Gloria Champine was born at Fort Monroe in Hampton in 1932, her family home a stone’s throw from Mary’s. Her father was an airman at Langley Field who was instrumental in the development of the parachute. He died in the crash of a Keystone bomber on a flight from Langley in 1933. Her stepfather was the crew chief on the only XB-15 ever built, which was stationed at Langley. Gloria spent part of her childhood on the base, where “everybody’s daddy had a plane.” She grew up overhearing her stepfather and his crew tell stories of the “crazy things” the NACA nuts put them through in order to analyze the flying qualities of their experimental model bomber. Gloria, who is white, graduated from Hampton High School in 1947, completed an associate’s degree at a local business college, and found a job as the secretary to the head of a printing company in Newport News. In 1959, Gloria took the civil service exam and accepted a job as a secretary in the Mercury range office, helping with the logistics required to build the worldwide tracking network that debuted with John Glenn’s orbital flight.
In 1974, an equal opportunity program gave Gloria the chance to advance from a clerical position in the Dynamic Loads Division into a faster-track administrative position in the Acoustics Division. Then, she competed for an even higher position as the Technical Assistant to the Division Chief of Space Systems, a job that had previously only been held by men. She went through the interview process three times, and each time she came out on top. “They kept testing you because they didn’t want to give the position to a woman,” a friend in Human Resources confided to her. Eventually, however, the center was obligated to hire Gloria: the best candidate for the job, the first woman in the position.
When Mary and Gloria were girls in the early part of the twentieth century, only the most gifted seer could have predicted the changes that would bring their paths together. In later years, Mary would describe to Gloria the segregation she had experienced in the early years at Langley. They met through one of the Federal Women’s Program committees and became friends, collaborators, and conspirators in the service of a shared belief in helping unrecognized talent get its day in the sun. Like Mary, Gloria Champine had a “hard head and strong shoulders and back.” She couldn’t keep herself from acting when she saw a way to give someone else a leg up. She always kept an extra women’s blazer behind the door in her office, in case a potential job candidate needed a little sartorial sharpening to make a better impression. When a young black woman who spent the summer interning with her mentioned an interest in computers, Gloria marched her over to meet the head of a programming branch in the Business Systems Division. The young woman secured a place in a programmer trainee program.
Male supervisors warned Gloria to “stay away from the woman stuff,” but the woman stuff was just as important to Gloria as it was to Mary Jackson. She had seen how dependent her mother, who was smart but valued for her beauty, had been on her father and stepfather. Gloria vowed never to be in the same situation; she never entertained the idea of not working, even after her three children came along. It was a decision that helped her to bear up when she separated from and then divorced her husband in the mid-1960s, leaving her a single mother and the head of her household at a time when the majority of white women still didn’t work outside the home.
In 1981, Langley sent Mary Jackson to NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, for a year of training to become an equal opportunity specialist. Mary had already decided who should follow her as Langley’s Federal Women’s Program Manager. Though Gloria didn’t come from a technical background, her military upbringing and fifteen years of experience at NASA gave her an understanding of the business of engineering and the motivations of the engineers. She knew airplanes better than a lot of the engineers she worked with. She was also a quick study with computers: Mary Jackson taught her how to “reprogram” the computers in the Human Resources Division, going deep into the databases that fed the systems in order to run statistical reports on employee qualifications and promotions. These reports revealed that female graduates with the same degrees as men were still more often hired as “data analysts,” the upgraded term for the center’s mathematicians, than as engineers. Black employees with similar qualifications lagged their white counterparts in promotions and were more likely to be steered to support roles, such as work in the Analysis and Computation Division, where Dorothy Vaughan had been reassigned, than to engineering groups. She showed Gloria how lacking a single course on a college transcript, such as Differential Equations, could keep an otherwise qualified and well-reviewed woman from keeping up with her male counterparts, even years after she had entered the workforce.
For the next five years, Mary Jackson and Gloria Champine were an effective social engineering team within the Equal Opportunity and Federal Women’s Program offices. For three of those five years, they worked for my father, Robert Benjamin Lee III, a research scientist in Langley’s Atmospheric Sciences Division. My father’s move into equal opportunity was part of a career development program designed to “season” him for moves into management when he returned to his division.
Mary, however, spent the rest of her career in the equal opportunity office, retiring in 1985. Her husband, Levi Jackson Sr., had spent the end of his working years at Langley as well, transferring from the air force base in the 1980s, still working as a painter. “We always thought it was so cool that Grandma worked in the wind tunnels and Granddaddy painted them,” remembered their granddaughter, Wanda Jackson. To the end of his life, Levi Jackson was devoted to Mary and proud of her every achievement. Mary stayed as busy over the next twenty years as she had been over the previous sixty-four, filling her days with her grandchildren and the volunteer work that gave her so much fulfillment. Mary Jackson died in 2005, and Gloria Champine penned a moving obituary that was published on the NASA website. “The peninsula recently lost a woman of courage, a most gracious heroine, Mary Winston Jackson,” Gloria wrote. “She was a role model of the highest character, and through her quiet, behind-the-scenes efforts managed to help many minorities and women reach their highest potential through promotions and movement into supervisory positions.”
Gloria, too, ended her thirty-year career at Langley in the equal opportunity office, building on Mary’s legacy, making sure that no talent at Langley was overlooked. One of those whose careers she tracked was Christine Darden, the young mathematician who had been galvanized by Sputnik back in 1957. Christine’s first years at Langley had been an exercise in enduring monotony. Though the Reentry Physics Branch had been an exciting place in the run-up to Apollo, long development lead times meant that by the time Christine came to the office, most of the interesting work had been completed, and the pace had slowed significantly. Although Christine’s pool was attached to an engineering group, most days she felt that she had entered a time machine. Many of the women in the pool of data analysts were former West Computers, and even though Christine had significant FORTRAN programming experience from her time in graduate school, a Friden calculator sat on her desk awaiting her input, just as it had for the computers in the 1940s. It was “deadly,” she said. She was working for the organization that had just led the charge to the Moon, and yet in her corner of NASA, Christine felt like the future had passed her by.
It took persistence, luck, and more than a little cheek to break out of what had become such tedium that Christine thought many times about quitting. She had survived the Green Book RIF in 1970, but just prior to a second wave in 1972, she happened to overhear her boss talking to someone in the Human Resources Department: she was on the hit list! In the complex game of RIF chess, she was being knocked off the board by a black man who had been hired at the same time as her, but as a mathematician. He had been sent off to an engineering group and promoted; she, with less seniority, was slated for layoff.