At the end of the summer session, however, Katherine and Jimmy discovered that they were expecting their first child. Being quietly married was one thing; being married and a mother was quite another. The couple knew they had to tell Joshua and Joylette about their marriage and impending parenthood. Joshua had always expected that Katherine would earn a graduate degree, but the circumstances made finishing the program impossible. Katherine’s love for Jimmy and her confidence in the new path her life had taken softened her father’s hard line on graduate school, and he certainly couldn’t resist the thrill of the family’s first grandchild. Though disappointed, neither he nor the other influential men in her life—Dr. Claytor and Dr. Davis—would ever have asked her to deny love or sacrifice a family for the promise of a career.
In the four years since leaving graduate school, Katherine had not once regretted her decision to exchange the high-profile academic opportunity for domestic life. Most days she felt like the luckiest person in the world, in love with her husband and blessed with three daughters she adored. In idle moments her thoughts turned to Dr. Claytor and the phantom career he had assiduously prepared her for. In truth, the idea of becoming a research mathematician had always been an abstraction, and with the passage of time, it was easy to believe that the job was something that existed only in the mind of her eccentric professor. But in Hampton, Virginia, Dorothy Vaughan and scores of other former schoolteachers were proving that female research mathematicians weren’t just a wartime measure but a powerful force that was about to help propel American aeronautics beyond its previous limits.
CHAPTER NINE
Breaking Barriers
After the war ended, the Japanese and Italian prisoners of war interned at the Greenbrier went home, but Howard Vaughan stayed on, continuing his summer work at the grand hotel alongside Joshua Coleman. The parallel lives that he and Dorothy Vaughan now led intersected often enough in Farmville and Newport News for the couple to add two more children to their family, Donald in 1946 and Michael in 1947. The youngest Vaughan children were Newport News natives, and Newsome Park was the only town they had ever known. For them, the rambling family house in Farmville was where they went on holidays and summer vacations, not a home they had left behind.
There was never a question that Dorothy would return to work as soon as possible after the births of her last two children, as soon as they were old enough to thrive in the nexus of siblings and babysitters and boarders that provided their daily lives with care and structure. An extended stay at home to care for them simply wasn’t an option. The family had always counted on her income, and now, more than ever, it was her job at Langley that provided all of them with economic stability.
The older Vaughan siblings were adjusting to the changes that had expanded their lives in some ways and contracted them in others. Newsome Park came with its own set of friends and boundaries, one of which was the pond their neighborhood shared with adjoining Copeland Park. Leonard Vaughan and his friends had it all figured out: if they got to the pond first, it was theirs for the day. If the white kids showed up first, they had dibs. If they both showed up at the same time, they shared the pond, stealing curious glances at one another and making occasional small talk as they swam and played.
An adopted extended family from the West Computing office stepped into the void left by the aunts and uncles and cousins in Farmville. Dorothy Vaughan, Miriam Mann, and the Peddrews—Kathryn (known as “Chubby” because of her voluptuous figure) and her sister-in-law Marjorie, who would join the office in the late 1940s—bonded over pressure distribution curves in the office and their children and community lives outside of it. Dorothy even had a real family connection in the group: Matilda West, related to Howard Vaughan’s sister-in-law, had followed Dorothy from Farmville to Hampton with her husband and two young sons during the war. In the summers, the families began the tradition of organizing a picnic at Log Cabin Beach, a wooded resort overlooking the James River, built exclusively “for members of the race.” The women spent weeks organizing the menu, hopping on and off the phone with one another before the big day as they prepared the culinary delights for the outing. Seven Vaughans, five Manns, and two sets of four Peddrews, including Chubby Peddrews’s dog, caravanned up Route 60 to the riverside retreat, enjoying a rollicking day of fun topped off by roasting marshmallows over a fire.
It felt fresh and new, that kind of free-form entertainment, away from the traditional, structured socializing that occurred for most blacks at home or in church, or in the nest of interconnected social and civil organizations that absorbed the precious free time of the incipient black middle class. Negro tourists had enjoyed sun and fun and amusement at Hampton’s Bay Shore Beach ever since a group of black businessmen, including Hampton Institute’s bookkeeper and local black seafood entrepreneur John Mallory Phillips, founded the resort in 1898. But Bay Shore, separated as it was by a rope from larger, whites-only Buckroe Beach, still reminded clients that there was Negro sand and there was white sand. At Log Cabin, Negroes with the means to take advantage of its charms left the “colored” signs behind completely. They could occupy the entirety of the space, free from the signs constricting their physical movements and the double consciousness that throttled their souls.
Dorothy loved allowing her children to take unguarded steps into the world; having access to a broader base of experiences was one of the most compelling reasons for turning their world on its head with the move to Hampton Roads. Even with a salary of $2,000 a year—the average monthly wage for black women in the 1940s was just $96—providing for the needs of six children meant that outings like the ones at Log Cabin Beach did not come often or easily. With the shadow of the Depression always at the back of her mind, Dorothy Vaughan sewed clothes for herself and her children, clipped coupons, and wore shoes until her feet started to push through the worn soles. If she could give more to her children by sacrificing her own comforts, she did it. Many was the evening when she came home from work to make dinner, and after putting the meal on the table, walked out the door and took a walk around the block until the children were done eating. Only then would she serve herself from the leftovers. She didn’t want to face the temptation of eating even one morsel herself that could nourish their growing bodies.
The prediction that the end of the war would send Hampton Roads into an economic downturn proved incorrect. The place Dorothy Vaughan now called home was on the cusp of a defense industry boom that would be measured not in years but in decades. After the war, the Norfolk Naval Base confirmed its command of the Atlantic Fleet and was appointed the headquarters of the navy’s air command. Added to the local military installations and contractors were the Army Transportation School, set up at Fort Eustis in Newport News, and the US Coast Guard base in Portsmouth, with the Newport News shipyard and the naval shipyard in Portsmouth still going strong. In 1946, the army decided to make Langley Field the headquarters of its Tactical Air Command, one of the major commands of the US Army Air Corps. One year later, the importance of the airplane to US defense was underscored when the Army Air Corps was elevated to the status of an independent branch of the military: the United States Air Force.