Let me tell you a story.
A story that I wish I’d asked for earlier in life. A story I received, in the form of a letter, on my sixteenth birthday.
It goes something like this:
On October 4th 1957, Russia launched the first ever satellite, SPUTNIK 1 into space.
My grandmother, twelve years old at the time, listened to the beep heard ‘round the world and held onto its sound.
This time period - July 1957 through December 1958 had been dedicated by the world as the International Geophysical Year and advanced nations were working on major medical and scientific projects.
That little girl in the classroom in Falls Church felt something begin to twist inside her, a ripple like within the stars that begged to be explored.
Both the US and the Soviet Union were developing Space Exploration Programs.
Because there was a whole universe out there that was just beginning to be understood — perhaps she could be the one to understand it for them.
THE US was preparing to launch satellites in 1958 but the Soviet Union had already won ‘THE RACE TO SPACE.’
And the devastation of the loss to the Soviets was nothing compared to her determination that she would be a part of this plan.
I grew up in suburban Washington DC and this launch panicked the government and local school systems.
She didn’t panic — rather took hold of a quiet power. Working, learning, thinking, little by little.
A plan was implemented in my community to accelerate the education of the best science and math students and expose them to many local educational tours of local government agencies and research facilities.
Because space may feel intangible now, but she could just begin to taste the sweetness of discovery on the tip of her tongue. Underneath, a twinge of bitterness, the worry that she would not be enough.
Up to that time I did not realize I was ‘gifted.’
And a part of me wishes I could go back and tell her then, a whisper in her ear, perhaps a brush from the future, that she was, is, exactly that. Because though she would go on to fight her way into the workforce as a powerful female engineer, no feeling would ever compare to the love I felt when she sat me on the couch and taught me to braid using white and pink yarn she’d formed into an octopus with eight sections for eight braided legs.
My sister was getting into trouble or probably just being a teenager, but my parents pulled her out of our high school and sent her to private school for her junior and senior year. This used up all of the educational savings my parents had set aside for both of us so I did not know if I could go to college ever.
And I think about what our future would have become for her without her next steps — would she ever sit with my brother for hours constructing the most beautifully complex toy train routes, as only an engineer could?
I knew that I wanted to be an engineer but there were only two colleges in the US that would accept women in engineering at the time and one was in Arizona - the other was Virginia Tech.
The University of Virginia, a place I know well, a place I now call home, was a closed door to her — the thought of a woman studying, let alone studying engineering, was preposterous to the good old southern boys in charge. Virginia Tech became the only feasible option. And though the sports rivalry may run deep, I find myself incredibly grateful that they recognized her brilliance when my own school could not.
My guidance counselors worked very hard to find grants for me and I ended up with a full tuition scholarship and approval for a student loan to cover room and board.
Even as I write it today I am tense with anger at the fact that someone who I aspire to be, someone who is the woman I hope to grow up and be even the tiniest sliver like, could be rejected simply because she was a woman. That everything was twice as hard for her even though I am half the woman she is.
There was no freedom for the women at Virginia Tech.
Especially when it came to those things I take for granted — the ability to come and go freely (restricted by a dorm mother), the ability to wear what I want (limited by a dress code that required modesty to the point of wearing trench coats over their tennis skirts on the way to gym class). Even when she had to play tennis in the courts in the middle of the male dormitories, boys jeering out the window at her and her short tennis skirt, she kept moving forward.
There were fewer than 100 — all in one dorm — most studying home economics. There were four female engineering students and several architecture students.
The numbers were against her, And yet she refused to be stopped. Though she had to leave behind her childhood dreams of aerospace for the mechanical, she kept doing as she always had.
There was a picnic held at a place called ‘the duck pond’ on campus the first week where I met this guy named Dennis and the rest of my life has been spent with him.
The wonderful man who spotted her from across the pond still talks about the beautiful cranberry dress she was wearing that day and notes that she was the reason he passed college–helping him study, and explaining concepts he couldn’t understand.
We were married the day before graduation and the rest is history.
The rest is history simplifies her story too much. Simplifies the fact that she had to navigate the working world as a female engineer, having to jump through hoops just to find a job that would have been given to a man half as qualified.
That she raised three wonderful children, one of them a brilliant, kind and dedicated daughter with auburn hair who went on to become an engineer just like her mother.
That the daughter would have three children, would raise them with grace and compassion just like her mother.
That one of them, a daughter with hair more brown than auburn, would go on to attend the University of Virginia, the very place her grandmother had wanted to go.
That the granddaughter is about to graduate from that very same school.
That every step of the way she has thought about her grandmother who paved the way for her.
And that someday, Grandma, when the granddaughter — me — has a daughter, I am going to tell her about you. I will tell her about the woman I believe should be placed among the greats — Amelia Earhart, Maya Angelou, Nancy Jean Whorley.
“The rest is history” — our history.
I will say:
Let me tell you a story.
A story I have held onto since sixteen. A story about a woman so bright even the space race couldn’t contain her.
It goes something like this:
