Rocket Girls

“Get the girl to check the numbers.  If she says the numbers are good, I’m ready to go.” Astronaut John Glenn, first American to orbit Earth

Nathalia Holt’s “Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars” is not only a history of the technology behind space flight (I learned that Uranus has a moon named Miranda) and the women computer pioneers who helped make those feats possible but also a fascinating case study of white-collar workplace relations between the sexes in the mid-twentieth-century. Holt talks about the liberating effects of birth control pills, as well as pantyhose and pants suits, which gradually replaced garter belts and skirts. Unlike Margot Lee Shetterly’s “Hidden Figures,” the women at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California, were, with a few notable exceptions, white.  Before Macie Roberts, in charge of hiring new computers (as the women were called prior to the installation of giant IBMs and their successors), selected African-American candidate Janez Lawson, she first made certain that the others were OK with the hire.

Macie Roberts hired only women, believing that to do otherwise would affect collegiality, so a sense of sisterhood developed. The “girls” looked out for one another, warning newcomers to be wary of lotharios, for instance, or that a certain engineer decorated his office with girlie pictures, and that Christmas parties could get a little loose, especially if one imbibed excessively.  Nonetheless, all women were required to participate in a Miss Guided Missile competition.  In the days before maternity leave, pregnant women were sometimes terminated when heavy with child.  Some with non-supportive husbands ended up divorced and back at Jet Propulsion Lab, as home life seemed boring comparison. What excited the staff more than beating the Russians to the moon was interplanetary exploration at a time when many believed there might be life elsewhere in the solar system. The women were much less resistant to new computer technology than the male engineers although, in the long run, the machines cost many of them their jobs.

Rocket Girls mentions the Red Baiting of Air Force Colonel Tsien Hsue-shen, a Jet Propulsion Lab founder, who had been born in China and studied at MIT and Caltech. After the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, Tsien Hsue-shen applied to become an American citizen.  That led to an FBI investigation resulting in his security clearance being withdrawn on the grounds that 20 years before, he had attended parties where alleged Communists were present.  Hounded by FBI agents at a time when Nazi scientists such as Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) were being welcomed into the scientific community with open arms, Tsien Hsue-shen returned to China and became the founder of his native country’s jet propulsion rocketry program. Sweet revenge.

The Fall 2017 issue of the IU publication Imagine contains “Sexual Revolution: The Sequel,” about the Kinsey Institute at 70.  The proliferation of dating sites and the practice of “hooking up” conjures images of lonely phone-swipers and oversexualized trophy collectors.  Sex researcher Justin Garcia cautions against seeing this phenomenon as a “dating apocalypse,” arguing: “The drive to love is way too much a part of what it means to be human.  I just think the rituals of courtship have changed.”

Samuel Love quipped that he is represented in Joseph Pete's photo by his water bottle and green rag

Sunday’s Times LifeStyle section featured Joseph S. Pete’s “City of Verse,” which focused on Corey Hagelberg and Samuel Love’s Gary Poetry Project.  It began:

    The imposing three-story brick facade of Gary’s historic Heat Light Water building was once drab but now pops with bright colors.  Yellow, green and blue plywood boards cover broken windows and doorways that haven’t been darkened in years. They’re covered with spray-painted words: “I love you,” “Four words for my city: we’ve got to work,” and “To hold dear/the light/we have found/we must/sprinkle poetry/like a sword/let it save us/let it ignite a/revolution/in the sanctum of the soul.”

    The Gary Poetry Project has been turning abandoned buildings across the city into an unlikely canvas, an unfurling scroll for a sprawling citywide poem. The words come from Gary residents themselves — hundreds of people, many of whom are schoolchildren, have contributed lines of verse to a growing poem that’s been spreading across Gary’s ruins like ivy draped on the side of the Heat Light Water building.

    Gary Poetry Project organizers Sam Love and Corey Hagelberg have plastered poems on vacant buildings across the city: on Broadway downtown, on the towering City Methodist Church, outside the vintage Palace Theatre and all over the Aetna neighborhood’s forlorn commercial district.

Explaining the process, Pete wrote: “Love transcribes all the lines workshop participants scribble down on handouts, and Hagelberg creates 4-foot-by-8-foot stencils on a CNC machine. The process takes about four hours to complete for a single board.  They’ve already cranked out more than 40.”  Sam told Pete:  

   It’s taking aspects of the city that aren’t appreciated, that people maybe even aren’t aware of and putting it out for people to see.  The real thing is the way non-Gary people view Gary. There’s no nuance. People don’t see the diversity. They see a singularity. We’ve got a great diversity of opinion, ethnicity and culture but it all gets funneled down into blacks, Michael Jackson, crime or abandoned houses. They never let the city be itself. That’s why we want to put it out there where people can’t ignore it. If people across the Region read it, it confronts the way people look at this city.

The Times Sunday Forum section has deteriorated without columnist Rich James or any liberal points of view. A black reactionary chortled at those “whiners” suffering from “Trump Syndrome.” An anti-abortion Notre Dame professor wrote yet again about the so-called rights of the unborn.  Yuck!  The truth is that most Americans of good will want the current administration to succeed and lament loss of life, whether by automatic weapons (the latest mass shooting occurring inside a Baptist church in Texas) or, usually in desperation, by terminating a pregnancy.

 Carson Wentz

Sunday morning, I went shopping at Strack and Van Til with coupons that would have saved me $20, only the cashier claimed they didn’t take effect for another two days.  She pointed to tiny print in contrast to the expiration date: November 14. Who ever heard of coupons only being valid in the future and for less than a week?  What bullshit! I was tempted to leave without paying for anything.  In the afternoon, I thought of Joe Okomski as the Philadelphia Eagles slaughtered Denver, 51-23, which would have made his “toe tap,” as the Sonny Man used to say.  MVP candidate Carson Wentz threw for four TDs against a normally excellent Broncos defense. Colt T.Y. Hilton killed my chances both in a CBS Pool and LANE Fantasy Football, catching 5 passes for 175 yards and two TDs in a win over Jacksonville.

