Revealing Another Hidden Figure! |
And now we know a Native American woman, the first female engineer at Lockheed, should have a movie made about her! Hidden Figures. Wonderful movie about the unsung African American women who broke race, gender and professional barriers, doing their jobs so well, Glenn insisted they sign off on final calculations to prevent his space craft from exploding in a ball of fire as it whizzed through the atmosphere. (Thanks to Hopper Stone/20th Century Fox for the photo.) Now meet Mary Golda Ross. She learned to read at 3, listening to her father teach her older sister. But it was
arithmetic that rocketed this woman into an aerospace career and the history books! The great-great-granddaughter of a Cherokee Chief John Ross, who lead his people over the Trail of Tears, Mary was born ten months after Oklahoma became a state on her parents’ allotment in the foothills of the Ozarks.
Her path to becoming a
space engineer began with the commitment of the Cherokee to equal opportunity education. Mary graduated from high school at 16, and teacher's college at 18.
"[I] didn’t mind being the only girl in math class. Math, chemistry and physics were more fun to study than any other subject,” Mary said.
"I sat
on one side of the room and the guys on the other side of the room. I guess they didn’t want to associate with me. But I could hold my own with them, and sometimes did better.” Teaching high school and taking college classes during the summer, Mary was ready when WWII broke out and Lockheed was looking for mathematicians to resolve problems
with the P-38 Lightning fighter plane.
According to Lockheed, the P-38 could climb to 3,300 feet in a single minute and reach 400 mph, 100 mph faster than any other fighter in the world, and it doubled as an long-range threat, carrying a larger payload than early B-17s with a range of 1,150
miles. But in a dive, the fighter could become resulting in the deaths of a test pilot and an undetermined number of men who flew the aircraft in combat.
Part of a team working in secrecy, Mary helped resolve the issues with the P-38 and went on to a career at Lockheed.
She was one of the founding members of Skunk Works, a super-secret think tank that became Lockheed Missiles & Space Co, and worked with NASA on the Apollo program, the Polaris reentry vehicle, and interplanetary space probes.
Much of the work of that Lockheed group,
including theories and papers by Ross, remain classified.
In the early 1960s, Mary told a reporter she believed women would make great astronauts But she said, “I’d rather stay down here and analyze the data.”
She offered some great advice for young women, “To function efficiently, you need math. The world is so technical, if you plan to work in it, a math background will let you go farther and faster.” One of Mary's accomplishments was as an author of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Vol. III dealing with space travel to Mars and Venus. After retiring in 1973, Mary worked to recruit young women and Native American youth into engineering careers.
Though she once mentioned one of her few regrets was spending so much of her life apart from Indian people, upon her death, the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Chad Smith said, “The accomplishments of Mary Golda Ross epitomize the Cherokee spirit. Her ambition and successes exemplify the importance of education and are evidence
of the doors that can be opened through higher learning.”
Mary Golda Ross died in 2008, just six months after Oklahoma celebrated 100 years of statehood. Great news this week for Fannie Never Flinched! The American Library Association's Booklist Online named it one of the Top 10 Biographies for Youth reviewed since last July. I'm so honored so see the book on a list with some of my favorite new books! Look at these!
In the process of researching and writing she discovered RBG had been disagreeing with unfairness and discrimination and injustice from the time she
was a young girl, but that disagreeing doesn’t have to make you disagreeable! Stay tuned for that!
Until next week... Have you read a great book? Tell me about it. Have a burning question? Let me know.
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