by Lynn Sherr
Far more difficult has been defining the mind-set that shielded her privacy behind often unscalable walls, trying to hear what her mother (who never heard them either) calls Sally’s “internal conversations.” She was resolutely guarded and a superb compartmentalizer, able to shut off various rooms in her mind until she needed to visit them. No doubt it was a survival technique that often served her well. But in the process, she also kept those of us who knew her from knowing her completely. As her friend, I am saddened that I missed the chance to share the happiness of her life with Tam, and to say a proper good-bye at the end. As a reporter who covered countless stories exploring the human side of the gay rights movement, I can’t help wondering whether a few more questions might have cracked the code. Although, as both friends and family lament, there’s no guarantee I would have gotten any answers. “There is a part of her,” admits Tam, “no one will ever know.”
Sally’s family has filled in many blanks, with recollections, artifacts and correspondence. That was a start. In her childhood diary, I saw early hints of the singular woman she would become. In letters home and to close friends (preserved, in some cases, for more than four decades; what does that say about her impact?), I found a late-blooming teen starting to come to grips with unfamiliar stirrings. And while her grownup journals are sparse, with a maddening preference for abbreviated bullet points rather than revealing paragraphs, some of Sally’s handwritten comments express tender vulnerabilities. I have also gained access to her files, from her college transcripts to her days at NASA through her role as CEO of her company. And I have unearthed many pages of documents related to Sally’s NASA career, including her application and the essay she wrote on why she wanted to be an astronaut. In addition, I have listened with fascination to hours of previously undisclosed audio journals that Sally recorded about her first trip to space and its aftermath, including the spine-tingling details of her forbidden encounter with a Soviet cosmonaut. I have also conducted several hundred interviews with friends, romances and colleagues, triangulating their accounts to verify decades-old memories. The recollections are theirs; the conclusions, mine.
The story is Sally’s: the all-too-human tale of a smart, witty, daring optimist who loved deeply—both men and women—and cared passionately—for the minds of girls and boys and for the future of planet Earth—beneath an image of cool detachment. She was that, too: at heart, a scientist, often happiest at her desk or in front of the chalkboard, quietly figuring out “the way and the wonder of the world around us,” according to one of her students. And how to make it more wonderful.
“Imagine this room in space,” she would tell an auditorium filled with a thousand youngsters, “and you could do thirty-five somersaults in a row. My favorite thing about space was being weightless. There’s not even a close second.”
This is also the story of a particular time in a particular place and a woman who had the brains and agility to seize the moment. When Sally Ride was born in 1951, outer space was science fiction and women’s rights were marginal. The social advances and lucky timing that would enable both to intersect with the life of a gifted young scientist make hers an inspiring lesson in modern American history. She took full advantage of the ever-widening definition of “woman’s place,” and spent much of her life making sure it was everywhere. That she could not, or would not, openly identify herself as a gay woman, reflects not only her intense need for privacy, but the shame and fear that an intolerant society can inflict even on its heroes. And the consequences of that secrecy on many of those close to her.
Today, with the evolution in attitudes that has made same-sex marriage legal in many states and inching towards full recognition by the federal government, the need for such caution is waning. With a majority of Americans supporting the idea of a woman as US president, and with the International Space Station orbiting overhead—meaning that humans, often female humans, permanently occupy the heavens—the idea that Sally and her peers were feminist pioneers may seem antiquated, even ridiculous. If only. As first females know well, every small step by one is a giant leap for us all.
• • •
A note about logistics: the sequence of this book is mostly chronological, as Sally lived her life, with occasional time shifts to accommodate history and to deal with the episodic nature of her career. In referring to the characters in Sally’s life, I’ve followed my own rules. Most are called by their last names, usually without titles, in the contemporary journalistic style so many of us fought for back in the days when a woman could be identified only by her marital status (Miss or Mrs.). In some special cases, however—notably, Sally’s family and close friends—I’ve used first names to avoid confusion.
That’s also true for Sally herself. Her PhD made her Dr. Ride, and she was rightfully proud of that. But I’ll be calling her Sally because that’s how I knew her. It’s also the way she chose to be remembered when she donated her sky blue flight suit to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Every astronaut gets a set of Velcro-backed, leather name patches: first name, last name, title, whatever. The one Sally chose for the museum—the one you can see on display by the space shuttle exhibit on the first floor—reads simply, Sally.
That’s also her ID as the fictional protagonist of a video game called Sally Saves the Alphabet. Sally and Tam, along with some potential business partners, cooked it up to help kids learn their ABCs, an animated adventure in which an intrepid little astronaut takes a spacewalk from the Shuttle to corral twenty-six letters, scattered by a gust of solar wind into aimless orbit above Earth. Although the game was never produced, the description of its star is fetchingly familiar: “Sally is a likable character, somewhere between 8 and 10 years old … She is independent and spunky, and should have the demeanor of an encouraging, adventurous older sister. She can be surprised, but not frightened; and should have a sense of humor… .”
As one of her high school classmates described the real-life Sally, “The adult she became was the kid that she was.”
