“I’m trying to explain how to go from SP-1 to P-20,” she told him, adding that the number of SP-1 employees in her group was “0 ±1 to three significant figures,” and that there was “one P-75,000” in the section. She then said that she was trying to explain the difference between zero and infinity. (“Quite rational,” commented House afterward, in a memo detailing the morning, “as some college students have had difficulty in comprehending this difference.”) The rest of Blanche’s diatribe declined from there. House asked her to accompany him to the East Area, hoping to take her to the psychiatrist on the air force base hospital. She refused to leave, but the men didn’t force the issue, concerned that if she was provoked and became violent, it would require “at least four strong men” to subdue her. Finally, quietly, Blanche turned her back on the group. She began to weep, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. The administrators dismissed the meeting, and the other women filed into the other office, leaving Blanche alone with the men.
In the hush-hush 1940s, such a public display of mental illness would have spelled the end of Blanche’s career at Langley, even if she had been able to recover from the episode. That afternoon, Blanche Sponsler was taken away to the Tucker Sanatorium, located in Richmond, the state capital. She had been admitted to the same hospital for treatment during her 1948 hiatus, and presumably this problem was also the reason behind her absence in 1947. She languished in the Tucker Sanatorium for three months before being transferred to Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg. This time, she was incapable of returning to her previous life.
“It appears that she will continue ill indefinitely,” Eldridge Derring commented to Langley’s personnel officer, Melvin Butler, two weeks later.
The women in West Computing never saw Blanche Sponsler again. A June 3, 1949, note in Air Scoop served as the only postscript to their former supervisor’s tenure at the laboratory: “Blanche Sponsler Fitchett, Head of West Computing Section, died last Sunday after a six-month illness.” The cause of her death, not revealed in the note or in her obituary in the Daily Press, was entered on her death certificate as “dementia praecox.” Whether Blanche died as a result of treatments designed to cure an illness that would eventually become known as schizophrenia or from suicide or another cause altogether was known only to her doctors and family.
Blanche’s absence left West Computing with an empty desk, but not a vacuum. It wasn’t the way Dorothy would have wanted to take the next step in her career, but Blanche’s tragedy pushed her up the ladder nonetheless. In April 1949, six weeks after Blanche left the office for the last time, the laboratory appointed Dorothy Vaughan acting head of West Computing.
There were limited ways for a white computer to break into management at Langley. Finding a way to move from being one of the girls to one of the Head Girls took time and persistence, pluck and luck, and there were only so many slots available: while even lower-level male managers might supervise the work of female computers, it was simply unthinkable for a man to report to a woman. Women with an eye on a management job were limited to heading a section in one of the now-decentralized computing pools or in another division with many female employees, such as personnel.
For a black woman, there was exactly one track: it began at the back of the West Area computing office and ended at the front, where Dorothy Vaughan now sat. The view from the supervisor’s desk, with the rows of brown faces looking back at their new boss, wasn’t that different from being at the head of the classroom at Moton: the segregation laws of the state applied just as vigorously to the roomful of highly educated college graduates as they did to the rural black students of Prince Edward County. Yet with its bright lights, government-issue desks, late-model calculating machines, and proximity to tens of millions of dollars’ worth of aeronautical research tools, West Computing was a world away from Moton High School’s deficient building, rundown chairs, worn-out textbooks, and general sense of powerlessness.
It would take Dorothy Vaughan two years to earn the full title of section head. The men she now worked for—Rufus House was her new supervisor—held her in limbo, waiting either until a more acceptable candidate presented herself or until they were confident she was fit to execute the job on a permanent basis. Or maybe the idea of installing the first black manager in all of the NACA’s expanding national empire caused them to demur, lest they stoke the racial anxieties among members of the laboratory and in the town.
Whatever skepticism might have existed among the powers that be about Dorothy’s qualifications, whatever lobbying and advocacy may have been required on Dorothy’s part, the outstanding issue was resolved by a memo that circulated in January 1951. “Effective this date, Dorothy J. Vaughan, who has been acting head of the West Area Computers unit, is hereby appointed head of that unit.” Dorothy must have known it. Her girls and her peers knew it. Many of the engineers knew it, and her bosses eventually came to the same conclusion. History would prove them all right: there was no one better qualified for the job than Dorothy Vaughan.
CHAPTER TEN
Home by the Sea
In April 1951, as the laboratory shuttle transported twenty-six-year-old Mary Winston Jackson from new employee processing in the personnel department over to West Computing, virtually no evidence remained of the agricultural roots of the land that had become Langley. The come-heres like Dorothy Vaughan and her band of sisters, like the phalanx of Yankees and Mountaineers and Tar Heels who had descended upon the laboratory during the war, would tell a lifetime of stories about the transformations they witnessed as Hampton Roads emerged from agrarian isolation to become a vibrant collection of cities and defense industry suburbs. But Mary Jackson remembered the prewar hamlet where Negro vacationers still made their way to Bay Shore Beach by trolley car. She grew up listening to the work songs of the black women shucking oysters at the J. S. Darling processing plant that wafted up to the pedestrians on the Queen Street Bridge above. During Mary’s childhood, elders at the black churches in the heart of downtown Hampton still told stories of sitting under a glorious oak tree across the river, on the campus of what would become Hampton Institute, and listening to Union soldiers read the Emancipation Proclamation. Those ancestors walked into the gathering as legal property and emerged as free citizens of the United States of America. No one was more of a been-here than Mary Jackson.