Fighting for Space

by Amy Shira Teitel

  Jim Webb (1906–1992)

  Jim was a trained lawyer and worked as a congressional assistant, served with the Marine Corps, and held the position of director of the Bureau of the Budget and undersecretary of state under President Truman before taking the role of NASA administrator under President Kennedy.

  Hugh Latimer Dryden (1898–1965)

  Hugh spent his career on the cutting edge of aviation and aeronautics. He was among the pioneers of supersonic flight before working on missile development during the Second World War. Postwar, he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and eventually became its first ever director. He led the NACA into supersonic and hypersonic flight programs before taking the role of deputy administrator when the NACA morphed into NASA.

  Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower (1890–1969)

  During the Second World War, Ike was a five-star general in the United States Army (as of 2019 he remains one of only five men to ever hold this rank) and supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe; in this capacity he played a major role in orchestrating the D-Day landings at Normandy in 1944. Between 1953 and 1961, he served as the thirty-fourth president of the United States.

  Robert Pirie (1905–1990)

  A naval aviator himself, Robert served as deputy chief of naval air operations from 1958 to 1962, the period in which the women were hoping to take additional astronaut tests at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola.

  Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold (1886–1950)

  Hap was a general of the army and then chief of the Army Air Force during the Second World War. The air force became a separate service branch in 1947, and in 1949 Hap was named its first general and awarded a five-star rank by the US Congress.

  Chuck Yeager (1923– )

  Chuck was a United States Air Force officer who moved into experimental flight testing after the Second World War. In 1947, he became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound in level flight. Known as one of the most intuitive pilots, he flew a variety of high-speed aircraft in his career, as well as instructing other test pilots, Jackie being one of his many students.

  John Glenn (1921–2016)

  After dropping out of college in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, John became a marine aviator who served in both the Second World War and the Korean War. He eventually moved into flight testing, training at the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent River, Maryland, before working for the Fighter Design Branch of the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. He had about 9,000 hours of flying time, 3,000 of which were in jets, when he was selected as a Mercury astronaut in 1959.

  Wally Funk (1940– )

  Flying professionally since 1957, Wally had a stunning career. In addition to working as a flight instructor, Wally notably served as the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board and served as the first female Federal Aviation Administration inspector. She also applied for NASA’s astronaut corps twice once the agency started accepting women.

  Jerri Sloan (1929–2013)

  Jerri learned to fly as a teenager and enjoyed a lifelong career as a pilot. Notably, she worked as a research pilot flying North American B-25s for Texas Instruments and served as vice president to both Air Freighters International and Air Services, Inc.

  Bernice “B” Steadman, née Trimble (1925–2015)

  B Steadman was an American aviator, businesswoman, and frequent face in the air race circuit in the mid-century. She founded the Trimble Aviation School before she was married and thus became one of the few women in the country to own and operate her own school. She also served as president of the Ninety-Nines.

  Myrtle “K” Cagle (1925– )

  When K earned her wings at the age of fourteen, she was the youngest pilot in her home state of North Carolina. This started her on a career path that saw her earning her commercial and multi-engine licenses and working as a flight instructor, flight instrument instructor, and ground instructor. She also ran her own charter plane service near Raleigh.

  Gene Nora Jessen, née Stumbough (1937– )

  Gene Nora quit her job as a flight instructor at the University of Oklahoma for the Pensacola tests. After the tests were cancelled, she joined a sales demonstration team of Beechcraft aircraft. As one of the Three Musketeers, she flew in formation over the contiguous forty-eight states before setting up her own Beechcraft dealership in Boise, Idaho.

  Rhea Woltman, née Hurrle (1927– )

  Rhea earned her commercial pilot’s license with single- and multi-engine ratings and was even a licensed seaplane pilot and held multiple instructor ratings. She retired from flying midway through the 1960s.

  Irene Leverton (1927–2017)

  Irene held multiple licenses and taught hopeful pilots to fly gliders, single-engine planes, and multi-engine planes. She even tested pilots for the FAA. In the early 2000s, she was presented with the Civil Air Patrol’s Commander’s Commendation Award and its Meritorious Service Award, as well as the FAA’s Master Pilot Award. She’s been inducted into multiple aviation halls of fame.

  Jean Hixson (1922–1984)

  Jean joined the WASPs late in the war, graduating in Class 44-6. Postwar, she worked as a flight instructor while earning her degree in education, which launched her second career as a schoolteacher. She continued teaching and flying until her retirement a little over a year before her death.

  Jan Dietrich (1926–2008)

  One of two girls in her aviation class in high school, Jan parlayed her love of flight into a full-time career. She worked as a flight instructor as well as a corporate pilot for a construction company in California, and earned advanced licenses including her airline transport pilot license.

  Marion Dietrich (1926–1974)

  The other of two girls in her aviation class in high school, Marion’s love of flying led to a career in journalism, though she flew charter flights and ferried aircraft in her spare time.

  Janey Briggs Hart (1921–2015)

  After earning her pilot’s license during the Second World War, Janey added helicopter pilot to her résumé, becoming the first licensed woman in her home state of Michigan. Outside of flying, Janey had a keen interest in politics; she was a liberal democrat along with her husband, Senator Philip Hart. She was also an avid sailor and mother of eight.

