by Lynn Sherr
Mommaerts, born and educated in Hungary, was one of the few female PhDs in science, and brought her outrage over the unequal opportunities for women to her job at Westlake. She also brought a college-level examination of the human body—as a set of systems wondrously intertwined. When she taught the eye, she explained the chemical and neurological processes behind it. When she taught the endocrine system, she told the girls to imagine they were on a date, sweating nervously. “What are the physical reactions?” “Are you getting colder?” “How did that happen?” The lesson on human reproduction meant lectures on love and emotional satisfaction. “She was just starry-eyed about the process of discovery,” Susan Okie tells me. “She’d talk about the kidney, and osmosis and how salts go through membranes and how the kidney works and what a miracle it is. And it wasn’t just, ‘Memorize the parts of a kidney.’ It was, ‘You have to understand what’s going on here and you have to be able to explain it.’ She was demanding.”
Mommaerts was especially fond of Sally and Sue, who, she said, had “glowing potential.” “My mother had a great admiration for people with a very clear-thinking brain,” says Edina Weinstein, Mommaerts’s daughter, “which in her mind was a very scientific brain. Sally and Sue were students who she thought were not only bright, but had the kind of brain that meant they could do something about scientific thinking. She wanted to impart a sense of appreciation for their potential and talent.”
Still, Mommaerts needled Sally, Okie recalls, because of Sally’s casual approach to exams. One test required students to draw a nephron—the functional unit of a kidney—and describe how it works. “And Sally could not remember what a nephron looked like. But she drew a circle and then another circle and then a bunch of little polka dots in the middle, and labeled it Nephron.” Okie, laughing at her bravura, recalls that Mommaerts never let Sally hear the end of it, saying, “Sally, that’s ridiculous, how could you forget what a nephron is?!”
Later, as a college freshman, Sally made sure Mommaerts knew about a dinner where “I was the only one at a table of seven Swarthmore students who was able to explain the structure and function of (would you believe) a nephron—I may not remember anything else from physiology, but I’ll never forget nephrons.”
Sally brought Mommaerts little intellectual puzzles that her teacher polished off instantly. “She could solve anything,” Okie says. “On the morning of the final exam we brought her the toughest puzzle that we could come up with”—a kind of Rubik’s Cube—“and she had it all done before we were halfway through the test.” Mommaerts also hosted a series of Saturday night dinners for favorite students, introducing them to soufflés and ratatouille and other sophisticated food. “We were all just totally gaga over her,” says Okie. Sally called her “my ideal.” She was, Sally said, “the kind of person that I wanted to pattern my life after. She was very logical, seemed to be in control of her life and of her emotions and was just a brilliant person.”
Decades later, Sally would write an article that began, “Thank you, Dr. Mommaerts … If you hadn’t taken a personal interest in me in high school, who knows what career path I might have followed… . She challenged me to be curious, ask questions, and think for myself.”
• • •
One other teacher captured Sally’s attention: Janet Mennie, a newly minted Mount Holyoke graduate who taught Westlake’s first physics and calculus classes and would remain a close friend. She and Mommaerts “were the science department,” Sally later pointed out, having excelled with both. “Sally’s genius,” Mennie (now Janet Schroeder) tells me, “was in writing exactly one sentence for a chemistry essay.”
Sally attributed much of her ability as an excellent student to being at a singlesex school. “A lot of the things that can kind of come into play when you’re a fifteen-, sixteen-year-old girl with boys in the school and boys in the classroom just didn’t happen at Westlake,” she said. “It was easier to focus on academics.” Thanks to her teachers there, and a few others from her coed public junior high school, Sally would also say, “I didn’t succumb to the stereotype that science wasn’t for girls. I got encouragement from my parents. I never ran into a teacher or a counselor who told me that science was for boys.”
There was one, however, who said it wasn’t for her. According to several of her classmates, a certain senior-year English teacher, not one of the girls’ favorites, would occasionally go around the room telling students what was wrong with them. When she landed on Sally, she decreed, “far too science-oriented. No creativity.” For a teenager who was prepared to devote her life to physics, it must have been very painful. Sally started to cry. So did many in the class when the teacher singled them out. Some months later, the teacher went at it again, this time telling Sally that she had a “first-rate mind, wasted in science.” The tears coursed down Sally’s face. Whatever sensitive nerve that touched, whatever vulnerability the teacher triggered, it is the only time any of her high school friends remembers seeing her cry. Few would ever see her do so again.
Sally had already decided she would major in physics—specifically, astrophysics, which made least one friend’s mother wrinkle her nose (“Astrophysics?! What are you ever going to do with that?”) and baffled her pals. Sally was undeterred. When a friend asked what it meant, Sally said simply, “It’s about space.” Which was not where she wanted to travel, not then. It was more about the big picture, says Okie, who shared her bff’s science passion and never questioned her choice. She and Sally used to have long discussions about “what’s out there” after sleepover dates watching The Twilight Zone and Star Trek. “What do you think happened at the beginning of the universe? How far is far?” they asked each other. “ ‘What does it mean that you go back in time when you are looking at the stars?’ She liked the abstract concepts.”
• • •
As captain of the Westlake tennis team, Sally also continued her education on the court. “Tennis taught me a lot about self-control,” she often said. “Self-discipline. How to maintain a kind of relatively cool demeanor even when you’re winning or losing by a lot—to be able to control my emotions and to kind of keep a cool head.” Bear remembers their father yelling “Don’t choke!” at the matches. Dale was the parent who took her to the tournaments, driving her around California and putting her on the planes that deposited her at the next court. He also dropped coins in a big jar at home to save up for her entry fees and plane fares. Several friends think Dale’s enthusiasm for Sally’s ascent up the tennis ladder pushed her harder than she liked. “I think there were always more rungs that he wanted her to climb,” Ann Lebedeff tells me. Another recalls Sally’s story about the day she and a girlfriend went surfing. “Her father said that she should have been playing tennis instead.”
Susan Okie witnessed the dynamic. “You’d go over to the house and Sally would be sprawled on the living room carpet with Tsigane, watching TV, and her father would say, ‘Why don’t you go run around the block?’ ” Okie pauses to chuckle. “Sometimes she would, but she kind of actively resisted working quite as hard as her father wanted her to. It was part of their relationship. She’d never talk about it, and you could tell she loved her father but there was a sort of a rebellious streak about how hard he was pushing her, and she didn’t want to completely knuckle under him, to do everything he’d say to the nth degree.”
Dale was also responsible for piling Sally’s tennis trophies onto the living room hi-fi set, an act of paternal pride that led to a typically eccentric pas de deux between him and Joyce. The cups and bowls and statuettes mounted up, cramming the furniture and leading Joyce, unimpressed with the second-and third-place knickknacks, to start removing the offending objects. Gradually, Sally said, “I started noticing trophies turning up as soap dishes, candy trays, flower vases, book ends and paperweights.” Sally, amused, would move them back; Joyce, unannounced, would relocate them to the bathroom or kitchen. The game went on. At one point Sally went east on the Junior Tennis Circuit. When she ret
urned to California, all seventy-four trophies had been shunted away to the garage. Sally wrote to a friend that she found it very funny. When I ask Joyce the point of her clean-up exercise she says simply, “Ostentation.”
COLLEGE BOUND
In June 1968, as the world mourned the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, following the April assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Sally was graduated from Westlake with honors in science. Because Sue had gotten interested in Swarthmore College, a top-ranked, small, coed Quaker institution outside of Philadelphia, Sally had applied, too. She interviewed with Fred Hargadon, the dean of admissions, who was visiting the West Coast. As they sat in her yard in the California twilight, Sally pointed out the stars that she’d observed through her telescope. “It didn’t give me any sense at the time about Sally’s future,” Hargadon says now. He was, however, impressed with her mind, as well as her performance on the tennis court. She was accepted to Swarthmore with a full financial scholarship. Dean Hargadon followed up with a letter to Dale: “Sally might also be interested in knowing that an alumnus has just agreed to foot the bill for resurfacing our entire field house. This will give us four indoor tennis courts.”
