A son demanding his mother's achievement be recognized.
It's the story of a lost legacy.
He says she invented the fuel that got the U.S. into space, and then she was forgotten.
I'm Susan Barnett, and this is 51 percent the women's perspective.
In 1957, it was a very different world for women.
Education was something to fall back on, but a woman's primary place was still supposed
to be in the home.
The story of Mary Sherman Morgan is a fascinating one.
In so many ways, she fit them old perfectly.
She never got a degree.
She gave up her job to stay home with her children, but she actually had another story.
According to her co-workers and her son, writer George Morgan, she invented the fuel that
finally got the United States into space, and she had a secret that she never shared
with her son.
She is the subject of his new book, Rocket Girl, the story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's
first female rocket scientist.
Number one, I couldn't get her former employer, North American aviation, now known as
Rocket Eye, to cooperate with giving me a lot of research materials.
They wouldn't give me anything.
And then the concurrent with that, things started happening with me discovering some of
these secrets from my mother's past, and I realized, you know, this is a much more personal
story than I really ever anticipated it was going to be.
So it just kind of morphed into more of a semi-biography, semi-memois sort of thing.
And I guess the first thing we ought to do is talk about Mary Sherman Morgan's contribution
to the space race.
She invented the fuel that made it possible.
Right, I think the most significant thing that she did was she invented the fuel that
put America's first satellite into orbit.
Like when the Soviet Union was basically shaming us with one success after another, while
America's rockets were just blowing up on the launch pad, she was given the responsibility
by her employer to come up with a more powerful fuel that would be strong enough and powerful
enough to take one of the rockets that we already had on the shelf and turn it from an
ICBM into an orbital rocket to put it, you know, kind of like the brute force method
of putting something into orbit just to rescue our country's reputation.
And she worked for the company that built the rocket because she was their very best rocket
propellant scientist, North American aviation put her in charge of it.
And what I found really fascinating was that your mother did not have a formal education
or complete a formal education in this field, but she was trained and she had what appeared
to be a personality disorder that may have made her better at her job.
You know, I wish I could, I wish I had more information on that, but she, first of all,
first thing, let me come in on the first part first, she wanted to go to college more
than anything in the world.
She had a very strong desire and a great love for education.
And she was enrolled in college, she wanted to finish college, but World War II came along
and, you know, it just interrupted everybody's lives in the whole country in one way or
another.
And for her, it interrupted her education.
But one thing it did do is it put her to work for a company, this weapons manufacturer
in Ohio, Plumbrook, ordinance, by working for them for four years, it gave her a lot
of chemistry skills, a very unique talents in chemistry that she probably would never
have gotten if she had completed her education.
There were, it was hands-on, real deep stuff that she was working on, top secret chemistry
problems.
And she actually got a top notch education just working in that industry for four years.
And it set her up to be just the right person at the right time when North American aviation
needed her.
Now, was her OCD, if that's what it was, and even I'm not sure, did that help her in some
way?
I don't know, but it, one thing's for sure, she was very good at focusing and concentrating
on a single problem.
She could tune out the entire world and focus on something for weeks and months at a time.
As a child, did you know what your mom had done before she had a family?
Well, you know, I was never really made aware of a lot of the details of my mother's life.
Both of my parents were rocket scientists and they both met at work in North American aviation.
That's what he meant.
My father was very, always very open with the projects that he worked on at work.
But neither my mother nor my father ever talked about my mother's work.
For some reason or other, that subject was off limits.
And so it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I really started learning how important my
mother's work was in the 40s and 50s bit by bit as I got older.
My father started giving me little spoon feeding me a little piece of information about the
kind of things that she was involved in.
When I would ask my mother about them, she refused to talk about anything.
She was really tight-lipped about her cold-war work.
Now I don't know if it was because she felt that because her work was top secret that
you should keep a top secret even after it had been declassified.
I'm not exactly sure what her motivation was and I probably will never know.
