THIS IS ADDRESSED MOSTLY TO MY FELLOW "MORE MATURE" FOLKS ~ But
it also could apply to my my younger Friends, even though their
time span window is much shorter. Have you ever looked back at
your life and said, "That had to be God!"
Several nights ago, my daughter, Lana, found the movie "Hidden Figures" on television. It is a true story, lightly tainted by Hollywood, which played out circa 1960-61 at NASA Langley, Virginia. It is the story of three amazing women, all black, all mathematical geniuses, and all three women who would play an important role in putting Americans on the moon and bringing them home again.
Knowing my history in the computer industry, Lana thought I would be interested, which I most certainly was - for I have read about those women before - and now I could watch their story in an exciting movie. This movie brought so many memories flooding back in full color.
The movie had me looking back at my life and career, and thinking, "That had to be God!" As my family and I watched the movie "Hidden Figures" - it brought much of my life and career into focus, and had me saying, "That had to be God working, even back in the 1950s."
I graduated from Sheffield High in Alabama in 1955, and since there was no way for me to go to college, along with three classmates, I joined the Air Force. I had no real skills, but in school I did find math to be pretty easy and I was fairly good in English - but nothing to warrant any special considerations.
On that June 1955 day, Bob Davis, Willy Joe Foust, Cortez Melton, and I boarded a bus to Montgomery where we were sworn in and put on a train to Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas. We spent 11 weeks in Basic Training and during that time we took a battery of aptitude tests to see in which career field we would best serve our country.
By the grace of God, I scored well in math and electronics and was sent to Lowry AFB, Denver, for 6 months of training on the AN/APG-30 Radar/Gunsight System for the F-86 Fighter-Bomber jet aircraft.
Then I was sent to Osan AB, Korea, and to Tainan AB, Formosa (Taiwan) for a year - then back to Bergstrom AFB, Austin, Texas. While at Bergstrom AFB, I switched career fields and worked as a technician on the F-100 Flight Simulator. During this time I spent much of my spare time studying the tech manuals. Some of the guys laughed at me for doing that, but I told them, "When I get out of the Air Force, I have a family to support - and I need a good job to do that."
At that time, being in the military, I was not really aware of the severity of the 1957-58 recession all across America. Being an enlisted man with a family in the military was in itself a recession. In Austin my family and I had one dollar of discretionary money to spend each week. A taxi to church cost 50 cents and after walking home from church, we each had 10 cents to use for a soda or popsicle at our local park. But we were happy.
In 1957 and 1958 the nation's economy underwent its worst postwar recession. Signs that the economy was faltering could be detected in early spring 1957. The recession reached serious proportions by November 1957 - and by February 1958, it had surpassed in depth all declines since the 1929-1933 Great Depression years.
In hindsight, I am convinced of God's omniscience, being able to look down the annals of time and see that Bill Gray would one day become a believer - and God's perfect timing. I was not scheduled to be discharged from the Air Force until June 1959, but by the grace of God, I had an early out in July 1958.
I arrived in Los Angeles on Wednesday, July 23, 1958, my 21st birthday - and one week later, I had a job with Burroughs Corporation working as a Computer Technician on their new B-220 vacuum tube mainframe computer system. The recession was breaking, this was just the beginning of a long and exciting career for me.
A year later I transferred me into the Field Engineering Dept and Burroughs sent me to work as a Computer Field Engineer on the B-220 system newly installed at the Norfolk Naval Supply Depot, a system which provided logistics and needed supplies to the Atlantic Fleet.
Nine months later I was transferred to the Burroughs Washington DC office where I was the lead Field Engineer on their system at Atlantic Research Corporation in Virginia. That is where I was on on April 12, 1961, when Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, became the first human to journey into outer space. Traveling in the Vostok 1 capsule, Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth in 1 hour and 29 minutes, landing safely in Russia.
