“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his security clearance being withdrawn on the grounds that 20 years before, he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.
