Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Sally’s sudden candor spilled over to her non-science studies. In African American history and political science, she wrote, “I’ve said more in 2 classes here than I did in English all last year.” She also tossed a lighthearted dig at her father, the political science professor: “I calculated that I spent about 25–30 hours (no, not consecutively) studying for Political Science, as opposed to about 1½ hours for Chemistry. I think that shows something about where my natural ability, or lack of same, lies; it also says something about the failure of some hereditary process somewhere—I seem to have inherited Daddy’s inability to spell, and nothing else.”

  Not quite true. She was now totally in sync with Dale’s drive for her tennis game, barely masking her ambition with this only slightly sarcastic tour of the facilities at Swarthmore: “a magnificent library (complete with thick red carpeting and chandeliers), a dining hall, which strangely resembles a ski lodge, a modern health center, and last but certainly not least—4 indoor tennis courts: the ultimate in luxury; the final goal of any college.” Just as Fred Hargadon had promised. She stopped by his office one day to see if he wanted to hit some balls, and the speedy little freshman wiped the unsuspecting dean of admissions off the court—even after slowing down her game. “From that point,” confessed the latest adult victim, “I decided just to watch Sally play.”

  In her first year of competition for Swarthmore, she won all six varsity matches and took the Eastern Intercollegiate Women’s Singles Championship for the first time. With her long, straight hair tied into bunches, and her toned legs whipping by, she was unbeatable. “I couldn’t figure out what she was doing there,” recalls one upper-classman who was awed by her grace on the court as he walked to the dining hall each day. “She was way too good for the school.” Fitting her matches into East Coast weather patterns took some juggling, but Sally maintained a tough schedule off-campus, in tournaments from Santa Monica to Philadelphia. “I’ve been playing a lot and I’m playing really well,” she wrote home, also reporting that she’d ordered an aluminum racquet (one of the earliest) and was practicing several hours a day. She told one reporter why tennis so engaged her inquisitive mind: “Because it takes a lot more thinking than any other sport. You can have all the strokes, stamina and speed, but still you must always outthink your opponent to win.”

  In May 1969, she retained her Eastern Intercollegiate championship with a 6–1, 6–1 victory, dominating her opponent, according to The New York Times, “with deep, forceful hitting.” That July, she found herself yawning through a big match in Wilmington, Delaware, the morning after the Moon landing she’d watched avidly on television. Sally didn’t get very far in the tennis that day, and the men of Apollo 11 didn’t spark any astronaut goals of her own. “I just assumed there would never be a place for women,” she later said. “When I saw them on TV they all seemed to be Navy or Air Force test pilots. I suppose I just took it for granted that it was pretty much a closed club.”

  She did purchase three posters of lunar photographs for the “astronomy corner” in her dorm room that fall, four flights up in Parrish Hall, which also housed Swarthmore’s administrative and admissions office. “It was a cheerful room,” recalls her sophomore roommate, Sherri Davis, with twin beds separated by bookcases for privacy (an upperclass improvement over the bunk beds of her freshman year) and covered, in enduring student style, with Indian print spreads. Thanks to a cash infusion from Gada and Grap, they also had an armchair beneath the Moonscapes. The day they moved in that September of 1969, Sally and Sherri opened the window, blasted their new Blood, Sweat and Tears album on the hi-fi, and sat on the wide sill shouting greetings to friends as they drifted back to campus across the lawn. Later that semester, the large central room often served as the gathering place for folk-singing and late-night conversations. Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles were the ones that made Sally’s heart sing.

  She added badminton (that’s “badmitton” in the Sally spelling book) to her athletic repertoire, along with ice skating. When a snowstorm brought the entire California contingent outdoors, she sledded down the hill on a cafeteria tray. Her family sent UCLA football clippings and Peanuts cartoon strips in the mail, and she had her subscriptions to MAD magazine and Scientific American transferred to the campus post office box. A string of boyfriends with no identifying last names turned her head. There was Chuck, about whom the only thing known is that she traveled to New Haven and Washington, DC with him; Jed, the football punter, with whom she watched a horror film on Hallowe’en and then sang pumpkin carols; Bill, who introduced her to wine and cheese that she actually liked; Gary, a 6’11” sports editor. She supplemented her allowance by working in the admissions office and the library ($1.40 an hour), giving tours, and finally grading physics papers ($1.75 an hour ).

  Sally had not participated in the social protests that rocked the Swarthmore campus her freshman year. But she joined several busloads of Swarthmoreans to travel to Washington, DC, for the November 15, 1969, Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a gathering of some half a million demonstrators at the Washington Monument, across from the White House. Sally flashed the peace sign, tried unsuccessfully to buy an “effete snob against the war” button (co-opting the words of Vice President Spiro Agnew), and listened to speeches by George McGovern and Coretta Scott King, music from Richie Havens and Peter, Paul and Mary. Then she joined half a million demonstrators swaying to the beat as Pete Seeger led them singing “Give Peace a Chance.” The moratorium was a moment of truth for many young Americans; Sue Okie was moved to write, “I’ve never felt as much a part of my own generation.” Sally, as usual, revealed nothing about her feelings. But there is obvious delight in her account of dancing her way out of the crowd and winding up between a poster of Ho Chi Minh and a North Vietnamese flag at the Justice Department, just as some demonstrators threatened to disrupt the peace. “When the first bottle flew,” she wrote, “I cleared out fast.”

  Sally seemed satisfied—challenged by her physics classes, sweeping opponents off the tennis courts, surrounded by new friends, living her life in tune with the times. True, college tennis in those pre–Title IX days was not up to the caliber that her peers were playing on the tour. But Sally appeared to be having fun. For Christmas vacation in 1969, she tapped into her inner Crusader Rabbit and enlisted Bear, then a Westlake sophomore, on an elaborate secret plot to surprise her parents by returning home a day earlier than they expected. So it shocked everyone when she returned to campus in January 1970 and, after three semesters at Swarthmore, announced that she was dropping out of school and going back to California.

  “I decided, ‘What was I thinking?’ ” Sally later explained. “ ‘I should have been a professional tennis player.’ I had this very, very strong feeling that I had something in me that I hadn’t really explored, and it was, ‘How good a tennis player could I be? Could I be good enough to be a professional tennis player? There is no way I am going to find this out at Swarthmore College, and if I wait until after I graduate, it will likely be too late.’ So I thought about it for several weeks pretty seriously, … [and] I … packed my bags and headed home.”

  Tennis balls don’t bounce in the snow.

  —Joyce Ride’s explanation of why Sally left Swarthmore

  Californians tend to miss California.

  —Bear Ride’s explanation

  UCLA

  In mid-January 1970, Sally moved back to Encino. Two months later, she wrote a letter to her ex-roommate in freezing Pennsylvania saying that it was sunny and warm, that her tennis was back up to the level of the past summer, and that she and Bear were the new owners of a sporty new red Toyota Corolla. Her ancestors had had the right idea.

  In most accounts of Sally’s life, her year and a half at Swarthmore is a parenthetical, a detour on her route to future fame. It’s not even mentioned in her official biographies. But from the letters she wrote and the recollections of people I interviewed, I think it represented much more—a chance to find herself,
to experiment, to cement her love of physics, to consider tennis seriously. And to recognize how rooted she was on the West Coast.

  Sally had missed California more than she realized. Now she basked in its bounty, slipping into shorts instead of snow pants, eating fresh oranges from her backyard trees instead of frozen juice in the school cafeteria, playing tennis outdoors on hard, green, predictable courts instead of the faster indoor surfaces where the ball skidded. She enrolled at nearby UCLA and joined its team; she teamed up with an old doubles partner and registered for tournaments from Seattle to New Mexico. Could she make it in the pros?

