The computers found that Jack’s unusual propellant had a specific impulse of 186 and an exhaust velocity of 5,900 feet per second. It delivered a formidable 200 pounds of thrust. It was exactly the kind of fuel the military needed, because it was powerful yet used common (and cheap) ingredients that could be stored at a wide range of temperatures. Almost immediately Barby saw her work finding its way into rockets owned by the U.S. Navy.
The work was secret, the reports classified. It was still wartime, and rocket research concentrated on military applications, not scientific exploration. For some, the war felt like an interruption. In the words of Suicide Squad member Ed Forman, “Our dreams of designing rockets for scientific research at high altitudes and for space flight had to be deferred for several years.” On the other hand, without the war effort, JPL might never have existed at all. Started with pocket money that was quickly used up, it survived solely because of military funding.
For Barby’s part, she was proud to be part of the war effort. Frank shared her feelings, writing home, “Some of the gadgets we helped to develop saved several lives in the Pacific recently.” California’s location—uncomfortably close to Pearl Harbor—stirred fear in its residents. Newspapers discussed the probability that Japan would attack California, and Japanese Americans were being rounded up and sent to internment camps. The need for military might was clear. In this atmosphere, the human computers at JPL lost their only male member, Freeman Kincaid, who joined the Merchant Marine, an auxiliary group to the navy during wartime. His departure, and the small pool of male candidates who might replace him, made the group distinctly female.
Whether they worked for the military or for themselves, JPL was unwaveringly pursuing rockets, still the subject of many jokes in the outside world, and ready to move beyond the strap-on rockets used to lift bombers. The group wanted to design missiles, but there was still the problem of propellants. They might have created an exceptional military solid propellant, but it was unknown whether liquid propellants could provide more thrust. The group divided in two: the solid and liquid propellant sections. The computers crossed borders, working with engineers in both sections. In weekly lab meetings, they all came together to apply their expertise and share their results.
In the hunt for new weapons, they would need a lot more computers. As the lab expanded, Frank decided to promote Macie to supervisor of the group. He didn’t take the promotion lightly; he was also trusting Macie to interview and hire the new computers, in addition to assuming a manager’s responsibilities. Macie was a natural for the job. She was the mother hen, and was interested in building not just a team, but a family. Because of her, the computing section at JPL would be entirely composed of women.
As Macie was rising in the ranks of JPL, Barby saw her future at the institute faltering. She was pregnant. It was getting harder and harder to conceal her growing belly at work, and she knew that soon she’d have to quit. There was no such thing as maternity leave. She was thrilled to be having a baby but sad to say good-bye to the group she’d been a part of since its birth.
The computers stood in the crowd at the Tournament of Roses Parade on a clear New Year’s Day, 1943. In 1942 the event had moved, for the only time in its history, to North Carolina, in a preemptive effort to spare it from possible attacks on the West Coast. Now the parade was back in Pasadena, where it belonged. As girls in pastel crinoline dresses slowly waved from their floats, Macie recognized one of the princesses: a mathematics student at Pasadena Junior College. The girl hadn’t planned to be in the parade, but tryouts for the Tournament of Roses Royal Court were mandatory for every girl older than seventeen enrolled in women’s physical education classes, a requirement. Even if they had no interest in participating, each was required to walk up a flight of stairs and across a stage while a panel of judges appraised her figure, beauty, and grace. Macie smiled at the sight of this young girl, gifted in math, riding atop a float. She wondered what opportunities awaited her.
With Macie to lead them, a group of young women were about to leave the lives expected of them. Each would go from being an oddity in school, one of only a few girls who flourished in calculus and chemistry classes, to joining a unique group of women at JPL. The careers they were about to launch would be unlike any other.