  Sarah Ratley, née Gorelick (1933– )

  Sarah learned to fly before she learned to drive and earned a slew of licenses including her commercial pilot’s license, multi-engine land and water instrument rating, and helicopter pilot license. She earned a bachelor’s of science in mathematics, minoring in physics, chemistry, and aeronautics, before switching tracks completely in the mid-1960s to work as an accountant with the IRS.

  Chapter 1

  Muscogee, Florida, 1912

  Bessie Pittman ran as fast as her six-year-old legs could carry her. She ran over dirt roads blanketed with wood chips and sawdust to stop them from becoming impassible when it rained. But as today was hot and dry, Bessie’s bare feet kicked up clouds of dust with every step. The flour sack she wore as a dress was soon covered in filth, but she didn’t care. She just wanted to get home before the ice block clutched in her hands melted. She’d packed it in sawdust and wrapped it in newspaper to protect it against the summer heat, but it was a losing battle. Bessie ran past townsfolk. She ran past the school. She ran past a Presbyterian church, a Methodist church, a post office, a barbershop, and a general store. She ran past the shacks residents called home, little one-room dwellings on stilts with windows permanently open to the elements such that there was nothing to do but tack paper over the holes when it rained. It was the same kind of home her family lived in.

  Sawdust Road, she privately called the ramshackle little town of Muscogee, Florida. The small community near the east bank of the Perdido River existed because of the sawmill. Like most of the men in town, Bessie’s father, Ira, worked for the Southern States Lumber Company for $1.251 a day, but the workers weren’t paid in
money, they were paid in chips that could only be redeemed at the company commissary. It was almost a form of indentured servitude that meant mill families rarely escaped mill towns. It wasn’t a good life, but the Pittmans never thought of themselves as poor. Like all of their neighbors, they got by, growing what food they could and leaning on friends in tougher times. When there was more work to get, Bessie’s brothers, Joseph and Henry, could nearly double the family’s earning while her sisters, Mary Elbertie and Maybelle Myrtle, were in school. But today, one of Bessie’s brothers had the mumps and her mother, Mollie, needed the ice block to cool his fever.

  The ice was nearly gone by the time Bessie got home. Taking the soggy package from her daughter, Mollie, headstrong and quick to anger, reached her breaking point. She grabbed a switch from the backyard and turned toward her youngest child, but Bessie was her strong-willed mother in miniature. They locked eyes. Without looking away, the girl leaned down and picked up the first piece of firewood her little hand found and raised it with fire flashing in her eyes. For a moment neither moved; then, sensing that her daughter wouldn’t back down, Mollie let the switch fall and backed away. Bessie, who already regarded her mother as slovenly, lazy, and mean, now added cowardly to the list. She threw the piece of wood to the ground and walked away victorious.

  The Pittmans weren’t in Muscogee long. Once all the trees in the area had been felled, planked, and shipped out as lumber, the mill closed and the workers were left scrambling to find new jobs at other mills where the forest was abundant. Ira packed up his family and its meager possessions, which included Mollie’s Bible that doubled as the only record of family births and deaths, and relocated to Bagdad, a port town near the junction of Pond Creek and the Blackwater River, about twelve miles east of Pensacola. Outwardly it was just another mill town—in this case, owned by the Bagdad Land and Lumber Company—but for Bessie it was the most luxurious place she’d ever seen. Routinely skipping lessons after the strict schoolmarm had taken a ruler to her hands on her third day of class, Bessie spent her days wandering through town alone. She marveled at the motorcars driving on paved roads lined with electric lamps that shone as it got dark. She’d find a spot atop a hill and watch the long freight trains lazily carrying lumber from the mill. She practiced her ABCs deciphering the names on the boxcars, imagining the distant places each train was coming from or going to. But the millinery shop was by far Bessie’s favorite. She could happily spend hours staring at the window displays, taking in every detail of the beautiful hats trimmed with fur and feathers. Between the foreign boxcars and the exotic fashions, Bessie began dreaming of a life far from any mill town.

  But her days of fantasizing came to an end when she was found by a truant officer and forced to attend the one-room schoolhouse. Initially angry over the loss of her freedom, Bessie changed her tune when she met her teacher, Miss Bostwick. To Bessie, Miss Bostwick was elegance incarnate. She had an exotic northern accent, wore pressed dresses, and though she was prone to rapping students on the knuckles with a ruler, Bessie found she was fair in her discipline. Miss Bostwick, in turn, took an immediate shine to Bessie. The teacher offered her student ten cents2 a week to bring firewood to her house, and before long the girl was making daily trips with armfuls of small logs. More important than the small sum were Miss Bostwick’s lessons about table manners and the value of personal hygiene. Uncommon though it was in the Pittman house, Bessie developed the habit of brushing her teeth with a gum tree branch and taking daily baths in the tin tub filled with cold well water. Miss Bostwick gave her a comb, a ribbon for her hair, and a proper dress so she could hold her head up high with the other kids in her classroom. She also gave her books. Bessie slogged through David Copperfield, underlining words for Miss Bostwick to explain later. This tutelage imbued Bessie with a sense of self-worth she’d never known, but her education came to an abrupt halt after two years. Miss Bostwick traveled back north and, with all the trees around Bagdad gone, Ira moved his family to Columbus, Georgia, where the Bibb City cotton mill held the promise of jobs for the whole family, including a now ten-year-old Bessie.

