paused while working in the fields to watch Navy jets fly over. “I started thinking about flying when I was about 12 years old,” he told US Black Engineer & Information Technology magazine in a 1987 interview. “Out working in the fields, I had the opportunity to see Navy jets flying over, in what I later figured out was low-level navigation training. And as I’m out there, working in the heat of the day, I see those jets screaming by, and I wondered, ‘Now which is better, me down here or those jets up there? Which is more exciting?’ It didn’t take me long to realize that if I had an opportunity to pursue flying, that was what I was going to do.” An older sibling came home to Pelham wearing Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps whites in the summer of 1972, just after Cochran finished high school. Three older brothers had gone on to historically Black Savannah State College and majored in engineering, and when young Donnie saw his oldest brother “wearing this real sharp white uniform, I thought, ‘this is pretty neat,’ and then he was going traveling, something I hadn’t done. I hadn’t traveled out of the state of Georgia.” Cochran majored in civil engineering technology, and might well have continued the tradition begun by pioneers such as Archibald Alexander, an internationally known Black architect and bridgebuilder responsible for the reflecting pool at the Jefferson Memorial, Washington’s Whitehurst Freeway, and the Alabama airfield where the Tuskegee Airmen got their wings. But flying was in Donnie Cochran’s blood. Coach Roscoe Draper would understand that drive implicitly. Coach Draper, a
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