CHAPTER 2
Headed West
Helen Yee Ling Chow heard the droning of planes overhead and the thud of bombs dropping. The sounds vibrated through her very bones. She could feel her brother’s heartbeat pulse through his body, closely pressed to hers. Their arms were wrapped around each other. Tears ran down Helen’s cheeks and pooled in the crevices of her older brother’s neck. Terrified of making a noise, they felt a fear that was intensified by the silence imposed on them. In their dark hiding place, the only thing the children could hear was the war closing in all around. Hong Kong was falling.
Nearly six thousand miles away, the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. On the same fateful day in December 1941, Japan attacked both the United States and British Hong Kong. Just as the military bases lining Pearl Harbor found themselves unprepared for the sudden, violent attack, Hong Kong was woefully ill equipped. The colony’s military defenses, a combination of British, Canadian, Indian, and Chinese forces, were outnumbered four to one.
A year earlier, before the war changed everything, Helen and Edwin had held hands reluctantly. Their mother had pleaded with them to stay still as the family took a picture together. Standing in the sunshine of Manila, the Philippines, far from the violence in China, Helen grasped her brother’s hand for only seconds before dropping his sweaty palm in disgust. She couldn’t be persuaded to pose again. Instead, she and Edwin and their two sisters ran in circles, teasing their parents and resisting every threat or bribe their mother offered. To touch each other, even for a brief moment, was loathsome. Now, huddled in a dark closet in their house, they couldn’t get close enough. In addition to every other paralyzing fear, Helen realized she didn’t know where their mother was.
While the United States was thrown into World War II in one devastating attack, China had been fighting since Japan invaded it in 1937. In a world descending into the chaos of war, Helen’s mother had stood as the family’s constant. By the 1940s, the Japanese held the fringes of China and were closing in. The family moved again and again, within and beyond China, trying to escape the escalating carnage. Helen’s father, a general in Mao Tse-tung’s Red Air Force, calculated his family’s relocations based on military intelligence, but even those forewarnings couldn’t keep them safe from the mounting destruction. When he moved the family to Hong Kong, his nerves calmed. The city was a safe haven under the protection of the powerful British Empire. The empire had never surrendered a colony; surely they would never submit to Japan.
These hopes shattered as the bombs rained down on the Pearl of the Orient. Helen’s mother was at a neighbor’s house. Trapped inside, she felt helpless to protect her children. When the thundering quieted, she raced home, shouting their names. She found Edwin and Helen clutching each other in the closet while her other two daughters crept out of their nearby hiding spot and hugged her close. Helen whispered softly, her voice faltering, “We thought you were gone.”
The family slipped out of Hong Kong right before Black Christmas. On December 25, the British surrendered Hong Kong to Japan, and inhabitants were subjected to widespread rape and murder. Helen’s father led the family back into mainland China, where they searched for safety in the countryside.
Few mothers could look beyond survival at such a harrowing time. Helen’s mother was different. She valued education highly. It seemed they were already losing everything to the war: their home, their safety. She didn’t want to sacrifice her children’s schooling as well. Wherever they moved, she made private schools a necessary part of their plan. She hounded her daughters and son about their homework and began to talk seriously to Helen about college. It was apparent from an early age that she was especially talented in mathematics. Helen grew up
valuing education above all.
At sixteen, Helen could see her country crumbling at her feet. It was 1944. Late one night she heard her father tell her mother that the invasion was worsening. The Japanese were launching a major attack. This time, there was nowhere safe to run. She heard her father talk about the Americans. They were covertly funding the war effort in China, funneling tens of millions of dollars into Chiang Kai-shek’s army. At the same time, President Roosevelt approved a volunteer group of a hundred civilians to fly fighter aircraft in China. The men, known as the Flying Tigers, were the first Americans to fight alongside the Chinese. They wore a mix of Chinese and American insignia as they battled in the Pacific, the noses of their planes painted with the bold faces of sharks, teeth gleaming.
As Helen lay awake that night, thinking about her father’s words, she wasn’t thinking about survival. She was hoping she wouldn’t have to leave school. She adored her teachers and thought about college often, wondering what it would be like to leave her family, to leave China. She loved to sit with her mother and indulge in these fantasies, the war receding into the background, if only for a little while.
