With East Computing’s calculating added to existing workload, Dorothy Vaughan and the West Area Computers remained in high gear. The laboratory was still hiring black women into the pool faster than they were being sent out to other positions. Women who did get assigned to another section were usually staffed on temporary duty and eventually returned, keeping the two offices full, at least for the moment.
After the war, West Computing’s head, Margery Hannah, decided to accept an offer from the Full-Scale Research Division, an excellent assignment working for Sam Katzoff. Within three years, she would join the ranks of female authors, publishing a study with Katzoff attempting to measure the degree to which waves bouncing off wind tunnel walls interfered with the airflow over a model. Like sound waves in an auditorium or water slapping up against the sides of a swimming pool, the gusts in a wind tunnel ricochet off the enclosure, and test results had to account for discrepancies caused by the interference.
Marge’s upward move resulted in opportunity down the line: Blanche Sponsler stepped into Marge’s position as head of the group. Just two years younger than Dorothy, Blanche was a thirty-five-year-old newlywed in 1947. Originally from Pennsylvania, she bowled in Langley’s Duckpin bowling league and was a faithful member of the Bridge Club. She and her sister, the wife of a soldier stationed at Fort Monroe, entered the laboratory’s Duplicate Bridge tournament in 1947 and took second place. Also interested in a move west, Blanche requested a transfer to the Ames Laboratory. Her Langley supervisors wrote letters of recommendation—since coming to the lab in 1940, she had received strong reviews and steady promotions—but at the time there were no open positions, so she continued as head of the West Computing group.
Dorothy had worked with Blanche since 1943. They enjoyed a good professional relationship, and Blanche gave Dorothy strong performance ratings. Dorothy’s role as a shift supervisor raised her profile with engineers. Part consultants and part teachers, computing supervisors had to be top-notch computers themselves, capable of grasping the needs of the engineer and clearly explaining the requirements to her subordinates. She fielded the computers’ questions and needed a strong-enough command of the math to tutor the women through any weaknesses. Tapping the right girl for a particular job was a big part of the manager’s responsibility. All the women were proficient in basic computing tasks, but knowing who was a perfectionist with the computing machines and who could churn out perfect graphs on short order was key to processing the data most efficiently. A small elite, like Dorothy Hoover, were endowed with an aptitude for complex math so strong that it exceeded the ability of many of the engineers at the lab.
Dorothy Vaughan might have eventually lobbied to follow Margery Hannah and Dorothy Hoover into a job working directly for an engineering section. As a supervisor she came into contact with engineers from a variety of groups, some of whom came to the office insisting that she personally handle their jobs. In 1949, however, an unusual and tragic turn of events would bind Dorothy to the West Area computing office for the next decade.
At the end of 1947, Blanche had left the group in Dorothy’s command during a one-month illness. She returned to work, appearing none the worse for wear, but was out of work again on a leave of absence during July and August 1948. This time, too, she returned to the office, snapped back into her routine, and continued uneventfully for the next several months. But on the morning of January 26, 1949, a West Computer made an urgent call to Eldridge Derring, one of the lab’s administrators. For the last few days, she told Derring, Blanche had been acting strangely. Now, Blanche was in the office “behaving irrationally,” and she implored him to come to the Aircraft Loads Building to help the women deal with the situation. Derring, along with the lab’s health officer, James Tingle, and Rufus House, assistant to Langley director Henry Reid, hustled over to the building, where several West Computers were anxiously waiting in the lobby.
Together, they all went into one of the West Computing offices, where Blanche was standing in the middle of the room, preparing for a 10:00 a.m. meeting. She had covered the blackboard in the office with “meaningless words and symbols” and began to conduct the meeting in what she seemed to feel was normal fashion. However, she was completely unintelligible to the people in front of her. House approached Blanche to ask about the gibberish covering the board.
“I’m trying to explain how to go from SP-1 to P-20,” she told him, adding that the number of SP-1 employees in her group was “0 ±1 to three significant figures,” and that there was “one P-75,000” in the section. She then said that she was trying to explain the difference between zero and infinity. (“Quite rational,” commented House afterward, in a memo detailing the morning, “as some college students have had difficulty in comprehending this difference.”) The rest of Blanche’s diatribe declined from there. House asked her to accompany him to the East Area, hoping to take her to the psychiatrist on the air force base hospital. She refused to leave, but the men didn’t force the issue, concerned that if she was provoked and became violent, it would require “at least four strong men” to subdue her. Finally, quietly, Blanche turned her back on the group. She began to weep, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. The administrators dismissed the meeting, and the other women filed into the other office, leaving Blanche alone with the men.
In the hush-hush 1940s, such a public display of mental illness would have spelled the end of Blanche’s career at Langley, even if she had been able to recover from the episode. That afternoon, Blanche Sponsler was taken away to the Tucker Sanatorium, located in Richmond, the state capital. She had been admitted to the same hospital for treatment during her 1948 hiatus, and presumably this problem was also the reason behind her absence in 1947. She languished in the Tucker Sanatorium for three months before being transferred to Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg. This time, she was incapable of returning to her previous life.
“It appears that she will continue ill indefinitely,” Eldridge Derring commented to Langley’s personnel officer, Melvin Butler, two weeks later.
The women in West Computing never saw Blanche Sponsler again. A June 3, 1949, note in Air Scoop served as the only postscript to their former supervisor’s tenure at the laboratory: “Blanche Sponsler Fitchett, Head of West Computing Section, died last Sunday after a six-month illness.” The cause of her death, not revealed in the note or in her obituary in the Daily Press, was entered on her death certificate as “dementia praecox.” Whether Blanche died as a result of treatments designed to cure an illness that would eventually become known as schizophrenia or from suicide or another cause altogether was known only to her doctors and family.
Blanche’s absence left West Computing with an empty desk, but not a vacuum. It wasn’t the way Dorothy would have wanted to take the next step in her career, but Blanche’s tragedy pushed her up the ladder nonetheless. In April 1949, six weeks after Blanche left the office for the last time, the laboratory appointed Dorothy Vaughan acting head of West Computing.
There were limited ways for a white computer to break into management at Langley. Finding a way to move from being one of the girls to one of the Head Girls took time and persistence, pluck and luck, and there were only so many slots available: while even lower-level male managers might supervise the work of female computers, it was simply unthinkable for a man to report to a woman. Women with an eye on a management job were limited to heading a section in one of the now-decentralized computing pools or in another division with many female employees, such as personnel.
For a black woman, there was exactly one track: it began at the back of the West Area computing office and ended at the front, where Dorothy Vaughan now sat. The view from the supervisor’s desk, with the rows of brown faces looking back at their new boss, wasn’t that different from being at the head of the classroom at Moton: the segregation laws of the state applied just as vigorously to the roomful of highly educated college graduates as they did to the rural black students of Prince Edward County. Yet with its b
right lights, government-issue desks, late-model calculating machines, and proximity to tens of millions of dollars’ worth of aeronautical research tools, West Computing was a world away from Moton High School’s deficient building, rundown chairs, worn-out textbooks, and general sense of powerlessness.
It would take Dorothy Vaughan two years to earn the full title of section head. The men she now worked for—Rufus House was her new supervisor—held her in limbo, waiting either until a more acceptable candidate presented herself or until they were confident she was fit to execute the job on a permanent basis. Or maybe the idea of installing the first black manager in all of the NACA’s expanding national empire caused them to demur, lest they stoke the racial anxieties among members of the laboratory and in the town.
Whatever skepticism might have existed among the powers that be about Dorothy’s qualifications, whatever lobbying and advocacy may have been required on Dorothy’s part, the outstanding issue was resolved by a memo that circulated in January 1951. “Effective this date, Dorothy J. Vaughan, who has been acting head of the West Area Computers unit, is hereby appointed head of that unit.” Dorothy must have known it. Her girls and her peers knew it. Many of the engineers knew it, and her bosses eventually came to the same conclusion. History would prove them all right: there was no one better qualified for the job than Dorothy Vaughan.