Specifically, an introvert who spent much of her life on the public stage. A fiercely private individual who once agreed to autograph a trout. A wonk with a twinkle, a physicist who loved Shakespeare, a world-renowned space traveler who saw herself as an educator. NASA was her launchpad, not her apogee, and no challenge matched the thrill of sensing the neurons firing to make new connections in a young girl’s brain.
At a time when celebrity is cheap and romance an internet blip, Sally Ride stood for something of value. In a world that has increasingly Tweeted its innermost feelings to strangers, she protected most of hers. And buried others.
Sally worked hard to control her own narrative, and in many ways it was both authentic and exemplary. One would do well to follow her tracks. But as her mother observed when Sally quit tennis, “she couldn’t always make the ball go where she wanted.” So too, with her life. In the end, with no time left to elaborate, she came to accept that. And while she neither contributed to, nor controlled the creation of this biography, I like to think she would appreciate the chance to set the record straight, to remove—finally—the burden of secrecy and burnish her image with truth. I only wish she could have done so while she lived.
“I’m so glad you are writing this book,” many of her friends told me eagerly. “I can’t wait to see how you connect the dots.”
“Me too,” I told them honestly.
I’ll start where she did, in the place on Earth where Sally always felt at home.
1
*
CALIFORNIA GIRL
MAY 1951–JUNE 1968
California, 1970.
During her interview before the committee selecting new NASA astronauts, twenty-six-year-old graduate student Sally Ride, a native of Los Angeles, breezed through the standard questions about her college major, her PhD research, her interest in space. Her poise impressed everyone. Then they asked, “What do you like to do for fun?” Sally’s cool self-confidence brimmed over. “Ride down t
he freeway, with the radio blaring,” she said, grinning, “volume at full speed.” NASA’s Dr. Carolyn Huntoon, the only woman among the interrogators, quickly recognized a smart, attractive personality who enjoyed life, and jotted down—approvingly—“California girl.”
ROOTS
The brilliant sun and laid-back living of Southern California were unimaginable to her forebears, generations of God-fearing farmers and preachers and shopkeepers and craftsmen who prospered amidst the frigid snows of Northern Europe and the often rigid confines of social custom. That modern descendants found their way to the wide open American West reflects the grit, idealism, and recurrent strains of rebellion on both parents’ sides. Not to mention a preference for keeping warm. Sally would inherit much of that spirit.
The Ride family name reaches back nearly four hundred years to Derbyshire, a rural, inland county as close to the center of England and as far from the ocean as it’s possible to get. Which, according to an early geographer, “made it for many centuries more or less inaccessible.” It was, however, known for its beauty: craggy mountains in the north yielding to gentle hills and broad plains further south, with abundantly flowing rivers to keep it all very green. Swift horsemen hunted fox across the tall hedges and lush fields; tenant farmers tilled the rich land surrounding great estates where some Rides would be employed. Think Downton Abbey, but more remote, less manicured and a century older. Even older genealogically. In the tiny parish of Mugginton, within the thick-walled Church of All Saints—whose Romanesque, square stone tower dates back to the Norman Conquest—entries for Rides are among the earliest in the register, and the graveyard is thick with stones of ancient relatives.
One of the first to seek another destiny was John Ride, a young man of “passionate and ungovernable temper,” according to a contemporary, so captivated by the fiery sermon of an itinerant Primitive Methodist preacher (a revivalist faction at odds with the mainstream church), John fell to his knees in his father’s frozen pasture and shouted, “Glory to God! He has pardoned all my sins!” To which his father (also John) responded, “The Methodists have driven my poor boy mad!” That was in 1807. Soon both converted to the new faith, and John Jr. became a traveling preacher himself. But hostility towards the daring new evangelists sent John and his family packing, making him the first Ride to reach American shores in 1820. His stay was brief, and after returning to England John Ride relocated to Australia. The Rides were on the move, progenitors of the “fierce spirit of independence” that would later characterize their California namesakes.
Three generations later, through the offspring of John’s brother William, the trek to America was repeated, this time for good. In 1880, at the age of twenty, William’s great-grandson William Ride sailed off, leaving behind the Wesleyan Chapel by the beechnut trees, the old wooden pump where he drank from the spout, and the blacksmith shop, touchstones of a community where mail was delivered by a boy on a pony. He also left his friends and family: hairdressers, domestic servants, wheelwrights, tailors, and undertakers like his brother, Sam, known for estimating villagers’ coffin size when he visited them on their sickbeds.
“It was a brave move for a young man at a time when foreign travel was practically unheard of,” reported a local newspaper of Will’s journey. “But he … believed a better life beckoned him in Pennsylvania.”