In these reveries she imagined America: brick buildings dotting college campuses as in the pictures her teachers had shown her; classrooms filled with happy students, far from the terrors of invasion and death. In these daydreams she wasn’t sure what she would be studying in these flawless classrooms or what career she would be preparing for. She only knew that she wanted to be anywhere other than where she was.
Her dreams swelled as the war ended in Allied victory. Edwin made his way to the States for college, but for Helen, it wasn’t to be. Instead, she stayed in China and enrolled in Canton College. For two years she worked hard at school. However, like all teenagers, she didn’t have her attention focused exclusively on her coursework.
She met a boy. Arthur Ling’s education had been derailed by the war. He’d completed four years of school before World War II. Now he was told he’d have to start all over again, since the enrollment records lay in ruins. Arthur was well liked and the student body president of Canton College, where he and Helen first met. Despite his delay in getting his degree, he seemed to have everything going for him. Yet losing so many years of education left him adrift. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. While Helen was entranced by this young man she barely knew, Arthur formed no commitments, to either his coursework or his admirers.
Her crush on him, arising in the wake of her turbulent teenage years, wasn’t enough to keep her in China. In 1946, her perfect grades, earned in the face of hardships her American classmates could little imagine, secured her a full-ride scholarship to the University of Notre Dame.
Helen moved to Indiana filled with the fear and excitement that most eighteen-year-olds experience. Though she found herself sometimes thinking of Arthur, her home felt very far away. Her English, which she had always prided herself on, seemed shaky in the presence of so many native speakers. Even though this opportunity was what she had so desperately wanted, at night she cried for her mother.
Her American education didn’t settle the question of what she wanted to do with her life. She majored in art and hoped to create the window displays of big department stores. She loved looking at them, each one a snapshot of a beautiful, pristine life at once desired and completely unattainable. Even if you bought everything in them, you could never re-create the view they promised.
Helen minored in math, a subject that seemed as impractical as a Bloomingdale’s store window. She couldn’t think of a single career possible for a woman with such a degree. However, this knowledge didn’t stop her from devouring the math curriculum at Notre Dame. The only girl in a class of men, she didn’t feel intimidated. Instead she felt invisible.
Barbara Lewis knew what it was like to feel invisible, but you wouldn’t think it to look at her. She not only shared a name with the first female computer at JPL, Barby Canright, but also her home state: Ohio. In high school she was loud, vivacious, and popular. She quieted down only in her math classes. Like Helen, she was the only girl in the room. Before class the boys would huddle around their desks in small groups, discussing their homework and the girls they liked. Unlike her approach in her other classes, Barbara rarely raised her hand to ask questions, instead toiling over the assignments alone. Yet she didn’t feel discouraged. She liked her teachers, and she took every math class her Columbus, Ohio, school offered, from trigonometry to geometry to calculus.
Although she was surrounded by boys in class, there weren’t many other men in her life. Barbara’s father died when she was just fourteen. He had worked long hours, every day except Sunday, pulling in forty-five dollars a week. As a bookkeeper for a produce company, he was used to keeping numbers in his head even as he delivered fruits and vegetables to the local markets. Sitting in his truck, Barbara would watch him with awe as he calculated numbers at tremendous speed, tearing sheets off his white notepad, one per grocer.
When he died of a heart attack, he left his wife, three daughters, and son heartbroken and without an income. Barbara’s mother didn’t seem to have much to recommend herself to the workforce. She was from a small mining town in Pennsylvania and had made it only through the eighth grade. But what she lacked in formal education she made up for in determination and savvy. She got a job as a secretary for the IRS and saved enough to buy a new, six-room, two-story house. She had always been a disciplinarian, but now as a single parent she was especially strict. Her children had to come directly home after school and begin their homework. She felt her lack of education keenly, and this pushed her to encourage her children, especially her three daughters, to attend college. Barbara’s older sister was the first in the family to do so, heading off to Ohio State.