After we watched the movie, I told Dory and Lana, "A person wanting to work in the computer industry today must have degrees to even open the doors. But, by the grace of God, when I arrived in Los Angeles on July 23, 1958, and went for an interview a week later at Burroughs Corporation, Chuck Hill, the department manager was not looking for degrees - only strong electronics knowledge." My past studies in my spare time in the Air Force paid off.
Chuck offered me a job that day - and the lady in personnel told me, "He must have really liked you, for he has not given anyone else that high a starting salary." What was that starting salary? Are you sitting down? I was given the amazing pay of $2.25 an hour as a Computer Test Technician. But in 1958, that was good pay for a technician. Okay, stop laughing, it was!
In 1960 I transferred from Norfolk to the Washington DC district office - and by a great blessing, Chuck Hill had transferred to be the Washington DC Field Engineering Manager in the DC office. He was my boss again.
While in the Washington DC office, I was assigned to test and then install a Burroughs B-220 computer which was part of much larger Melpar Corporation system installed at the Air Force SAC Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. The system had two Datafile multi-tape mass storage units and one of them we knew had a problem before we shipped it to Omaha.
At SAC Headquarters I had to find and fix the problem of the movable read/write head which occasionally hung up and just stopped. I found that the unit with the problem had a slightly shorter cable attached to the read/write head which would occasionally bind and was causing it to hang up and stop the head movement. I gave it more cable and Voila, the problem went away.
The next day I told the Denver District Service manager that it was fixed and what I had done. He did not believe it was fixed and I told him, "The damn thing works now and I am going home."
In late 1962 Burroughs transferred me back to Los Angeles and when driving back, I arrived at my in-laws' home in Denver, to find there was a phone call for me. Surprised, for who knew I was stopping in Denver? It was the same Denver District Service Manager who in Omaha had not believed me. But when he had a problem with a Datafile storage unit at the headquarters of the Denver-Rio Grande Railroad in downtown Denver - who did he want to solve his problem? Me!
When he called the Washington DC office, he found out that I had left that office and was on way back to California. He had his people pull up my security clearance records, found my in-laws' name and address in Denver, assumed I would be stopping there, and called me for help.
He told me he had a problem with the Datafile unit at the Denver-Rio Grande headquarters - and felt I was the one to fix it. I guess he did believe me in Omaha. I was able to find their problem and then we drove on to Los Angeles. But as a bonus, my wife and girls were able to spend another week with the grandparents.
Another surprise! A few months after arriving in Los Angeles and being assigned to a B-220 system in downtown Los Angeles, I got a phone call from Chuck Hill. He had been hired to establish a Test Department for the new Ramo Wooldridge AN/UYK-1 MilSpec minicomputer in Canoga Park - and he wanted me to join him in that new endeavor.
So for the third time, my friend Chuck Hill became my boss again. Karma? No, God working! For my first three career positions in civilian life, Chuck was my boss.
And knowing that part of my computer career story, Lana knew this movie would stir many memories. Watching the movie also brought back a memory of the stereotyping discrimination still in NASA minds in 1965.
After helping start the AN/UYK-1 Test Department, I transferred into the Ramo Wooldridge Field Engineering Department. There I met and started dating a young lady who, like the ladies in this movie, was a whiz at mathematics. Isabel had been one of only six women attending the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, class of 1958, and she had majored in Mathematics.
At Ramo Wooldridge she was writing a program for the AN/UYK-1 which was to be installed in the NASA Down Range Tracking Station in the Caribbean. Once her program was finished she was being sent to the Down Range Station to install the software she had written. She was so excited about the trip, and had made reservations to spend a week on San Thomas Island after her work was done.
The day before she was to leave, she was told that NASA would not allow a woman to go to a Down Range Tracking Station - so another programmer, a man, not nearly as familiar with the software as the woman who had written it, Isabel, was sent to do her job. Sound like what we saw in that movie? You bet!
In 1965, after accepting a position with Scientific Data Systems (SDS), Santa Monica, as a Computer Field Engineer, my first two assignments were to install an SDS 930 computer at MIT Lincoln Lab in Boston - and then to install and support for six months an SDS 930 computer for the NASA Space Flight Simulator Boeing was building in Seattle.
