Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  Her academic home was the physics department, where she slaked her growing thirst for the fundamental structure of the universe. “Physics is the basis for everything,” another scientist tells me. “If you understand physics, then in principle you understand everything else.” And if you woke up Sally Ride in the middle of the night and asked her what one word best described her (a question I often pose to size someone up), she would say, according to everyone who knew her best, “Physicist.” She liked that fact that only ninety-some naturally occurring elements comprise everything from a grain of sand to the furthest star; that physics means being precise, not arbitrary; that it dwells in the real world with natural law. These were Sally’s most comfortable coordinates.

  Her later focus on high-energy physics was, according to a physics colleague, “a quest to get to the highest level of understanding of the universe.”

  Her grades were good, not perfect. As an undergraduate she made many straight A’s, not only in the first semester of the dreaded Electricity and Magnetism, but in Atomic Structure, Kinetic Theory, Quantum Mechanics, Statistical Mechanics. There were four physics B’s. One was in the second semester of Electricity and Magnetism; then she fell to a C. That course would always bedevil but never impede her progress. In 1973 she got her BS in physics.

  She also got a BA in English literature—a rare double major—in which she graduated with distinction. That’s better than she did in physics. Her honors essay analyzed the theme of grace in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and The Tempest. On one final exam, the teacher gave her an A and wrote, “A superb job. I hope you’re as successful with physics as with literature, in which you are very fine indeed.” So much for the Westlake English teacher who had belittled her lack of creativity with a mind “wasted in science.”

  Sally juggled both disciplines with ease. In one notebook, she recorded her physics lectures front to back, then flipped the notebook and turned it upside down to write her Richard II notes, back to front. That’s how Sally solved many problems. If the rules didn’t work, she rewrote them.

  Or just moved on. Uncertain about her next step after graduation, she combined her interests to apply for a Fulbright Fellowship to London, where she wanted to study the “Impact of Science on Elizabethan Thought”: how British literature responded to the radical new concepts of Copernicus and “other pre-Galilean astronomical advances.” Her recommending professor from the history department at Stanford called her “an unusually competent and mature student … [who] refuses to be intimidated or discouraged by difficult topics (as might be expected of a combination English-Physics major).”

  But when Sally was accepted for graduate work at Stanford, she plunged into science fulltime and got her master’s degree in physics. As she honed her focus to astrophysics (the physics of astronomy), she also served as a teaching assistant to an astronomy class, where one student remembers her as “a kid in sneakers. She was so small! And we were building the Stanford Observatory, up in the foothills, working on the darkroom and the mount for the telescope. It was the greatest lab I ever had.”

  Sally’s research centered on the free electron laser, a beam of highly charged particles—only recently invented—with a pinpoint blast, like her own. “She was very comfortable in details,” says a colleague. “She saw big pictures, but could focus narrowly.”

  For her doctorate, she was the first student to be advised by Dr. Arthur B. C. Walker, a noted astrophysicist who invited Sally to join him in modeling the interaction of x-rays and the gas surrounding the stars, known as the interstellar medium. Walker taught science as a team project, right up Sally’s alley from her tennis doubles days. She liked working collaboratively. And finding answers. The day she finished her dissertation, she later told Tam, “she sat back and realized that she knew something that no one else in the world knew.” That, she thought, was the real dividend of doing research, the real joy of doing science.

  MOLLY

  Shortly after she arrived at Stanford in September 1970, Sally pulled on a tee-shirt and a pair of cutoff jeans, grabbed her tennis racquet, and knocked on the door of the dorm where Molly Tyson, whom she knew from the teen circuit, had just moved in. “Hi!” she said when Molly answered the door, “Wanna hit some?”

  Molly, who thought Sally was still at Swarthmore, was startled. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I missed the sunshine,” Sally quipped.

  Molly stammered a bit, saying that she was out of shape, hadn’t been playing. She was also slightly intimidated by Sally, who was not only a year older, but had always been a better player. Molly still had a clipping in her high school scrapbook where Sally was ranked number 9 (in the Girls 18 and under division) and she was only number 19 (in Girls 16 and under). They weren’t even particularly close friends.

  Sally persisted. “You’re the only one here I know, so come on!”

  They walked across campus to Stanford’s bright green, hard-surfaced courts and started to hit, just as they would every day from that moment on, an afternoon ritual when they didn’t have class. Occasionally they played under the lights at 11:00 p.m., two slim, sporty, long-haired athletes—Molly the blonde, Sally the brunette—who rarely kept score, just thwacked the ball back and forth, keeping a rally going for hundreds of shots. Sometimes they bet pomegranate seeds on who would miss first, 500 at a clip. At one point, Sally was 3,500 pomegranates ahead. The goal was to keep the ball in play, not to hit a winner. “I’m not sure how much exercise we got playing that way,” Molly says today, “but it was fun.”

  Then they joined the tennis team. When the coach tried to pair Sally, who was ranked number 1 at Stanford, with the number 2 player for doubles, Sally shook her head. “No, I’m going to play with Molly [who was number 6],” she insisted, in a take-it-or-leave-it manner. And that was that. “I felt like I was getting a privilege that I didn’t deserve,” Molly recalls. “But it was pretty exciting. I’d just look over my shoulder and there she was.” Molly played forehand, Sally, backhand. “She was a wonderful competitor,” Molly says, with a wicked drop shot and the precision to lob the ball over your head. “She could just outthink you and anticipate what would happen.” On weekends, they piled into Sally’s car and traveled to tournaments in Fresno, Bakersfield, San Diego, Phoenix, once finding their own chaperone and paying their own way to a tournament in Ojai, 350 miles away, when the phys ed department wouldn’t authorize the funds.

  Sally knew that tennis was neither top rank nor a priority at Stanford, where winning a tournament was less important than “general improvement,” and she ultimately quit the team to protest the school’s refusal to join the competitive Pac-8 conference. “It’s not only not good practice, it’s bad practice to play against girls who can’t even serve,” she told the university newspaper. But she didn’t stop playing. With college athletic scholarships not yet available for women, she and Molly taught tennis on campus during the summer to earn money. Every day during lunch break, along with some other tennis teachers, they raced to a TV to catch the soap opera All My Children. During the school year, they were partial to Star Trek reruns, when they weren’t playing killer volleyball.

  They also started writing a long, involved children’s book on big rolls of butcher paper, an allegory about good and evil. Creating the characters and the bad puns sent both women into peals of laughter. They illustrated it with, among other silliness, Sally’s sketch of the “Black & Blueberry”—a wrinkled, Yoda-like blueberry wrapped in bandages and leaning on a crutch. “We just wanted to spend time together,” Molly says.

  Molly was an English major, a “staunch science hater,” according to Sally, who took courses like Physics for Poets to fulfill her science requirement but listened with fascination to Sally’s clear explanation of the scientific world. “She could make science interesting, even to me,” Molly says. “She could turn astrophysics lectures into science fiction thrillers.” Sally’s tastes and talents ranged even wider. She added literature courses to her o
wn schedule—just for balance, she said, a “sanity class” or two to mitigate all the hard physics. Also, she could borrow Molly’s notes. Shakespeare became a parlor game. On road trips, Molly and Sally would memorize obscure Shakespeare quotations and then work them into conversations. It became a running joke. For instance, Molly explains, if someone said, “Lynn seems trustworthy,” the other would launch into Hamlet’s “ ‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems,’ ” or some other appropriate line from another play. Molly remembers all of them.

  Molly and Sally spent vacation time in Tulsa, where Molly’s family had moved. Sally took Molly down to Encino, for visits with the Rides. And she wrote to John Tompkins about their friendship. “Molly and I are taking the university by storm,” she announced about their tennis. “We entered the all-university women’s doubles tournament and have convincingly swept our way into the semifinals.” She told him they’d gone to a church service—“a very rare occurance [sic]”—to hear Yale’s William Sloane Coffin, the antiwar activist. “We decided that if we’re going to satirize everything in sight, we should at least know something about the things we’re satirizing.” The women were so close and their friendship so easy, Molly scrawled her greetings to John (whom she’d not met) on the envelope, with her own little drawing from the work-in-progress.

  Sally, who always had a best buddy, now had two.

  JOHN

  One day in November Sally sat down with, of all things, an exam blue book (“graciously donated by the Stanford physics department”), and tried to explore her feelings to her physicist beau in Moscow. It is a remarkably candid document—maybe not for any other college girl accustomed to baring her soul—but for Sally, who preferred looking out, to faraway galaxies, not inward. “I’m not used to analyzing my feelings and emotions—much less used to trying to communicate them,” she started out to John, “so please forgive my clumsiness: being serious is very hard for me.” She then talked about how much she’d been missing him while he was in the Soviet Union, how their letters (which had now gone on longer than their in-person relationship) might have distorted things.

  I told you I loved you—and I’m very sorry I did because at the time I knew subconsciously that it wasn’t true. I’d better explain that … I’ve come to realize that I’m physically, mentally, and emotionally incapable of loving someone who I don’t know very, very, very well. “Love at first sight” would be impossible for me, because I’m not an emotional person—I don’t get “carried away” with anything. I just never thought about it before, and “I love you” seemed like the thing to say, especially with you repeating it so often. I remember the first time you said it to me—the first time anyone had directly—and how much it meant to me …

  Sally, at nineteen, was apparently encountering her hormones for the first time, at least in print. Whether she was struggling with her feelings about John, or about herself, is impossible to know. She was clearly attached to him, but utterly unfamiliar with the sensation, or what to do about it. “I feel very sure that some day … I’ll know,” she wrote, more hopeful than convinced. Then she withdrew the toe she’d stuck into the turbulent waters and retreated to the safe, glib ground of physics.

  I’m very sure that I’m only a very short quantum jump from love, and that a very little transfer of energy this April will bring me there—I’m existing in a stable state until then, and waiting patiently.

  She signed it “Love, Sally.”