By the time Barbara finished high school, her older sisters had graduated from college and moved to California. Barbara was desperate to join them there. California seemed a magical place, full of movie stars, warm weather, and exclusive colleges that she dreamed of attending. She pictured herself at the University of California at Los Angeles or the University of Southern California, surrounded by palm trees and near the sparkling Pacific Ocean. Many of her classmates had similar dreams of going to California, though their fantasies centered on being discovered and becoming a movie star like the sultry Lauren Bacall, whom they watched on Saturday nights at the Westmont Theatre. Unlike her friends’, Barbara’s dreams were not woven of glitz and glamour.
Barbara was a pretty girl with thick brown hair and bright brown eyes. She was nineteen and a late bloomer. With her girlfriends she had confidence and ease, but boys made her nervous, and with them she became silent and dull. In her California daydreams, boys were but a blur in the background.
With her elder daughters begging her to join them and her youngest daughter desperate to go, Barbara’s mother gave in, packing up their home in Ohio and driving out west. Barbara, her little brother, and mother rented a small cottage in Altadena, a town fourteen miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Life in California was not as Barbara had imagined. Her mother came home every night exhausted from fighting traffic. The schools she had dreamed of seemed as out of reach in Altadena as they had in Ohio, at least for a girl without a car of her own. Instead she enrolled in the local junior college and immersed herself in math classes.
Her sisters lived in Pasadena, the town next door. They were both secretaries, a job that Barbara secretly frowned on for herself. It didn’t fit the ambitions she had for her life. The problem was, she didn’t see many alternatives. When she spoke with a teacher about her career options, the choices were simple: secretary, teacher, nurse. There seemed to be no science in her future.
As she lamented her prospects, her eldest sister, Betty, sympathized. Then she had an idea. She worked at a place called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and although her job didn’t put her directly in contact with the computers, she had noticed them, making calculations in their room. Peeking in, she had s
een one woman banging away on some odd machine. She decided to mention it to her sister. “There’s this girl,” Betty began. “She enjoys her work and there’s this big thing on her desk which seems kind of interesting.”
Barbara looked at her curiously. “What is it?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’ve never seen one like it before. But I think she’s pretty good at math.”
This was all Barbara needed to hear. The next day she went with Betty to her office. They left the paved streets of Pasadena and took to the dirt roads to arrive at JPL. The buildings were set deep in the canyon. It seemed they were miles from civilization.
It was Barbara’s first job interview. She was nervous as her heels clacked down the flights of stairs and long hallway. She couldn’t believe how much the job paid: ninety cents an hour. Minimum wage was only forty cents an hour. When she walked into the interview room, her anxiety faded. She had assumed her interviewer, who she knew might be her future supervisor, would be a man. Seeing Macie Roberts, with her gray hair and sweet smile, was a surprise. Barbara shook her hand warmly. She felt suddenly at ease.
Susan Greene was five years old and living on the West Coast on December 7, 1941. After that dark day, she and her classmates readied themselves for Japanese attacks at school by hiding under the desks. It seemed inevitable that the war would wash up on their shore.
Sue was born in Los Angeles. You could tell just by looking at her that she was a California girl. With her thick blond hair and bright blue eyes, she always attracted attention. Sue was only nine when her father died. He collapsed from his second heart attack, and just like that, the family was left without their compass. He was a strong, well-liked man who always cared for his family. Sue was proud of his degree from Harvard Business School and his career in corporate insurance. With his death, the Greenes were set adrift. A housewife, Sue’s mother seemed unsure how to proceed with her life now that her husband was gone. Sue was frustrated and couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t find work right away, especially as the year dragged on. It’s not what I would do, a nine-year-old Sue thought, torn between anger and grief.
Rise of the Rocket Girls Page 4