  The truth hit her like a wicked slice down the line. On one warm August day, she played three separate matches; the next morning, she noted, “all of the muscles in my body have formed a union, and gone on strike for shorter hours.” That’s all it took. “I didn’t quite have the discipline it takes to practice tennis eight hours a day,” Sally later explained. “I discovered that very quickly.” A future in tennis was over. For the rest of her life, when asked what kept her from a professional career, she’d smile—not quite ruefully—and say, consistently, “My forehand.” She also said, “I realized finally and for certain, what I had realized but waffled on in the past: that my education, science, was more important to me than tennis was.” It wouldn’t keep her from playing—and usually winning—over the next decade, but it would refocus her attention on physics. Sally pivoted and moved on.

  “Even in tough tennis matches, she didn’t brood over losses,” Dale would later say. “She’d be discouraged for a very short period of time, but she’s not one to have taken a loss home with her. It was the same in school. She did very well, but if there was a disappointment, she’d just handle it and move on to the next problem. She’s not one to get down on herself or blame someone else for whatever happens.”

  Sally had prepared for the tennis verdict, signing up for two classes at UCLA during the spring semester—Shakespeare and Elementary Quantum Mechanics. She got A’s in both, complaining that she’d “never studied so hard in her life” for the latter. That’s also where she met her first real romance.

  • • •

  “You can guess how many attractive young women there were in an undergrad physics class at that time,” explains John Tompkins, the volunteer teaching assistant [TA] for the class. “Sally was the only one. Actually, she was the only woman.” Tompkins’s comment reflects a cultural cliché of the 1970s, quickly eclipsed by his appreciation of Sally’s “absolutely unstated demand to be treated as an equal. Anybody that knew that wouldn’t mess around.” They hit it off instantly: the long-haired, bespectacled, twenty-four-year-old grad student and the longer-haired, nineteen-year-old tennis bum (her term); two kindred souls turning each other’s heads over the structure of the atom. “We were very much alike,” Tompkins tells me, “both very competitive,” although he is quick to add that Sally “was much smarter than I was, and certainly a better athlete. And quite fearless. I never lost so many ping-pong games! I did beat her in basketball.” Like Sally, John was living at home (“Yeah, we were a couple of nerds!”), which meant a lot of time driving his white Mustang from Pacific Palisades to Encino, over the Sepulveda pass into the Valley. That’s where she annihilated him over table tennis on the Ride family patio and where they compared notes on her collie and his two borzois. They joked that their shared Scandinavian roots (his mother’s side was Swedish) explained their mutual reticence. And they embarked, he says, on a real romance—“physical but not sexual. We were both slow starters. But it was very intense. Sally was not trivial or superficial. We spent an awful lot of time together in a relatively short period.”

  Short, because that September John Tompkins flew to Moscow, to join cutting-edge research on a subatomic particle called the pion. John’s trip to the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, working with what was then the world’s highest energy proton accelerator—as big as a circus arena—was as exotic as the mission itself: with the Cold War still raging and President Nixon in the White House, student exchanges with the then–Soviet Union were rare in 1970. John was part of an unusual collaboration between the UCLA physics department and a Soviet group. Sally was pining for him before he landed.

  “This is going to be a very long 6 months,” she wrote him one Friday evening from Encino. “The night you left I just felt kind of numb and empty.” One day later: “I miss you too much. Maybe you could sabotage the experiment …” Over the course of the next year or so, in between her usual clever commentary and meticulously detailed play-by-play recaps of Bruins and Lakers games, she would pour out her heart to her new best pal, discovering strange new feelings.

  I always seem to end letters by saying either that I miss you, or that I love you—or both. I guess that’s because both of those are more important to me than anything else I have to say—so I won’t write any more in this letter.

  I miss you.

  I love you.

  Love,

  Sally.

  Rash words for someone who had grown up without ever saying them.