CHAPTER TEN
Home by the Sea
In April 1951, as the laboratory shuttle transported twenty-six-year-old Mary Winston Jackson from new employee processing in the personnel department over to West Computing, virtually no evidence remained of the agricultural roots of the land that had become Langley. The come-heres like Dorothy Vaughan and her band of sisters, like the phalanx of Yankees and Mountaineers and Tar Heels who had descended upon the laboratory during the war, would tell a lifetime of stories about the transformations they witnessed as Hampton Roads emerged from agrarian isolation to become a vibrant collection of cities and defense industry suburbs. But Mary Jackson remembered the prewar hamlet where Negro vacationers still made their way to Bay Shore Beach by trolley car. She grew up listening to the work songs of the black women shucking oysters at the J. S. Darling processing plant that wafted up to the pedestrians on the Queen Street Bridge above. During Mary’s childhood, elders at the black churches in the heart of downtown Hampton still told stories of sitting under a glorious oak tree across the river, on the campus of what would become Hampton Institute, and listening to Union soldiers read the Emancipation Proclamation. Those ancestors walked into the gathering as legal property and emerged as free citizens of the United States of America. No one was more of a been-here than Mary Jackson.
The Olde Hampton neighborhood where Mary grew up, in the heart of downtown, was literally built upon the foundations of the Grand Contraband Camp, founded by slaves who had decided to liberate themselves during the Civil War from the families that had stolen their labor and their lives. The refugees sought shelter as “contraband of war” in the Union stronghold at Fort Monroe, located at Old Point Comfort, on the tip of the Virginia Peninsula. The freed colored people raised central Hampton from the ashes of the “Confederate-set inferno” that consumed the city in 1862. Olde Hampton’s street names—Lincoln, Grant, Union, Liberty—memorialized the hopes of a people fighting to unite their story with the epic of America. In the optimistic years after the Civil War, before the iron curtain of Jim Crow segregation descended across the southern United States, Hampton’s black population earned a measure of renown for its “educated young people, ambitious and hardworking adults, its successful businessmen, and its skillful politicians.”
It was no small irony that Woodrow Wilson, the president who had authorized the creation of the NACA and who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his promotion of humanitarianism through the League of Nations, was the very same one who was hell-bent on making racial segregation in the Civil Service part of his enduring legacy. Now, Mary’s presence at the laboratory built on plantation land rebuked the short-sighted intolerance of her fellow Virginian. Mary’s family, the Winstons, had the same deep Hampton roots as Pearl and Ida Bassette. Mary’s sister Emily Winston had worked with Ophelia Taylor in the same nursery school during the war, before Taylor headed off to the Hampton Institute training program. Many of the West Computers, including Dorothy Vaughan, were members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority that Mary had pledged as an undergraduate at Hampton Institute. Mary graduated in 1938 with highest honors from Phenix High School. Phenix, located on the Hampton Institute campus, was like the upper school that Katherine Goble attended on the campus of West Virginia State. It served as the de facto public secondary school for the city’s Negro students, since the city provided schooling for them only through elementary school. Mary followed the family tradition of enrolling in Hampton Institute, which had graduated her father, Frank Winston, her mother, Ella Scott Winston, and several of her ten older siblings. The school’s philosophy of Negro advancement through self-help and practical and industrial training—the “Hampton Idea,” closely associated with Booker T. Washington, the college’s most famous graduate—mirrored the aspirations and philosophy of the surrounding black community.