That was an exciting six months, for I was working with the team that designed and was building a huge simulator primarily to train the astronauts in the most dangerous part of their Apollo missions to put a man on the moon - the earth atmosphere re-entry. As the Apollo Command Module was re-entering the earth's atmosphere from space, the angle of entry was very critical. Too shallow and the heat caused by the friction could cause the Module to burn up - and if the entry angle was to wide, the Module would just bounce off the atmosphere and ricochet back into space. It was a very narrow and very critical angle of entry, a matter of life or death.
It was an honor to be there the day the first group of Apollo astronauts come to the Boeing Space Flight Simulator facility to begin their training exercise. And just two years later, in 1967, it was heart-breaking to hear that our Moon landing program had suffered a shocking setback, when on Jan. 27, 1967, three of the Apollo astronauts, Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee, died, trapped by a flash fire aboard their spacecraft Command Module during a ground test on the launch pad. But most likely their deaths and the improvements made to the Command Module as a result of the investigation which followed, saved other lives in future missions.
So many memories flooding back as we watched the movie "Hidden Figures." You can see how this movie awakened many deja vu moments about my computer career and America's journey to the moon. But at the same time it reminds me of the discrimination which had long been a part of the NASA male dominated career field also. I pray you enjoyed this peek back in time as much as I did. The video below is a 20 minute preview of the movie. You can find the full movie on YouTube - or as we did, on our television channel.
Please keep in mind that my collage below shows a photo of the three actresses portraying the actual ladies, those three taller than life women who played such an important role in America's successful Moon Landing Space Program begun by President John Kennedy in 1960.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Hidden Figures | Featurette: Achieving The Impossible |
The incredible untold true story of Katherine Johnson (portrayed byTaraji P. Henson) - Dorothy Vaughan (by Octavia Spencer) - and Mary Jackson (by Janelle Monae). All brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. This stunning achievement galvanized the world and inspired generations to dream big.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiwBpkyjrmQ
God bless, have a wonderful, blessed day,
Bill
Several nights ago, my daughter, Lana, found the movie "Hidden Figures" on television. It is a true story, lightly tainted by Hollywood, which played out circa 1960-61 at NASA Langley, Virginia. It is the story of three amazing women, all black, all mathematical geniuses, and all three women who would play an important role in putting Americans on the moon and bringing them home again.
Knowing my history in the computer industry, Lana thought I would be interested, which I most certainly was - for I have read about those women before - and now I could watch their story in an exciting movie. This movie brought so many memories flooding back in full color.
The movie had me looking back at my life and career, and thinking, "That had to be God!" As my family and I watched the movie "Hidden Figures" - it brought much of my life and career into focus, and had me saying, "That had to be God working, even back in the 1950s."
I graduated from Sheffield High in Alabama in 1955, and since there was no way for me to go to college, along with three classmates, I joined the Air Force. I had no real skills, but in school I did find math to be pretty easy and I was fairly good in English - but nothing to warrant any special considerations.
On that June 1955 day, Bob Davis, Willy Joe Foust, Cortez Melton, and I boarded a bus to Montgomery where we were sworn in and put on a train to Lackland AFB, San Antonio, Texas. We spent 11 weeks in Basic Training and during that time we took a battery of aptitude tests to see in which career field we would best serve our country.
By the grace of God, I scored well in math and electronics and was sent to Lowry AFB, Denver, for 6 months of training on the AN/APG-30 Radar/Gunsight System for the F-86 Fighter-Bomber jet aircraft.
Then I was sent to Osan AB, Korea, and to Tainan AB, Formosa (Taiwan) for a year - then back to Bergstrom AFB, Austin, Texas. While at Bergstrom AFB, I switched career fields and worked as a technician on the F-100 Flight Simulator. During this time I spent much of my spare time studying the tech manuals. Some of the guys laughed at me for doing that, but I told them, "When I get out of the Air Force, I have a family to support - and I need a good job to do that."
