Rocket Girl

by George D. Morgan

  There are certain defensive tactics I've developed over the years. Pretending I'm sick and staying home from school is my favorite. When that doesn't work, I leave fifteen minutes early and get to school before the milk-money goons station themselves at their usual street corners or hiding places. Bullies, I've learned, don't like to get up early. Like lions on the Serengeti, they prefer the antelopes that straggle. So I learn early on not to be a straggler.

  When you walk alone day after day you have a lot of time to think. Think, and fantasize. I do a lot of fantasizing, imagining my mother as a loving person who kisses and hugs her son before he goes off to school. I fantasize she is someone who shows affection and isn't afraid to say “I love you” once in a while. Sometimes I really stretch things and imagine she makes my breakfast or (gasp) drives me to school so I can spend time with her (and not be victimized by the Guidos).

  Like all good fantasies, they never happen.

  Something is wrong with my mother, but I don't know what it is. She's unhappy, but whatever it is that's bothering her she refuses to talk about. Sometimes she gets angry for no reason and lashes out. I rarely see her cry, but it happens. The terrible thing is I just assume all mothers act this way—I have little to compare her to. That assumption, however, is called into question each morning when I arrive at the front gate of St. Catherine's and see how many mothers are hugging their children good-bye. They even kiss them. They talk to them. Everyone smiles and looks happy.

  Why is my mother so different? Decades later I would ask my father that question. His response made perfect sense in light of what I had experienced: “Your mother loves babies,” he said. “She just doesn't like children.”1 That alone, of course, did not explain many of her behaviors.

  I've taken a circuitous route to school this morning, eluding the Guidos by zigzagging through a retail section of town. As I enter the front gate of St. Catherine's, I try not to watch the huggy-kissy mothers seeing their kids off. I don't want to look, it's just too painful. I hang around one of the tetherball poles until the bell rings. Two hundred blue blazers and two hundred blue plaid dresses line up by grade level for the morning bugle. I can still hear the tune in my head, but I don't know the name. I think it something Sousa wrote for the Marines.

  When the prerecorded bugle music is over, we watch the raising of the stars and stripes, then we're dismissed to classes.

  A couple of hours later, I look up from my times-tables exercise to check the clock. It's Friday, 9:59 a.m. The clocks in St. Catherine's are always well calibrated, and if they aren't, you can always readjust them every Friday morning. In one minute, a siren somewhere in the neighborhood will begin its low wail, slowly building in both tone and intensity. It will reach a shrill peak, then slowly fade. This buildup/fade-out wail will continue up and down for about a minute, during which all of us will be on our knees and under our desks, our hands clasped firmly over our heads. This is the drill—the “duck and cover” drill that has become ubiquitous throughout the American school system, both public and private. Every Friday morning at precisely 10:00 a.m. we, the children of the United States, practice a safety procedure that, we are told, will keep us safe from a nuclear holocaust. No one ever articulates any specific details about what a “nuclear holocaust” is or what effect it would have on us, but we suspect it must be something really bad. All we've been told is that if we just get under our desks, all will be fine. We don't mind, of course, as it's a fun diversion from the routine of our otherwise-boring school day. So every Friday, we do the drill.

  But not the teachers. All the classes are taught by habit-wearing nuns, and each one of them, we've decided, must have some kind of death wish; they never participate in the drills. As the students duck and cover, the nuns casually sit at their desks, grading papers or reading a book. My teacher prefers crochet. The religious order these nuns belong to requires them to take on a masculine name. My teacher's name is Sister Robert Francis.

  I raise my hand and she calls on me.

  “You know what I would do if I were the Russians?” I ask.

  “No, George,” she says. “What would you do?”

  “I would time my attack so it occurred at ten on a Friday morning so everyone would think it was just a drill.”

  I mean it as humor, but no one is laughing. Instead my comment is met with silence—silence that is interrupted by the low moan of the city's civil-defense siren whirring up. As we all duck under our desks, I notice Sister Robert Francis, for the first time, is participating. Her ankle-length black habit quickly disappears under her desk.

  After a minute, the siren fades out, and we climb back into our desks to return to the scholastic grind. Nobody has the courage to tell our teacher she is now covered in dust.

  Years later I would discover that the danger we practiced duck-and-covering drills for was not just an atom bomb, but an atom bomb carried aboard an ICBM—Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. I would also discover that my mother had been instrumental in creating the very thing that made us cower under our desks.

  The hours pass like a dull headache. Finally 3:00 arrives and we're dismissed. As large crowds of my fellow students greet their mothers at the gate, I head home the same direction I arrived: alone.

  Irving Kanarek was an American citizen, born and raised in New York. But his parents were immigrants, having been born in the Soviet Union. In 1947, Irving decided to apply for a chemical-engineering position with North American Aviation, then one of the country's leaders in the fledgling business of liquid-propellant rocket design. NAA had been advertising for scientists and engineers relentlessly in engineering trade journals—the boom times had arrived and they needed bodies with brains.

  Irving showed up at the company's main office, where a dozen other men, all in dark suits, white shirts, and crew cuts were sitting at tables, filling out applications. A young man missing his left arm handed him a sheaf of papers, then directed him to a table. Irving could smell the atmosphere of wartime veterans—the room was filled with it. Most of these men, he was certain, had been in Europe or in the Pacific two years earlier, fighting the Axis powers. Now the war was over, and a million men needed real employment.

  As Irving filled out the application, he arrived at a small box on page 2 that one of his friends had warned him about. The question beside the box read, “In what country were your parents born?” In the post-war atmosphere of anticommunist hysteria that had gripped the United States like a vise, many applicants would have lied; they would have written anything but the truth. To admit that one's roots could be traced back a single generation to America's new Cold War enemy would be considered employment suicide. Irving's friend had strongly encouraged him to write “Poland” instead—a country whose forced takeover by the Nazis, followed only a few years later by a Soviet Red Army invasion, was a country whose citizens enjoyed a great deal of sympathy in America. When fanning the flames of anticommunism, American politicians would use Poland as an example of why all good Americans should fear and despise the Soviet Union. But Irving chose to be honest. His parents, he argued, had not been born in one of the Soviet satellite countries, but in the Soviet Union itself. He was an engineer, and engineers cared about facts. Fudging facts for expediency was what politicians and criminals did, not practitioners of science. And so, on his employment application, in the little box requesting the birth country of his parents, Irving Kanarek put pen to paper and clearly wrote the well-known abbreviation for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic: USSR.2

  Irving completed the remainder of the application, affixed his signature, and dropped it into a large box overflowing with the efforts of a thousand other applicants. Then he left.

  The soldiers and officers, veterans and vagabonds lining up at the North American Aviation main office weren't the only ones looking for post-war work. They had returned from the theater of battle with promises of full employment—promises that frequently went unfulfilled. The year was 1947, and the country was weighed d
own by a glut of available workers. For this reason, almost all of the women who had been employed in wartime work—Rosie-the-Riveters et al.—had been forced out of their posts in order to make room for the massive influx of jobless male veterans.

  Some, though, did not go so quietly into the night. One such rebel was the little unwashed urchin from North Dakota.

  The Slauson bus pulled to a stop near the intersection of a busy street with no street sign. Stepping down to the sidewalk, Mary Sherman adjusted her cat's-eye glasses and squinted at the bright Southern California sun. Everyone who had regaled her with stories of how much better than Toledo the Los Angeles weather was had been truthful. This was a city with weather so perpetually perfect its citizens joked about LA having only two seasons: spring and two weeks of winter.

  The intersection was only three blocks from Los Angeles Airport,3 and Mary briefly watched as a small twin-engine plane left the runway and ascended over the Pacific Ocean. Six feet from the bus stop bench was a high security fence topped with a menacing helping of barbed wire. From the corner she could follow the gate in two directions—one traveled east, the other south. The chain link seemed to go on forever in either direction, and the “front gate” she had been directed to enter was nowhere to be seen. She flipped a mental coin and started walking south. After two minutes, and still no gate, she decided to ask for directions. An elderly man walking a dog was approaching.

  “Excuse me, sir. I'm looking for the front gate to North American Aviation. Do you know where it is?”

  He pointed and gesticulated wildly at the fence, then walked on. Mary shook her head and kept walking. A minute later she came to the compound's southwest corner and another intersection. She turned eastward, continuing to follow the fence. Halfway down she came to a locked gate marked “DELIVERIES.” She waved at a nearby guard, who stepped over.

  “I'm looking for the front gate.”

  “Are you a visitor?” he asked.

  “I'm here to apply for a job.”

  “Go to the next corner and turn left. It's down about a hundred yards.”

  “Thank you.”

  As she continued east, the hum of heavy machinery whirring like a generator could be heard from inside the closest building. It was the sound of people making things, she thought. Finally, after four years of designing explosives and bombs she would be able to make things that were useful.

  If she got the job.

  Turning right at the northeast corner, she could see a line of vehicles turning into a large entrance. Mary approached the gate and turned in, a lone pedestrian amongst a fleet of Detroit-born sedans. A guard waved her over, and she explained the purpose of her visit. The guard pointed her in the direction of a large glass door on the far side of the parking lot.

  Irving pushed on the metal handle of the door, but it did not budge. He pushed again, but nothing happened. Then he noticed the “PULL” sign above the handle. Obeying the written directive, he pulled, and the door opened without effort. As Irving walked across the hot asphalt pavement toward his ’44 Ford, he held a hand over his eyes to blunt the bright morning sun. Someone was coming toward him.

  A young woman.

  Irving guessed she was about twenty-five years of age. Her dress was conservative yet attractive, but there was something off about her clothing—something not exactly normal. Her dark hair ended just above her shoulders, and she wore cat's-eye glasses. As they neared each other, he noticed she had a small mole near the left of her mouth—what women had started calling a “beauty mark.” They passed each other without comment, and Irving removed his car keys from his pocket.