Most of Hampton Institute’s female students earned their degrees in home economics or nursing, but Mary Jackson had a strong analytical bent, and she pushed herself to complete not one but two rigorous majors, in mathematics and physical science. She intended to put her degree to use as a teacher, of course; there were practically as many teachers in her family as there were Hampton Institute graduates. She fulfilled her student teaching requirements at Phenix High, and after graduating in 1942, accepted a job teaching math at a Negro high school in Maryland. At the end of the school year, however, she returned to Hampton to help care for her ailing father. Nepotism laws forbade her from teaching in one of Hampton’s public Negro elementary schools, since the school system already employed two of her sisters. But her excellent organizing skills, fluency with numbers, and good marks in a college typing course made her the perfect fit for the King Street USO, which in 1943 was looking for a secretary and bookkeeper.
While the women in Hampton Institute’s Engineering for Women courses were preparing for their new careers as computers, Mary Jackson managed the USO’s modest financial accounts and welcomed guests at the club’s front door. Her daily schedule, however, usually overflowed well beyond the job’s narrow duties, since the club quickly became a center for the city’s black community. She helped military families and defense workers find suitable places to live, played the piano during the USO’s rollicking singalongs, and coordinated a calendar of Girl Scout troop meetings and military rallies. She organized dances at the club, making sure that the Junior Hostesses and Victory Debs were on hand to entertain visiting servicemen. The people who came to the club for movie night or cigarette bingo, for tips on where to worship or get their hair cut, or just a hot cup of coffee, appreciated the energy, warmth, and can-do skill of the young woman at the front desk. If Mary Jackson didn’t know how to get something done, you could bet a dollar to a USO doughnut she’d find the person who did.
Her family’s motto was “sharing and caring,” and even in a community of active citizens, the Winstons distinguished themselves with their tireless service, religious devotion, and humanitarianism. Mary’s father, Frank Winston, was “a pillar” of Olde Hampton’s Bethel AME Church. Her sister Emily Winston received a citation from President Roosevelt, thanking her for more than one thousand hours of meritorious service as a nurse’s aide during the war. The Winstons were the embodiment of the Double V, and Mary took her duties as secretary as seriously as if she were the head of the club.
Unsurprisingly, the USO was the scene of many a wartime romance. Negro soldiers from Fort Monroe and Langley Field and the naval training school on the campus of Hampton Institute rested their cares in the company of some of the community’s most eligible bachelorettes. The USO’s dance floor was always full of beautiful young ladies, b
ut one enlistee stationed at the naval school had eyes only for the club’s secretary. Mary’s nimble intellect, her quiet but commanding nature, and her all-embracing humanitarian spirit might have been a red flag for a less secure man, but it was exactly her strength of character that drew Alabama native Levi Jackson to her. Their romance blossomed in the heady days of the war, and they married in 1944 at the Winston family home on Lincoln Street. Ever the independent spirit, Mary eschewed the traditional all-white bridal gown for a shorter white dress with black sequins, topped off with black gloves, black pumps, and a red rose corsage.
The end of the war brought the closing of the King Street USO and the end of Mary’s job there. She worked for a brief period as a bookkeeper at Hampton Institute’s Health Service but left after the birth of her son, Levi Jr., in 1946. While Levi Sr. headed off to work at his job as a painter at Langley Field, Mary doted on her son at home. With a full calendar of child care, family commitments, and volunteer activities, she was as busy as a stay-at-home mother as she had been working outside her home.
Her free time was absorbed by her position as the leader of Bethel AME’s Girl Scout Troop No. 11. Scouting would be one of Mary’s lifelong loves. The organization’s commitment to preparing young women to take their place in the world, its mission to promulgate respect for God and country, honesty and loyalty—it was like a green-sashed version of all that Frank and Ella Winston had taught their children. Many of the girls in Troop 11 were from working-class, even poor, families—children of domestic servants, crab pickers, laborers—whose parents spent most of their waking hours trying to make ends meet. The door to the Jackson home on Lincoln Street was always open to them. Mary became a combination of teacher, big sister, and fairy godmother, helping her girls with algebra homework, sewing dresses for their proms, and steering them toward college.
Hidden Figures Page 11