At that time, being in the military, I was not really aware of the severity of the 1957-58 recession all across America. Being an enlisted man with a family in the military was in itself a recession. In Austin my family and I had one dollar of discretionary money to spend each week. A taxi to church cost 50 cents and after walking home from church, we each had 10 cents to use for a soda or popsicle at our local park. But we were happy.
In 1957 and 1958 the nation's economy underwent its worst postwar recession. Signs that the economy was faltering could be detected in early spring 1957. The recession reached serious proportions by November 1957 - and by February 1958, it had surpassed in depth all declines since the 1929-1933 Great Depression years.
In hindsight, I am convinced of God's omniscience, being able to look down the annals of time and see that Bill Gray would one day become a believer - and God's perfect timing. I was not scheduled to be discharged from the Air Force until June 1959, but by the grace of God, I had an early out in July 1958.
I arrived in Los Angeles on Wednesday, July 23, 1958, my 21st birthday - and one week later, I had a job with Burroughs Corporation working as a Computer Technician on their new B-220 vacuum tube mainframe computer system. The recession was breaking, this was just the beginning of a long and exciting career for me.
A year later I transferred me into the Field Engineering Dept and Burroughs sent me to work as a Computer Field Engineer on the B-220 system newly installed at the Norfolk Naval Supply Depot, a system which provided logistics and needed supplies to the Atlantic Fleet.
Nine months later I was transferred to the Burroughs Washington DC office where I was the lead Field Engineer on their system at Atlantic Research Corporation in Virginia. That is where I was on on April 12, 1961, when Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, became the first human to journey into outer space. Traveling in the Vostok 1 capsule, Gagarin completed one orbit of Earth in 1 hour and 29 minutes, landing safely in Russia.
After we watched the movie, I told Dory and Lana, "A person wanting to work in the computer industry today must have degrees to even open the doors. But, by the grace of God, when I arrived in Los Angeles on July 23, 1958, and went for an interview a week later at Burroughs Corporation, Chuck Hill, the department manager was not looking for degrees - only strong electronics knowledge." My past studies in my spare time in the Air Force paid off.
Chuck offered me a job that day - and the lady in personnel told me, "He must have really liked you, for he has not given anyone else that high a starting salary." What was that starting salary? Are you sitting down? I was given the amazing pay of $2.25 an hour as a Computer Test Technician. But in 1958, that was good pay for a technician. Okay, stop laughing, it was!
In 1960 I transferred from Norfolk to the Washington DC district office - and by a great blessing, Chuck Hill had transferred to be the Washington DC Field Engineering Manager in the DC office. He was my boss again.
While in the Washington DC office, I was assigned to test and then install a Burroughs B-220 computer which was part of much larger Melpar Corporation system installed at the Air Force SAC Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. The system had two Datafile multi-tape mass storage units and one of them we knew had a problem before we shipped it to Omaha.
At SAC Headquarters I had to find and fix the problem of the movable read/write head which occasionally hung up and just stopped. I found that the unit with the problem had a slightly shorter cable attached to the read/write head which would occasionally bind and was causing it to hang up and stop the head movement. I gave it more cable and Voila, the problem went away.
The next day I told the Denver District Service manager that it was fixed and what I had done. He did not believe it was fixed and I told him, "The damn thing works now and I am going home."
In late 1962 Burroughs transferred me back to Los Angeles and when driving back, I arrived at my in-laws' home in Denver, to find there was a phone call for me. Surprised, for who knew I was stopping in Denver? It was the same Denver District Service Manager who in Omaha had not believed me. But when he had a problem with a Datafile storage unit at the headquarters of the Denver-Rio Grande Railroad in downtown Denver - who did he want to solve his problem? Me!
When he called the Washington DC office, he found out that I had left that office and was on way back to California. He had his people pull up my security clearance records, found my in-laws' name and address in Denver, assumed I would be stopping there, and called me for help.
