Men...and Woman...of Science!

Posted Saturday night, January 28, 2017.

Saw Hidden Figures tonight. (Thanks to the generous readers who bought our tickets and popcorn.) I think it was a very good movie. I think it was. I’m not sure it was because I feel like it was a great one. It really hit me where I live. But it wasn’t just the subject. There was the nostalgia factor, of course. But the nostalgia was personal as well as generational. These photos might explain.

Here’s Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician and physicist who’s the main character of the film, with other members of the Space Task Group whose job was doing the math and science that put the first Mercury astronauts, including John Glenn, into space.

This is one of my favorite images from the movie, because of it’s symbolic import, and because it reminds me of this…

It really was a uniform.

I’ve posted this picture before, but in case you don’t remember or didn’t see it, this is General Electric’s Knolls Atomic Power Lab champion softball team circa 1960. The 14-0 on the blackboard is their record for the season. The short guy with pompadour in the center is the team’s captain and manager, Pop Mannion.

You can tell by their ties that some of these guys were rebels and mavericks compared to the guys in the photo from the movie. Pop Mannion’s brightly striped rep tie, for instance, is a pretty bold fashion statement for the time and place, but get a load of the tie on the cat to Pop’s right! I’ll bet he had a jazz collection. Beatnik.

Pop and his colleagues didn’t do any work for the space proram that I know of. They helped build the power plants for nuclear subs.

Comments

[El Jefe]

You're right -- the little dude to the right is hiding his stash of Dizzy Gillespie records in the den of his ranch-style bungalow. One of my favorite stories about my mother -- a math whiz (who passed it on to my non-zero number of daughters) who taught statistical methods her whole career in Poli Sci and who might have been a "pure" mathematician had some things gone differently (including meeting my father on the University of Florida campus in the fall of '61) is this. When she arrived at UF the math department had just hired a high-flyer from MIT to come down and be the new star of the department. He was teaching integral calculus -- a wash-out course for engineers -- to a room full of the younger versions of those guys when my mother walks into the room (calf-length skirts were still a required uniform for female students at Florida in those days.) The sight of a female in their classroom discomfited them. The MIT prof knew better. By the end of the semester he had Mom tutoring half the class to get them through the course.

[El Jefe]

Another quick six-degrees story. My oldest friend's husband is the point of connection -- his father served several years in the late Sixties on the USS Benjamin Franklin, one of the boomers whose core Pop and the softball team probably helped build. Life all comes around in the end.