  It was not until fifteen minutes later, as he was driving down Imperial Boulevard, that Irving realized what was “off” about the woman's dress: the creases in her collar and the folds in the sleeves did not have the slick look of machine-tooled precision one saw in department-store clothing. Irving realized the woman's dress had been hand sewn. Either by choice or by necessity, the woman, whoever she was, preferred to make her own clothes.

  The next day, an NAA Human Resources secretary assigned to make cursory inspections of all new applicant paperwork pulled Irving Kanarek's application from the pile on her desk. As the initial reader of all prospective employee applications, one of her responsibilities was to use a bold black pen to make spelling corrections. At the top of the form she noticed this applicant had misspelled “engineer,” and she corrected it. The rest of the page seemed fine, but on page 2 she came to the parental-birth-country box and saw the letters USSR. She had never seen that abbreviation on any of the hundreds of applications that had come across her desk—it was completely alien to her. Occasionally she would see France, Mexico or even Germany, but for the most part foreign countries had become rare. More than 95 percent of the time, the box she was now staring at contained the same predictable entry: USA. Perhaps the young woman never read the newspapers. Perhaps she did not own a television. But for whatever reason, the secretary was unfamiliar with the abbreviation USSR, and assumed it was a mistake. Using her bold black pen, she “corrected” the entry, changing it to read USA.4

  The rest of the application appeared to conform to company standards, and she tossed it into the “OUT” bin, where it would be closely examined by various department managers trolling for talent.

  The instructions above the door handle read “PUSH.” Mary pushed the door open and stood before a single desk.

  “I'm here to apply for a job.”

  The secretary pointed her toward a door, and Mary walked through it.

  The day Mary Sherman walked into the Employment Services office of North American Aviation, she was struck by how things had changed in just two years. During the war, almost all of her coworkers, and many of her supervisors, had been women. As she took her place in line to obtain an employment application, there were eight men ahead of her, and several more lining up behind. At the tables were at least twenty prospective employees filling out job applications—all men. Looking around the room, she felt for the first time like a fish out of water. This was the world of crew cuts, black slacks, white shirts, cheap ties, and roving eyes. Things had changed a great deal since her days at Plum Brook Ordnance. Mary had not been worried about obtaining employment—until this moment. She carried with her numerous letters of recommendation from Plum Brook, each more glowing in their praise than the next. Still, this was an engineering job she was applying for, and the want ad had specified “college degree preferred.” She could hear the men talking in low tones, sharing stories of their war wounds, their exploits, their medals, their college degrees obtained under the GI Bill. She had no such benefit—few women did. In the post-war world, women were expected to vacate the jobs they had occupied while American men were overseas so employment space could be freed up for the over one million returning American GI's. Now here she was, a poor farm girl from North Dakota with no college degree, competing against a system designed to promote the careers of men and return women to the kitchen.

  But Mary Sherman would have none of it—she would not be blocked, she would not be stifled. Mary stiffened her resolve, threw back her shoulders, stood as tall as she could in her five-foot-five, 111-pound frame, and turned toward the man sitting at the table.

  “I'd like an application for one of the chemical-engineering jobs you advertised.”

  The man was unsure what to do. Of the thousands of engineering applicants who had stood before him, none of them had been women. Finally he asked a question.

  “Do you have a college degree?”

  “No, but I have work experience, and many references.”

  “References from whom?”

  “Plum Brook Ordnance.”

  The man's expression was blank.

  “You worked at Plum Brook.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As what, exactly.”

  “I was a chemist. I worked on distilling various solutions of weapons-grade dinitrotolulene. We were the main supplier of…�
�

  The man held up his hand.

  “I was a corporal—served in the 6th Army under General Walter Kreuger. The munitions we received from Plum Brook were always first-rate. Your company saved a lot of American lives, and helped win the war.”

  He pulled out an application and handed it to her.

  “Pens are on the tables. Fill it out, sign it, drop it off over there. Good luck. Next.”

  As Mary walked to an empty table, she could feel everyone in the room watching her.

  Tap, tap, tap…

  Tom Meyers nervously tapped the eraser end of his pencil on the glass cover of his desk. One of several supervisors in the Engineering Department of the Office of Research and Development, Tom had been given the responsibility of hiring 130 more engineers and analysts. His sphere of responsibility focused on the engineering of new liquid-fuel rocket engines and their propellants. His assignment was to “push the envelope”—to create ever more powerful rocket engines that used ever more powerful propellants so the government could achieve ever more powerful performance. He had a great many positions that needed filling, and filling them was finally starting to get easier. The quality of the prospective employee pool had improved greatly over the last six months. The first crop of post-war college graduates was out there, looking for jobs and searching for the American Dream. That large group of applicants comingled with an even larger number of 4-F's who had sat out the war years getting their own degrees. Even so, there were several key positions that remained vacant, and none of the applications coming across his desk stood out.

  Especially problematic were the three open positions for theoretical performance specialist. The job of a TPS was to mathematically calculate the expected performance of a particular rocket-propellant combination when used with a particular engine. In this way his department could make a great many engineering decisions without having to go through the time and expense of actual testing. Field testing of rocket engines and their propellants was expensive and time consuming; better to math it out whenever possible.