Jimmy’s brother-in-law was the director of the Newsome Park Community Center. Since 1943, Eric Epps had coordinated community activities such as the semipro Newsome Park Dodgers baseball team, and he had been a strong advocate for the residents of his neighborhood with the local government, always fending off the demolition campaigns that never seemed to disappear. A former teacher in Newport News’s public schools, he had taken the Newsome Park job after being fired for joining what was one of the most bitter and contentious of all of Virginia’s teacher-pay-equalization lawsuits. Through his job and relationships with the residents in Newsome Park, he was one of the most well-connected individuals on the Virginia Peninsula, and knew many women of West Computing, including Dorothy Vaughan, who lived in the neighborhood.
Katherine listened intently as her brother-in-law described the work, her thumb cradling her chin, her index finger extended along her cheek, the signal that she was listening carefully. She and Jimmy made a living as public school teachers, but their paychecks were modest. The needs of their three growing daughters seemed greater by the day, and Katherine pushed her math skills to the breaking point just to cover their basics and squeeze out a little extra for piano lessons or Girl Scouts. Deft with a sewing machine, Katherine bought fabric from the dry goods store and stayed up nights making school outfits for the girls and dresses for herself. During the summer break from school, the Gobles worked as live-in help for a New York family that summered in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The extra cash tided them through the toughest months during the rest of the year.
Katherine enjoyed teaching. She felt a keen sense of responsibility to “advance the race,” instilling not just book knowledge but discipline and self-respect in her students, who would need both of those qualities in abundance to make their way in a society stacked against them in nearly every way. She and Jimmy hewed to the path that was so well-worn that the feet of Negro college graduates like them were trained to walk it almost automatically. But Eric Epps’s mention of the mathematics job in Hampton kindled the memory of a long dormant ambition, one Katherine was surprised to find still smoldering within her.
It was late that night when Katherine and Jimmy tucked the girls into their beds and collapsed onto their own bed, but they stayed up even later laughing and gossiping, recapping the family gathering. Only after exhausting all the other stories of the wedding did they broach the topic that occupied both of their minds. Taking the road to Newport News would mean making a decision quickly. With the school year approaching, the Bluefield principal would need time to find replacements to take over their classes. They would need a place to live. Uprooting the girls on short order and enrolling them in new schools would be trying for all of them. Hampton Roads was far from Jimmy’s parents, and even farther away from Katherine’s parents in White Sulphur Springs, who doted on their granddaughters. In the mountains, even the summer nights were breezy. How would she manage that coastal heat? It would have been easy to continue with the stable small-town life they had created. But the possibility of this new job tugged at the curiosity that was at the core of Katherine Goble’s nature.
“Let’s do it,” she whispered.
Within one busy year, Katherine Goble and her family managed to fold themselves seamlessly into the Peninsula’s rhythms. Newsome Park was a natural place for the quintet to land, its endless city-within-a-city blocks a ready-made brew of neighbors, social organizations, and advice for newcomers. Eric Epps had made good on his promise to find employment for his brother-in-law Jimmy Goble, who had traded his teaching credential for a painter’s job at the Newport News shipyard. It was the kind of stable, well-paid job that gave Negro men—even those with white-collar credentials—a chance to pull their families solidly into the middle class. The girls loved their new school and marveled at living in such a large and dynamic black community.
Langley’s personnel department approved Katherine’s 1952 application, but with a June 1953 appointment. The intervening year helped her make the transition to everything but the Virginia heat; many was the night she pined for White Sulphur Springs’ brisk summer nights. Filling the months in the meantime posed not the slightest problem. As a substitute math teacher at Huntington High School in Newport News, she had the perfect platform for meeting families in the area, and the Twenty-Fifth Street USO Club, which had continued operations as a postwar community center, recruited their new neighbor to be the club’s assistant director. From her involvement with the local chapter of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and her choice of a church, Carver Presbyterian, Katherine gained a strong social network and a new best friend.
Eunice Smith lived three blocks down, and Katherine delighted in learning that her soror, neighbor, and fellow worshipper was also a nine-year West Computing veteran. In the early days of June 1953, when Eunice Smith drove over to Katherine’s house to pick her up for work, the two women started a routine that would persist for the next three decades. They made small talk as they drove through the tidal flatland of Hampton, Katherine’s cat-shaped, wire-rimmed glasses lending her face a seriousness that matched her demeanor.
The morning commute ended at Mrs. Vaughan’s office in the Aircraft Loads Building. It was a great and pleasant surprise to find that Katherine’s new boss was not just a fellow West Virginian but the neighbor who had spent so much time with her family back in White Sulphur Springs. It didn’t take long for Katherine to appreciate Dorothy’s talents both as a mathematician and as a manager. When they needed more computing power, engineers trusted Dorothy to staff the right person for the job, often hoping that she was at the top of her own list.
Matching ability with assignments was only part of the challenge. The more subtle management skill was to match temperaments with the groups. The engineers could be a quirky lot, often brusque, temperamental, or authoritarian. One girl’s brusque was another’s cruel. Working closely in a team was key to the entire operation, and Dorothy had both a license and an obligation to see to it that her computers were set off on the best career paths possible.
For two weeks, Katherine worked the desk, learning the ropes. Her honors degree in mathematics, her time in graduate school, and her years teaching math added up to the very modest job rating of SP-3: a level 3 subprofessional, the entry-level fate of most of the women hired at Langley, regardless of their professional and educational credentials. Nearly twenty years after Virginia Tucker first came to Langley, and despite the fact that hundreds of women had gone through the position, it was still expected that the women would accept their new jobs with a little gee-I’m-just-glad-to-be-here gratitude. “Don’t come in here in two weeks asking for a transfer” to an engineering group, the human resources director said to Katherine Goble on her first day of work, a comment she didn’t appreciate. But she nonetheless felt “very, very fortunate” to have lucked into a job that paid her three times her salary as a teacher.