After a successful career as a carpenter and cabinetmaker in Jackson Center, a small Pennsylvania mill town near the Ohio border, William crossed the Rockies to Colorado, where he became a farmer in the early 1900s. Then he and his wife, Alice Irene Vernam, headed for the Pacific, settling on a small ranch in Escondido, just north of San Diego. California “is a fine place to live,” he wrote to a childhood friend back in Derby. “It seldom freezes, never snows, a wonderful place for old folk and children.” William Ride was sixty-eight, thankful for safe harbor as the Great Depression began in November 1929. “This is a very extravagant country,” he told his village pal. “People live well, dress well, and do a lot of riding around. Automobiles are very common, nearly every family has one or more. You hardly ever see a horse on the road and seldom see anybody on foot. We have wonderful paved roads and thousands of miles of them, mostly made out of cement.”
William’s son, Thomas Vernam Ride, was by then living in Santa Monica with his wife, Jennie Mae Richardson. Her ancestors, who had left England even earlier for the New World, included a distant link to Robert E. Lee and direct ties to two patriots from the American Revolution, later making Sally eligible for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a straitlaced affiliation her liberal mother would preemptively reject. Tom and Jennie’s first child was a boy, Dale Burdell Ride, born in 1922.
THE NORTHERN ROUTE
Through her maternal grandmother, Sally was descended from several generations of Dutch Mennonites: German-speaking Protestant dissidents who roamed Europe in search of a place to practice their faith without persecution. They found refuge in Russia when Catherine the Great offered the Mennonites land and security in what is now Ukraine. But in 1878, faced with conscription into the czar’s army—the same threat that powered great waves of immigrants from other parts of Eastern Europe—Wilhelm Rempel II, thirty-two, a prosperous grain farmer, and his wife, Anna Harder Rempel, sturdy folks with a severe demeanor, fled to America and made their way to Butterfield, Minnesota, near the state’s southern border, a dot placed on the map by the railroad line to help develop the prairie. With the population barely breaking three digits (the town’s first store had been razed several years earlier due to lack of customers), Wilhelm lured them in with hammer and nails, owning and operating the hardware store on Main Street. It flourished, as did his family, after a fashion.
Wilhelm and Anna’s daughter Anna (Sally’s ancestors on both sides recycled names the way she would later recycle cans of 7UP) fell in love with Sylvester Sulem, the son of nearby homesteaders from Lom, Norway, a quiet village in a verdant valley of arresting majesty: immense, snowy peaks, gentle reindeer, brilliant wildflowers. With dim prospects for the future, the Sulems had skied to the coast and steamed across the ocean to join countrymen in Minnesota. Problem was, Sylvester, thirty-eight, was nearly twice the age of Anna, twenty; worse yet to the strict Mennonite Rempels, he was Lutheran. When neither church would marry them, the couple sent a horse and buggy to Mankato, nearly fifty miles away, to find a justice of the peace, and held the ceremony in Sylvester’s sister’s home in St. James. He wore a snappy waistcoat, she a flowing veil. They later got even by helping found the local Presbyterian Church.
They also opened a dry goods emporium across the street from the hardware store owned by the Rempels, who refused to speak with their rebel daughter or new son-in-law. The family squabble did not extend to their ten children, the recitation of whose names, in birth order, would become one of the favorite parlor tricks of Sally and her sister: Ada, Ethel, John, Willard, Myrtle, Pearl, Martha, Marie, Chester, Vivian. Ada Sulem left school in tenth grade to change her siblings’ diapers and work in the family store. Then she married Andy Anderson, the son of another Norwegian farming family, from Stavanger on Norway’s west coast. When Andy didn’t want his wife to work, she gave up her career as a Registered Nurse. They moved upstate to Detroit Lakes, the tourist town (with 425 lakes that swelled the population tenfold in summer) where he prospered as the owner of a bowling alley, a chain of movie theaters, and a golf course that remains popular today. Their older daughter, (Carol) Joyce Anderson, played saxophone in the high school marching band and skied or tobogganed all winter long from their house atop a hill. Andy retired early, at forty-seven, and tired of chilly Minnesota, moved his family to Santa Monica in 1941. That’s where Joyce met Dale Ride on a blind date in 1948.
“He had this gorgeous dark red hair,” Joyce recalls today. “Very appealing.” She was twenty-four, a diminutive brunette with a quick smile, a clever (if infrequently motivated) tongue, and a recent psychology degree from UCLA. He was twenty-six, a six-foot-t
all, rangy World War II veteran who had landed at Marseilles to help liberate Eastern France, then crossed into Germany, Bavaria and Austria. The perilous trail of Dale’s combat with the 928th Field Artillery Battalion of the 103rd Infantry Division, like that of the entire war, had been tracked by his family with clippings pasted into a scrapbook: NAZIS CHASED OUT OF ALSACE, MANNHEIM FALLS, GOERING SURRENDERS. And finally, a triumphant strip of yellowed newsprint pasted diagonally across the entire page: GERMANY SURRENDERS. Dale came home with a Purple Heart, and got his degree from Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, on the GI Bill. Joyce met him when he returned to get his master’s in education at UCLA. Was it love at first sight? “I think so,” she recalls, which for her is very enthusiastic. They married six months later in a church ceremony with tossed rice, long, white gloves and flirty veils, the bride barely reaching the groom’s chin, even in high heels. Tradition stopped there: she wore neither white nor a long train.