He told me he had a problem with the Datafile unit at the Denver-Rio Grande headquarters - and felt I was the one to fix it. I guess he did believe me in Omaha. I was able to find their problem and then we drove on to Los Angeles. But as a bonus, my wife and girls were able to spend another week with the grandparents.
Another surprise! A few months after arriving in Los Angeles and being assigned to a B-220 system in downtown Los Angeles, I got a phone call from Chuck Hill. He had been hired to establish a Test Department for the new Ramo Wooldridge AN/UYK-1 MilSpec minicomputer in Canoga Park - and he wanted me to join him in that new endeavor.
So for the third time, my friend Chuck Hill became my boss again. Karma? No, God working! For my first three career positions in civilian life, Chuck was my boss.
And knowing that part of my computer career story, Lana knew this movie would stir many memories. Watching the movie also brought back a memory of the stereotyping discrimination still in NASA minds in 1965.
After helping start the AN/UYK-1 Test Department, I transferred into the Ramo Wooldridge Field Engineering Department. There I met and started dating a young lady who, like the ladies in this movie, was a whiz at mathematics. Isabel had been one of only six women attending the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, class of 1958, and she had majored in Mathematics.
At Ramo Wooldridge she was writing a program for the AN/UYK-1 which was to be installed in the NASA Down Range Tracking Station in the Caribbean. Once her program was finished she was being sent to the Down Range Station to install the software she had written. She was so excited about the trip, and had made reservations to spend a week on San Thomas Island after her work was done.
The day before she was to leave, she was told that NASA would not allow a woman to go to a Down Range Tracking Station - so another programmer, a man, not nearly as familiar with the software as the woman who had written it, Isabel, was sent to do her job. Sound like what we saw in that movie? You bet!
In 1965, after accepting a position with Scientific Data Systems (SDS), Santa Monica, as a Computer Field Engineer, my first two assignments were to install an SDS 930 computer at MIT Lincoln Lab in Boston - and then to install and support for six months an SDS 930 computer for the NASA Space Flight Simulator Boeing was building in Seattle.
That was an exciting six months, for I was working with the team that designed and was building a huge simulator primarily to train the astronauts in the most dangerous part of their Apollo missions to put a man on the moon - the earth atmosphere re-entry. As the Apollo Command Module was re-entering the earth's atmosphere from space, the angle of entry was very critical. Too shallow and the heat caused by the friction could cause the Module to burn up - and if the entry angle was to wide, the Module would just bounce off the atmosphere and ricochet back into space. It was a very narrow and very critical angle of entry, a matter of life or death.
It was an honor to be there the day the first group of Apollo astronauts come to the Boeing Space Flight Simulator facility to begin their training exercise. And just two years later, in 1967, it was heart-breaking to hear that our Moon landing program had suffered a shocking setback, when on Jan. 27, 1967, three of the Apollo astronauts, Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee, died, trapped by a flash fire aboard their spacecraft Command Module during a ground test on the launch pad. But most likely their deaths and the improvements made to the Command Module as a result of the investigation which followed, saved other lives in future missions.
So many memories flooding back as we watched the movie "Hidden Figures." You can see how this movie awakened many deja vu moments about my computer career and America's journey to the moon. But at the same time it reminds me of the discrimination which had long been a part of the NASA male dominated career field also. I pray you enjoyed this peek back in time as much as I did. The video below is a 20 minute preview of the movie. You can find the full movie on YouTube - or as we did, on our television channel.
Please keep in mind that my collage below shows a photo of the three actresses portraying the actual ladies, those three taller than life women who played such an important role in America's successful Moon Landing Space Program begun by President John Kennedy in 1960.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Hidden Figures | Featurette: Achieving The Impossible |
The incredible untold true story of Katherine Johnson (portrayed byTaraji P. Henson) - Dorothy Vaughan (by Octavia Spencer) - and Mary Jackson (by Janelle Monae). All brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. This stunning achievement galvanized the world and inspired generations to dream big.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiwBpkyjrmQ
God bless, have a wonderful, blessed day,
Bill
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