And one fine tennis player. The California girl was headed east.
2
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40–LOVE, SALLY
SUMMER 1968–JANUARY 1977
Sally Ride, an 18-year-old sophomore at Swarthmore College, may one day be the first woman astronaut but for the moment she is the number one woman college tennis player in the East. She acquired this status by winning the recent Eastern Women’s Intercollegiate Tennis Championships … About the astronaut business: Sally is a physics student who plans to specialize in astrophysics and would like to work someday for NASA. She hopes she has what it takes to make a space team.
—Delaware County (PA) Daily Times, November 1969
SWARTHMORE
The prophetic article, nearly fourteen years before the fact, always bemused Sally. While she basked in the attention—and proudly sent the newspaper clipping home—she had no recollection of mentioning any NASA goals to the reporter. Certainly the science part was true; also the tennis trophy. But Sally’s ambitions in that last unliberated decade were grand in a more down-to-Earth way.
“Sally wanted to be famous,” recalls Susan Okie. “She said she wanted to be famous. But she wanted to win the Nobel Prize.” And that was just for starters. “I suggest you keep this letter,” she wrote playfully to her former chemistry teacher, Janet Mennie Schroeder, “as it may become a collectors’ item and worth millions of dollars when I become famous (as an astrophysicist-tennis player).”
She was on track to achieve both.
After graduation from Westlake in June 1968, she and Sue took an advanced math class at Santa Monica Community College, where Sally used a computer for the first time and learned to design simple programs using punched cards, at least one of which worked. In July she joined her family on a car trip to Colorado and Minnesota to visit relatives, stopping off for a tennis tournament in South Dakota and flying east for the USLTA Junior Invitational in Philadelphia. “I hate grass,” she reported after losing (on a grass court) in the third round to the number 7 girl in the nation. “I should have won.”
Grass of another variety was absorbing much of the rest of the country during that turbulent summer of 1968. In Chicago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated for president by a Democrat party torn by riots over the Vietnam War. Hippies and yippies took to the streets, and marijuana moved from the fringes of the urban ghetto to college campuses. Richard Nixon was the Republican standard-bearer and would easily be elected to the White House. The culture wars had begun, but Sally had other things on her mind.
On September 18, 1968, she began her freshman year at Swarthmore College and took a few uncharacteristic moments to smell the roses.
“I love the school so far,” she wrote Janet a few weeks later, in one of the many handwritten, chatty missives to family and close friends that would detail the next few years of her life. “The campus is beautiful … Being from Los Angeles, I’m not used to all these trees. I’ve been doing most of my studying (if you can call it that) under a huge oak, flanked by 2 rare Japanese cherry trees … Most campuses have dandelions, Swarthmore has lilacs and other strange purple things sprouting up between the semi-cobblestone paths.”
Her botanical observations were matched by her sketches of Swarthmore’s lively, coed social scene, an exotic revelation to the graduate of an all-girls’ prep school.
I think there is an all-campus undercover plot to devise so many interesting and diverse activities, that the freshmen won’t have time to study, and will flunk out, making the lunch lines much shorter. Last week there were 2 fraternity desserts; 1 mixer; a production of The Knack (excellent) by a campus group; 2 movies; parts 1 and 2 of Flash Gordon; a folk singing session around a bonfire; a refugee professor from Charles U. in Prague speaking on the Czech liberalization drive (also excellent); dessert at the home of a faculty member (a math teacher who was the spitting image of ensign Parker on “McHale’s Navy”); a square dance; and, of course, the student center.
