Robert W. Coggin Books In Order

Publication Order of Memoirs

Robert W. Coggin
Robert W. Coggin has spent much of his life working for Delta Air Lines, from the year 1956 until 1998. Since retiring, has devoted a lot of his time to community service, including a long stint on the Newman City Council and one pivotal and ongoing role in the Boys & Girls Clubs of Newman.

He wrote about his experiences, for his autobiography called “Flying High Over the Cotton Field”, because he wanted to inspire other young folks to work hard and to succeed everything got involved in. He wanted to demonstrate to them that if you really have a good work ethic, you are willing to go where the company sends you, and you have a lot of energy, you have a good chance of succeeding in whatever company you’re with.

The book begins when he was around the age of three, with his earliest memory, on the farm close to Sargent where he grew up. He says that his early life was rather humble. Ultimately, he says, the qualities that his parents instilled in him would serve him quite well and credits the work ethic his dad helped him attain. Robert would joke that his dad didn’t know that slavery had never been abolished.

Robert’s mom was ‘quite a creative person’, and he inherited these genes from her. A few of the creative ideas that he had during his time with Delta really impressed the people he worked for and it helped move him along.

When he first joined up with Delta, he believed his ramp job would be a lifetime job, due to his limited education and his background. Since he was willing to relocate and was hard-working, he could move up, however. After six months with the company was offered a job in Montgomery, Alabama in the role of station agent. In this job, he did it all, processed paperwork, made reservations, and even loaded and unloaded the planes.

The eleven years he spent in New York is something he says helped prepare him for his much larger role at Delta. He was able to see just how businesses were operating in the country’s largest city, which helped show him just how “Delta ought to be operating”.

In the year 1979, Coggin was named the head of planning for Delta. While he was adding employees into the planning department, he routinely hired those people that had computer programming experience. He ended up building his own IT department in the planning department, and was able to get his job done in an acceptable way.

He quickly found that when there was something new coming, top executives would call on him to handle it. As the company was starting talks to make Delta the official airline of Disney World, Coggin was sent in so that the deal could be negotiated even though it didn’t have anything at all to do with planning. In the end, Delta wound up becoming the official airline of Disneyland and Disney World.

After he retired he founded Alpine Marketing and Consulting, which soon attracted travel industry clients, including Priceline.com.

Robert has also been an airline consultant for the Nassau/Paradise Island Promotion Board and has been active as a member of the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau.

For around ten years, Robert worked on his book. Deberah Williams and Angela McRae, a couple of local writers, took major hands in editing the book and prepping it for publication.

Despite being known as a lion in the travel and airline industry, he and Millie (his wife) are better known locally for their many efforts that make the lives of people in Coweta better, especially those of young people. It is a role he enjoys, and says that God had a strong hand in the successes he had, and he felt that he wanted Robert to give back as a result. He is thankful he gets to be in a position to give back and share a part of what God has allowed Robert to achieve.

His memoir, called “Flying High Over the Cotton Field”, was released in the year 2018.

“Flying High Over the Cotton Field” is the first non-fiction book and was released in the year 2018. Robert Coggin was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Coggin spent his early years in a tiny mill village in Georgia. Later on, he and his family later lived on their large farm, where his daily chores may include plowing the fields behind an old mule or picking cotton.

Enlisting in the United States Air Force gave him a taste of what life might be like off of the farm, and some training in classified communications gave him the leg up on the competition when applying for a job at Delta Air Lines back in 1956. This first Delta job, working as a “ramp rat” led to one amazing career with this airline, a time of great evolution in the airline industry, and a time of much professional and personal growth for Coggin, who retired in 1998. By this time, he was one of Delta’s top four executives, and had worked with the company for over forty years.

Inspired by the founder of Delta, C.E. Woolman, he found that through a willingness to go anywhere the company needed him to serve and hard work, there wasn’t any limit to what he could possibly achieve.

The journey takes you along with Robert while he gets promoted to better and larger jobs with increasing amounts of responsibility. This includes spending eleven years in New York before he was asked to return to Georgia, where Atlanta was his home base and he was again near his family.

Readers found this to be an interesting journey, and provides insights into Delta’s transformations and challenges. It also gives readers how Coggin goes from his humble beginnings and ends up becoming an Executive with the company. Readers enjoyed the background info in the book as well as the amazing career this man had. It is a tale of a love of family, both is airline family and his blood family.