  Sally focused on her own next chapter. She had decided to transfer to Stanford University, where, in another of the happy coincidences of timing that smoothed her life, she was readily accepted by the same man who had welcomed her to Swarthmore. Now dean of admissions at Stanford, Fred Hargadon found himself reading her college application for the second time. And, he recalls, “there was another tennis coach delighted at the prospect of Sally’s enrolling.” Years later, when Hargadon invited her to address a conference of college counselors and admissions officers, he says Sally joked “that I had admitted her twice because I didn’t want to admit I’d made a mistake the first time.”

  On a cool September morning in 1970, long before the sun illuminated Joyce’s rose bushes on Texhoma Avenue, Sally took sole possession of the red Toyota and drove north to Palo Alto. She arrived before noon and dove into the nearest glass of ice tea. Sally was exhausted, exhilarated and facing a significant new stage in her life. For a moment, the detached irony of the college sophisticate evaporated. Her letter to Moscow that night was exuberant: “Dear John … I’m at Stanford!!”

  “Well! A girl physics major! I’ve been waiting to see what you’d look like—I haven’t seen one for years!”

  —Dr. Melvin Schwartz, Sally’s physics advisor at Stanford, 1970

  STANFORD

  In 1988, Dr. Melvin Schwartz shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his earlier work (while at Columbia) on the subatomic neutrino particle. He is one of more than fifty Nobel laureates associated, at some point in their career, with Stanford University. Long one of the nation’s elite institutions with a highly competitive physics department, Stanford polished its reputation in the 1960s with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), a federally funded, super high-tech facility that attracted researchers from around the globe. When Sally arrived on campus in 1970, physics was considered by many the most exciting and exacting of the sciences, luring the brightest students with the sharpest minds (although not always the most socialized) at a university with no ego problems in any department. How many Stanford students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? One to hold it up, went the joke, and then the world revolves around him.

  When it came to physics, the operative word was “him.” In 1970, only some 6 percent of all US bachelor’s degrees in physics were awarded to women; the percentage of female doctoral candidates was about half that. At Stanford that year, you could count the number of female physics majors on one thumb. Nor were there any women teaching physics there. As one of Sally’s later colleagues tells me, “being in physics means there’s never a line at the ladies’ room.” When women did get in, they often faced more than black holes and charged particles. One male Stanford professor (another star physicist) reportedly stood up in class and said, “What are these girls doing here? You are taking jobs away from men!”

  Sally Ride—junior transfer student, declared physics major, wannab
e Nobelist, unshakable optimist—sized up her “friendly, neighborhood advisor,” Melvin Schwartz, as “a rather large, tan, jolly fellow with a good sense of humor.” Still, she reported his greeting in a letter to John with mock panic: “Help!!!” When Schwartz told her about the phenomenal 60 percent dropout rate in his class on electricity and magnetism (a class she’d signed up for, with some anxiety), “he managed to scare me.” But she didn’t quit, didn’t protest, didn’t file a sex discrimination lawsuit, which, in any case, wasn’t available. She walked out of his office and went apartment hunting.

  “She was very smart, very independent, and she was a competitor,” Tompkins says now. “I think she was twenty years ahead of her time in her absolutely unstated demand to be treated as an equal. She didn’t carry placards or signs or use jargon or trite phrases, she just asserted herself in a way that said, ‘I’m here and I’m capable and I’m doing it.’ Her view of piloting that world at that time was just to do it better than men or anyone else.”

  For the next eight years, that is exactly how she would do it at Stanford. She had chosen the quintessential California campus—eight thousand acres, some twenty times the size of little Swarthmore, with more than five times the undergrads—with its pale yellow sandstone buildings and graceful Spanish-style arcades, located in the heart of what would become yet another famous valley, Silicon. Never enamored of East coast ivy or ice storms, Sally was back in the land of palm trees and blue skies, soaking up the good vibrations. “Stanford was a little bit more suited to my personality,” she said. “Particularly the California side of my personality.” More than a decade later, she would enjoy Stanford from a loftier perspective, picking out its distinctive red tile roofs through the window of the space shuttle.