But she never talked about any of her work ever to anybody.
And you discovered the answers to some of the mysteries surrounding your mother and I
wondered, the woman you described was a difficult mother, not a warm or a loving mother.
But with all of the new information that you found, did it in your mind change your relationship
with the woman who was your mother?
Yes, I have a much greater respect and I guess you could say greater respect and love
for her now that I know more about what she went through.
99% of what I know about my mother, I learned about her after she passed away in 2004.
And all of this stuff I've had to learn by digging, by basically playing detective, calling
up her former co-workers, sitting down with them and interviewing them or if they're
live far away, interviewing them over the phone.
I really have gotten a nine year education on my mother and all of it has been since
she passed away and it's given me a much greater respect for who she was.
Growing up, she was a difficult mother.
You're right, to use the word warm, I think that's a good word.
She was not a warm mother, not a huggy kissy kind of person.
She was extremely intellectual.
There's that moment in the book I mentioned where my brothers and sisters, we bought her
a trivial pursuit game for her birthday one year.
When the game first came out, we only played it once because she knew all the answers and
nobody else got to play.
We put the game in the closet and nobody ever played it again.
That's the kind of person she was and I think that high intellectual, that super brainy intellectual
quality of hers made it difficult for her to also be a loving mother.
I think she had difficulty playing both of those roles.
And I know that there has been some dispute about who gets credit for what you say are
your mother's achievements, which you say her co-workers all confirm is that argument
over.
Well, it settled as far as the living employees of North American aviation are concerned.
When I've interviewed all of them, there are all in agreement that they work side by
side with her and they know that she was the inventor.
So there's no battle or question in their minds.
The problem is there's one individual who after my mother retired from North American
aviation, after she left, he sent some paperwork to NASA, claiming that he was the inventor.
I'm going to eventually get that problem fixed with NASA and it is fixable.
I have a wealth of documentation to fix that problem and it's going to get fixed.
I have a question for you.
I suspect that if your mother knew that you were telling her story, she might not approve.
What do you think?
Even though she never talked about her work, if she knew that someone else was trying to
take credit for it, she would have spoken up and taken action and gotten the phone calls.
She was very at a very strong sense of fairness and justice and would not have let that
sit.
Had she known about it, but she never knew about it because once something goes into a
giant warehouse in a box in a warehouse and collects dust for three decades, it just sits
there percolating and if you can't find it on the internet, nobody knows about it, nobody
can challenge it.
So this information that this other supervisor sent to NASA is just sitting in a cardboard
box somewhere in some shelf.
So that's why nobody knew about it until I started researching her life.
Even the other engineers like Bill Weber, who was one of her closest friends at North American,
even Mr. Weber did not know that someone else was trying to usurp ownership over Mary's
invention.
So when these other engineers when I told them what was going on, they were all angry.
And they said, well, you've got to fix that.
And I said, I promise them I'm going to fix it.
We did this because we wanted to get Mary Sherman Morgan's story out there.
It's a legacy.
What it is, it's a story of a lost legacy, a story of a woman who should have been famous,
but for a number of reasons, including her own feelings against celebrity, against notoriety,
for a number of reasons, history is completely buried her accomplishments.
So I guess if I could say one other thing is that I hope the book gets out there into
the world that people read it and that my mother attains the notoriety she deserved in
life, but never had.
George Morgan is the author of Rocket Girl, the story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's
first female rocket scientist.
Up next, changes in the industry that brings you your morning eggs and a seal that's backed
by thousands of women.
If you missed part of this show or want to share it with others, visit the 51% Archives
at WAMC.org.
This week's show is number 1257.
Every American eats about 250 eggs each year.
Think about it.
Not just your breakfast, but your brownies, cakes, even the original Caesar dressing calls
for an egg.
But is factory farming is replaced small farms, consumers have become increasingly concerned
with environmental health and even moral issues created by huge complexes of caged laying
hands.