  John doesn’t recall the “blue book” letter, and there’s no evidence of his response. He was, after all, on his own journey of discovery in the Soviet Union. Sally continued to write him letters, although back to her breezy self. But after John returned and Sally went away for the summer, he broke up with her, in a letter. Sally was furious. “I’m not going to let you break things off by mail,” she wrote. “You’ll have to do it in person … Give me a chance, John …” At the bottom of the page she added, “Written ‘in a countenance more in sorrow than in anger …’ Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2.”

  “I think I did it sort of passively,” Tompkins says now. “Just sort of drifted away. I changed a bit after having never been out of the country before, and never living on my own, and I’d come to the realization that we were different. First she felt pressure, then I felt pressure as well.” He adds something common to all of Sally’s beaux: “It was very difficult for me to be too open emotionally at the time. With hindsight, we were probably too much alike.”

  MOLLY AND SALLY

  “That’s when our physical relationship started.”

  Molly has never talked about this publicly.

  “When Sally and John split, she seemed pretty sad. She was in a vulnerable state, and I’d never seen her show any vulnerability before,” Molly says. She and Sally had been spending more and more time together in the year since Sally showed up, playing bridge, teaching tennis, taking car trips. Now it became a romance.

  “I think it’s possible Sally and I were obsessed with each other for a long time before we had anything physical,” she says. Before, in fact, either of them had been physical with any other woman.

  “Eventually it dawned on us that something was going on. But when it became a relationship, it felt like an extension of the friendship.” It was 1971, and homosexuality was still mostly closeted—still a crime in many states, including California. Although the Stonewall riots had taken place two years earlier at a New York City bar—widely considered the beginning of the American gay rights movement—Greenwich Village and San Francisco (up the peninsula from Stanford) saw far more activism than other parts of the country. The campaign had not yet caught on nationally the way the women’s movement had, on the heels of the civil rights movement. Across America, feminists were marching for their rights wearing buttons that proclaimed, “Sisterhood Is Powerful” and “Uppity Women Unite.” At Stanford, Sally joined the newly formed National Organization for Women.

  But if you were gay, says a friend who is, “you were considered a sexual freak.” In fact, a Gay Students Union had been founded at Stanford the year before, but early meetings were held off-campus, and many who attended in search of support, still preferred anonymity. Sally and Molly knew of no other gay couples on campus. If they had, it wouldn’t have mattered. “In our ignorance, we probably would have put them in the category of, Those Icky People,” Molly says. “They were not like us. We didn’t want to be associated with our idea of what gay people were like.” Anyway, they weren’t looking for a peer group.

  “It’s a pretty familiar story that with a person’s first relationship, you’re absolutely certain that this does not mean you’re gay, that it has nothing to do with being gay,” Molly says, explaining the mind-set of some who grew up in an era when homosexuals were regarded as social deviates. “You are in love with a particular person, and you’re not generalizing it to say, ‘Oh, okay, I’ve now learned something about myself.’ Both Sally and I had been in relationships with men before then, so we were just thinking, okay, this is interesting. It’s just you that I’m attracted to.” They discussed it, Molly says, and “It seemed like an anomaly. We didn’t want this to be a label that was attached to us forever.”

  I ask Molly if she was in love with Sally.

  “Yes.”

  Was she in love with you?

  “Yes.”

  Did you think it would last forever?

  “No. I thought it would end when college ended. I was counting on that. Because then I’d go off and get married and have kids.”

  Molly was nineteen; Sally, twenty. “There was a lot of fumbling around in the dark,” Molly tells me about their physical relationship. “We did the best we could. But we were clueless people coming up against a pretty formidable taboo. Kissing felt incredibly daring, sleeping in the same bed felt incredibly daring. But nobody was swinging from the chandeliers. It’s safe to say that sex was not the driving force. It was this emotional intimacy, a connectedness. We knew how to finish each other’s
sentences. In hindsight it was not a very sexual relationship, but it felt huge because of all the barriers we were crossing.”

  Sally and Molly moved in together, a two-bedroom house decorated, student-style, with brick-and-board bookcases, posters from Shakespeare festivals, and a bust of Julius Caesar from the San Jose flea market. Supernovae posters covered the kitchen wall and a solar system mobile hung from the living room ceiling. They took pride in living cheaply, with lots of frozen spinach at nineteen cents a box. Sally made a wicked guacamole and a very good strawberry pie. When her parents came to town, they contributed jars of cashews. Both women worked at odd jobs to pay the rent: Sally cleaned house, taught tennis, TA’d classes. And they hit the books, hard. No more pretense that Sally didn’t study: she was putting in sixteen-hour days, her focus as intense as the lasers she was exploring. She could, colleagues say, burn through to a subject’s core. “Sally could study through a whistling tea kettle and not hear it,” Molly remembers. She could also turn a ten-page Shakespeare assignment into a three-page paper that the teacher would call “Brilliant!”

  As far as the world knew, they were roommates, just like anyone else, with Sally the quieter, more serious one and Molly the outgoing, funny one, “a real kick.” But there weren’t that many people who might have known. “We pretty much kept to ourselves,” Molly says. It was Sally’s trademark social group: small and tight, no outsiders. When they did interact, “This was not something that we wanted to share with anyone.” Their love affair was a secret, but they never made rules about keeping it. “It was just sort of a given,” Molly says, “at that time, for people like us.”