Longtime supporter Victor Thornton fixes Hatcher's tie; below, Jackson and Freeman-Wilson

Ron Cohen filled me in on the November 4 “Day to Remember” tribute to Richard Hatcher at West Side on the fiftieth anniversary of his election as mayor of Gary.  Earlier that day, Cohen heard me quoted about Hatcher’s historical importance in an NPR report by Michael Puente. Maurice Yancy, who made use of my tickets, said the event went on for five hours.  The main speakers were Reverend Jesse Jackson and Minister Farrakhan, who brought his Fruit of Islam bodyguards.  Jackson pledged a thousand dollars for a statue of Hatcher and shamed others into making similar donations.

In Nicole Anslover’s Sixties class Jesse Jackson’s name came up in connection Martin Luther King’s assassination.  I heard Jackson speak at a 1968 Poor People’s Campaign Solidarity Day rally in Washington, D.C.  He strained to get the crowd to chant “Green Power.”  Because students would be reporting on articles about Vietnam Vets in my “Brothers in Arms” Steel Shavings issue, I mentioned interviews with IUN colleagues Raoul Contreras, Jim Tolhuizen, and Gary Wilk.  In the middle of his year tour of duty, Contreras spent R and R in Bangkok with a beautiful escort.  Gary Wilk’s brother was a peace activist in college and understood, Gary admitted, more about the “Big Picture” than he did while an army cook in Nam.  Jim Tolhuizen had never discussed his Vietnam experiences until opening up one day to me; then he began speaking to my students about being a “ground pounder.”  It was good therapy, he told me.  After his closest friend Paul died from a rocket propelled grenade, Tolhuizen avoided getting too close to others.   Referencing Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” I told of avoiding the draft by staying in college, getting married, and having kids.  Tolhuizen, who graduated from Western Michigan in 1968, was not so fortunate.

 Admissions director Dorothy Frink; photo by Erika Rose

IUN Admissions director Dorothy Frink interviewed me for a research project concerning the recruitment and retention of minority students during the 1960s and 1970s.  I talked about F.C. Richardson’s role in the creation of a Black Studies program (one of the first in the country) and program directors Henry Simmons and Joe Pentecoste, as well as administrators Leroy Gray, Bill Lee, Ernest Smith, and Barbara Cope.  I mentioned that Dr. Nicolas Kanellos believed that the university was not doing enough to recruit students from Gary or East Chicago.  Perhaps it was under orders from Chancellor Danilo Orescanin, who worried over perceptions that IU Northwest, as the racist joke went, was becoming “Indiana University Non-white.”

 above, Jonathan Briggs; below, audience members; photos by James Wallace

IUN’s Office of Diversity and the History Department co-sponsored a three-part forum on World War I.  Tuesday, with Jonathan Briggs presiding, three seminar students presented papers, Branden Hearn on the war’s effect on the world economy, a second student on the naval battle of Jutland, and Virgil Spornick on how the conflict affected Romania and Romanian-Americans.  Virgil’s dad returned to his native village in Transylvania around 1930, met a pretty girl, and proposed to her the following day.  She came to America, and in 1934 Virgil was born. What she remembered about arriving in New York City was seeing laundry hanging between the upper floors of tenements.

Noticing Chancellor Bill Lowe in the audience, whose research field was Ireland during this period, I asked how the war impacted that troubled area. After saying, “Do you want me to answer that” Bill proceeded to enlighten the audience about an unfolding tragedy.  When the British reneged on granting meaningful home rule, it radicalized Irish nationalists. Though Irish were not conscripted (an Act of Parliament to that effect was not enforced), both Catholics and Protestant enlistees sacrificed their lives in numbers comparable to Englishmen. At war’s end Sinn Fèin candidates swept to victory and drew up a Declaration of Independence, provoking civil war and the partition of Ireland.  Lowe’s grandfather died of cancer at age 60 when Bill was four, due, in all likelihood, to poison gas encountered in the trenches. 

Winning a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, Transgender Danica Roem defeated the incumbent, outspoken LGBT rights opponent Bob Marshall, who, insisted on referring to Danica as a “he,” by double digits.  Eleven of the 14 LGBT rights newcomers were women, including the first Asian (Kathy Tran) and Latina (Elizabeth Guzman). In a victory speech Danica Roem said:

            To every person who’s ever been singled out, who’s ever been stigmatized, who’s ever been the misfit, who’s ever been the kid in the corner, who’s ever needed someone to stand up for them when they didn’t have a voice of their own because there’s no one else who was with them, this one’s for you. 

 Anne Balay photos by Riva Lehrer

Anne Balay solicited opinion on what photo to use for her upcoming trucker book “Semi Queer.”  Most responders recommended the red cab pose after Liz Wuerrful edited out the Atlas Truck Company logo.  I preferred what Anne called “the hobo look,” but Cathy Van Bruggen wrote:

  The first one looks like a real driver about to get on board her working truck, the second looks like you dropped by a truck sales lot and took a picture with a truck for sale. No ICC number on the door? But thanks Anne for giving me something to ruminate on other than my own BS.

 Phil, Miranda, and Delia

Liz Wuerrfel, second from right

On Facebook: Daughter-in-law Delia is now a blond, while Liz Wuerrfel got her head shaved for St. Baldrick’s Foundation.  The VU event raised over $25,000 for childhood cancer research.