As harvest public media's Any Mayor reports, the poultry business, which grapples with the
environmental challenge of caring for the millions of hands that lay all those eggs, is
anything but simple, and change happens slowly, driven by consumer demand.
During car heart overalls and a faded blue work shirt, Mark Chaunlin shows me around
his farm in Central Iowa.
With his thick white beard and a baseball cap from the local farmer's cooperative framing
his face, Chaunlin looks every bit the part.
He grows the state's most popular crops, corn and soybeans, on one farm.
But here this third generation farmer defies stereotypes, rotating certified organic corn,
beans, oats and hay, and keeping 700 free-range laying hands to supply his egg business.
The layer building, and you can see their nests.
There are no cages here.
The long henhouse opens onto a three acre fenced pasture.
Except during winter's cold, the chickens spend their days roaming and pecking.
At night, they lay their eggs 45 dozen per day indoors.
Chaunlin says animal welfare is important to him, and to the growing customer base that
buys his eggs.
But allowing the chickens to wander also improves the land.
Just the fact that we've had a permanent pasture as opposed to a corn soil rotation.
It's been a big impact on the environment where we have a lot of habitat for native pollinators.
He says the pasture also keeps nutrients in the soil and out of waterways.
Such bigger conventional egg operations also worry about soil and water quality and even
greenhouse gas emissions.
Iowa State University professor Hong Wei Xin is sharing with egg producers results from
his recent study showing the environmental impacts of large-scale production are about
half what they were 50 years ago.
Today's healthier birds live longer and produce more eggs.
The land use, that's another aspect that today is much more efficient because we're
able to keep the birds at a higher stock intensity, if you will.
An industrial handhouse may hold a quarter million layers.
That size alone attracts attention from activists.
But the egg industry seems willing to address both environmental and animal welfare issues.
United egg producers, the industry's largest lobbying group, is working alongside the Humane
Society of the United States on a far-reaching federal egg bill.
This is what my industry and my egg farmers want and passionately believe that they need
to happen to the take and pass their farms onto the next generation.
Chad Gregory is the president of United egg producers.
He says the proposal would require larger cages with purchase, nesting boxes and improved
manure systems.
Housing will improve drastically.
The environment will improve drastically and the safety of our product will improve
drastically over the next 15 years.
Gregory says the bill also requires strict carton labels describing the hands-living conditions
as caged, enriched cages, cage-free or free-range.
Chaumlin's collecting eggs now.
The egg bill wouldn't impose any changes on free-range producers like him, but he hopes
the explicit labels will lure more consumers to free-range eggs.
That's a ways off though.
The bill didn't get anywhere in the last Congress, and supporters are still waiting for it to
be introduced this year.
I'm Amy Mayer, Harvest Public Media.
Finally, you know about Consumer Reports, the Good House keeping sealable approval, even
Angie's list.
Have you noticed the Women's Choice Award when you go shopping?
It's an award given to companies after marketing surveys show that women would recommend a
particular brand, a company or even a hospital.
Deelia Passy is the founder.
Her experience is in publishing, but also marketing, and she's creating a brand of her own
with information gathered from the surveys she creates.
The Women's Choice Award is an award that identifies brands that women would highly recommend
to others.
So it's a way to give women a collective voice.
It's a symbol of empowerment for women because it allows her to identify brands that, you
know, women have tried and tested and would go to their girlfriend and their friend and
a woman at a cooler in the office or a male as well and say, no, this is the brand I'd
recommend.
So, you know, if we have to buy a computer, if we have to make a trip, if we have to choose
a hotel, a cruise, if we have to, you know, decide on what carpet to use or what cleaner
to use.
Why struggle?
You know, why struggle with, I hope I'm making the right decision or going online and maybe
you read, you know, two reviews or three reviews.
You know, that's not enough today.
Today, if I'm going to make a major decision, I'd like to know not what, you know, five
people say, but what 500 people have to say.