The letters are impressionistic, skating over the surface rather than digging into the soul. But for someone who kept so much of her private life private, they are both revealing and entertaining. Sally was bursting with the exuberance of a maturing young adult, eager to discover the rest of the world and starting to find herself, although self-examination was not an obvious priority. Mostly her correspondence sparkles with trenchant asides, carefully composed commentary on everything and everyone she encountered. One professor struck her as “a nervous, hyperthyroid hummingbird”; one beau, “a good ping-pong player—i.e., I don’t have to throw points to lose (usually).” She was equally sardonic about herself, but usually framed the story so she came out ahead. When she tried out for Swarthmore’s field hockey team—a game she had neither played nor watched—she wrote that she “confidently strode onto the field without ever having seen a hockey stick (paddle? Racket? Mallet? Club?), and knowing none of the rules. If you can imagine an eskimo or African native one day deciding he’d like to learn how to play baseball, and going to try out for the Dodgers without ever having seen a bat, you’ve got the general picture of me the first day. I’ve since improved to the point where I might start varsity, but it requires at least three 1½ hr sessions per week, not including games. It’s ruining my golf swing.” Notice the offhand shrug—the hockey team she’s trying out for pales in comparison to her golf. But oh yes, she “might” make varsity. Of course she did, or it’s unlikely she would have mentioned it in the first place.
Things usually turned out well in Sally’s world. Perhaps it came from her parents, who told her she could do or be anything. Or perhaps it was a defensive maneuver, to abolish anything that didn’t satisfy the rosy glow of her usual self-confidence. Either way, it would become her trademark. As an adult, the only tennis photograph she put on the shelf was of a match she won. In these letters home, she generally came out ahead.
She also sprinkled in references to Darwin, Hobbes and her beloved Shakespeare. And she could turn herself into the Seinfeld of letter writers, scribbling page after page that said absolutely nothing, in the wisecracking mode of the moment: “I’ve never hit a good volley in my life—no, wait—I remember now—in 1965 at Ojai—I hit a forward volley in the court. My father fainted.” Or a rare burst of politics: “And remember … as we antiwar canvassers are told … ‘Show me Lenin’s grave, and I’ll show you a Communist plot.’ ”
Sally wrote on anything she could find—school stationery, sheets of onionskin paper, letterheads she’d stockpiled from the nation’s fanciest tennis clubs, even an exam blue book liberated from the classroom. Her indifference towards the paper was echoed by the breezy image she affected: I’m cool, I’m unmoved by all this, don’t sweat the small stuff. It was reinforced by the speed writer’s favorite traffic sign: the dash. Even there Sally flaunted th
e rules. “The dash is the lazy man’s punctuation mark,” she often wrote, quoting the unpopular Westlake English teacher. Then she’d insert a dash. Halfway through her sophomore year at Swarthmore she streamlined her handwriting, turning the childlike cursive into a simpler, bolder statement, with an almost-printed initial “S” and “R” for her signature. “I’m sure this has incredible Freudian overtones,” she announced to her family, “which I’d rather not know about.” She also adopted a sign-off that merged her preferred score on the tennis court with at least the illusion of emotion: “40–love, Sally.”
The collie got her own greeting. “Woof to Tsigane,” she’d add in the postscript.
But as much as she avoided introspection, the “gross underachiever” of her high school yearbook couldn’t always hide her passion, especially for the classes that fired her brain and fed her immense curiosity. As a freshman she got into the honors sections of both chemistry and calculus, and proudly reported that she’d aced an exam in the former. Although she declared her major in physics early in her first semester, one class was tougher than she expected, and she confessed to some serious doubts about making it, about being “petrified” during an exam. But the “period of black depression” vanished and she regained her confidence. “I really love physics,” she wrote to Gada and Grap about a later course. “We had our first lab last week, and it lasted for 6 hours. We were studying collisions, and got to use a strobe light and a really cool World War II press camara [sic]—which we learned to use and develop film for.” Another course in mechanics and wave motion clinched it. “It’s a really good feeling, because we’re doing things I’ve never had before,” she wrote Janet Mennie Schroeder, “using methods in math I never knew existed, and although I really have to study, I can understand what’s going on (you may never again hear me admit that I study occasionally).” She did repeat it, to her sister, in a rundown of her courses: “The only one I have to work at is physics, but I really have to work at that.”