  There was no question of Bessie returning to school when she could earn money for the family. Every night from six o’clock in the evening to six o’clock in the morning, Bessie pushed a cart up and down the aisle of weavers, her bare feet slapping against the concrete floor and her little hands deftly replacing bobbins. At midnight, the weavers ate whatever meal they had brought for lunch while Bessie crawled into her cart for a nap. When Bessie proudly brought home $4.503 after her first week—real money, not commissary chips—Mollie confiscated the full sum for the family. The next week Bessie handed three dollars to her mother and kept the remaining $1.50 for herself. Money, she quickly realized, could be her path to independence.

  Week by week Bessie added to her hidden fortune until she had enough money to buy a pair of used shoes from a peddler. Her choice was a pair of too-big high heels like the ones she’d seen the grown-up ladies wearing in Bagdad; on her next shift, the sound of her slapping feet was replaced by the telltale clicking sound. Bessie quickly realized they were more fashionable than practical; her second purchase was a pair of tennis shoes. As the weeks went by, she saved enough money to buy a georgette blouse, a colored corset cover, and a black wool skirt on installment payments from the same peddler. On Sundays, her one day off, she donned the whole outfit and walked up and down Broad Street. Face pressed against shop windows, she looked longingly at the beautiful ladies’ clothes that were for sale, knowing full well she looked like she was playing dress-up in her mother’s closet.

  The cotton mill turned out to reward hard work. In a matter of weeks, Bessie was promoted to the inspection room where she examined rolls of material and rejected any with flaws. Soon after she was made foreman, put in charge of fifteen older children and some young adults in the inspection room. Each promotion brought a small raise, but the overall conditions remained deplorable. The building’s facilities consisted of an outhouse on the other side of a nearby river. There was no break room. The foremen were lecherous, pinching Bessie in ways no little girl should be pinched. Healthcare was rudimentary but available. When Bessie suffered an attack of appendicitis, a young doctor removed the organ for a small fee but left talcum powder behind in her abdomen; the talc provoked scar tissue that adhered to her intestine, causing frequent blinding cramps and blockages that often demanded medical intervention. The poor working conditions became too much, and workers formed a union. Bessie paid a dollar for her membership card, and soon after that, her mill along with twenty-six others in the area went on strike.

  After three months with no resolution, Bessie the eleven-year-old foreman went to the woman at union headquarters. She wanted to know when her workers could expect to get back to the mill. The woman considered Bessie for a moment. She was struck by the girl’s drive and energy, things rarely seen in the oppressed workers and almost never in a child growing up in a mill town.

  “Get out of the factory and make a new start,” the woman advised Bessie. “Go see Mrs. Ryckley.”

  Mrs. Mattie Ryckley was a small Jewish woman who co-owned and ran three beauty salons and a hair goods store on Broad Street with her husband, Charles. The couple needed an errand girl in the shops who could double as domestic help with their six children, and Bessie assured Mrs. Ryckley that she could do both. Satisfied with this self-professed experience, Mrs. Ryckley offered Bessie $1.504 a week plus room and board. Unwilling to turn down the opportunity to escape the cycle of mill life, Bessie, just eleven years old, moved in with the Ryckleys for a full-time job.

  Working for the Ryckleys was hardly better than the mill. Bessie was up at five o’clock every morning to make kosher breakfast for the family before going to work in the salon, where she spent hours in a windowless back room mixing shampoos, transformations, and dyes by the light of a gas flame. But the strong work ethic she’d developed in the mill remained, and she was rewarded. As she learned more about the product
s she mixed, she got the chance to shampoo clients before a hair treatment, apply color, and even learned how to give a permanent wave. Clients and technicians alike would tip her for her help, and soon she was making close to ten dollars a week.5 She sent half back to her family and kept half for herself.

  Bessie’s favorite part about working in the salons was the clientele, especially the well-off women in elaborate dresses. “Fancy ladies,” Bessie called them. One of these fancy ladies mentioned that she owned a house, and since the other women referred to her as a “madam,” Bessie assumed she was a schoolteacher like Miss Bostwick. She even had a similar northern accent. Bessie loved how glamorous the Madam was and delighted in her stories of distant cities and grown-up parties. Every time the Madam came into the shop, Bessie dawdled as much as she dared, stretching out appointments for a little bit more time with her favorite client. The Madam noticed, and, in spite of the stories she told, warned Bessie of the dangers that came with her profession.

  “It’s easy for a pretty girl to make a living without mixing shampoo and waving hair,” she told Bessie one day as the girl flitted about the shop. “It’s much better to work and maintain self-respect.”

  As Bessie grew into a teenager, the Madam’s lessons reinforced her willingness to work and taught her always to keep one eye looking for her next opportunity.