Where do you get the information of who recommends what?
Well, Women's Certified, which is the company I started after I sold Working Mother magazine.
I was the group publisher of Working Woman and Working Mother magazine.
And when I started my own company, I started a research company.
And the research was designed to help businesses understand women, how we buy, what motivates
us to buy, what challenges us in the buying process, how to treat us better in the customer
experience.
And so, what we did is we built a database of, you know, a couple hundred thousand women
who have opted in to do our research.
And as we continue to grow, like on our site now, women's choice award.com or women's
certified.com, either one I'll take it the same one.
But if you go to women's choice award.com, you'll see that we have a new, you know, effort
going on called Join the Million.
So, in addition to the couple hundred thousand women we have for serving, we also have this
group of women, which is about 140,000 right now, that are opting in to be, to give us
their opinion because they are, they want to do more than just take surveys.
There are two ways to earn the award.
One way is that we do a national survey.
And these are called our America's Best Brands, where we'll do a survey like we did a survey
which, what is the number one carpet brand that you would most recommend.
And women across America and a survey with, we had about 5,000 responses.
So, how does the women's choice award compare to some of the online review sites that you
can join for a fee?
I've had companies tell me that they've had, you know, their people go in and post comments.
So I'm not quite sure, you know, how much I could trust.
And if there are five, you know, many times what I see customers being do, they're being
prompted or they're being rewarded for posting comments, you know what, you cannot challenge
our research.
Our research is the most objective research out there.
You cannot challenge the opinion of a hundred thousand women.
There's nothing out there that can compare to the strength of them.
Let's be clear on this too.
This is not a not for profit enterprise.
That's right.
We are a consumer advocacy group.
It is a for profit.
Most of our profit goes back though into the community.
So, we really value the fact that every survey you take, we donate money, we donate 50 cents.
We get to choose a one of several causes that we support and you're able to then donate,
you know, money based on each survey you take with us.
And are you finding companies approaching you wanting to be included?
Every day.
Every day.
We get major brands coming to us every single day.
And when I say major brands, these are the brands that you shop at.
These are the brands you use.
These are the cruise lines you go on.
These are coming to us and saying, you know, just to give you an example, just today,
Hampton Inn contracted because they came up number one in certain categories for travel
frauds.
That's what we're trying to do.
Hurt is coming in.
I mean, major brands that value the women's choice, the word value, their female consumers,
you know, customer experience.
I love the idea that they can help women make these great choices because, you know,
what, they worked really hard to get there.
This isn't just consumer products and companies.
You also include hospitals in these awards.
Yes, because we partner with the Office of Medicaid and Medicare to get, you know, tens
of thousands of surveys done, you know, each year on the patient experience throughout
every hospital in America.
Through those surveys, we're actually able to determine how recommended they are by women
and their community.
The Women's Choice Award is really designed to be a game changer in the market.
It was designed to elevate the customer experience so that brands that are doing it right, we
reward.
And the brands who do not will have to raise the bar so that they can compete.
So it's setting a high standard and women are setting these high standards.
And that's what, you know, I love most about, you know, I've founded it.
It's obviously a passion of mine.
But what I love is that women control the destiny of these brands and can control and change
the course of what customer experience looks like.
Diliapasi is founder and head of the Women's Choice Awards, a designation awarded to companies
and brands that women surveyed chooses the ones they'd recommend.
Find out more at women's Choice Award dot com.
That's our show for this week.
Thanks to Katie Prittin for production assistance.
Our theme music is by Kevin Bartlett.
This show is a national production of Northeast public radio.
Our executive producer is Dr. Alan Shartock.
If you'd like to hear this show again or visit the 51% archives, go to our website at
www.amc.org.
If you'd like to connect with us on Facebook, you can find 51% there.
And you can also email me at esparnetatwamc.org.
Thanks so much for joining us.
We'll be back next week with another edition of 51% the Women's Perspective.
