Mary Golda Ross

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Back in the summer, we
got an email from listener ED about our episode on
electrical engineer Edwin Howard Armstrong, and in that email, Ed

(00:26):
said that he was waiting with baited breath for an
episode on a woman aeronautical engineer. So we ran our
episode on mathematician and aerospace engineer Mary Winston Jackson as
a Saturday classic after we got that email, and I
also started looking for ideas that might lead us to
a new episode on that theme. I have finally gotten

(00:47):
to that episode today with aerospace engineer Mary Golda Ross.
She was the first indigenous woman in the United States
known to have become an engineer. She does for the
purpose of expectations management if you are really looking forward
to hearing about some extremely cool feats of aerospace engineering.

(01:11):
We don't actually have a lot of detail about the
specifics of her work as an engineer because a lot
of it was and still is classified or if not
actually classified like very highly secretive. Mary Golda Ross was
born on August ninth, nineteen oh eight. She was the
second child born to William Wallace Ross Junior, known as Biscuit,

(01:34):
and Mary Henrietta Moore Ross. Her other siblings were Francis, Curtis, Billy, Charles,
and Robert, and her family and people close to her
called her Gold in her professional life. Later on people
called her Mary. That is what we will also do. Yeah,
it felt a little overly familiar to call her a
name that was really her family and community's name when

(01:57):
we aren't part of the family or the community. Mary's
great great grandfather was John Ross, who was principal chief
of the Cherokee Nation for thirty eight years. He died
in eighteen sixty six, which was decades before Mary was born,
but his life and his work, and the period of
history that he lived through all had an enormous impact

(02:18):
on her and her family and the rest of the Cherokee.
He was principal chief leading up to and during their
removal from their ancestral homeland in and around the southern
Apalachian Mountains and the deadly forced march westward that came
to be known as the Trail of Tears, and the
establishment of the Cherokee Nation in what's now Oklahoma, and
then the US Civil War. That was a lot, and

(02:41):
trying to cover all of it would take at least
a whole episode, probably more than one part of an episode.
And it is a story that's simultaneously very complicated and
culturally very important to the Cherokee. So while we are
not going to talk about all of the details of
that earlier history, we are going to touch on some

(03:02):
of the connecting points between Mary Golda Ross's life and
that of her ancestor. Mary was born in park Hill, Oklahoma.
Park Hill is south of Taalaquah, which was established as
the Cherokee capital in eighteen thirty nine. John Ross helped
build this capital, which serves as the capital of the
Cherokee Nation today. Tallaqua is also the capital of the

(03:26):
United Katuah band of Cherokee Indians, who are largely descended
from people who moved west prior to the Trail of Tears.
A third federally recognized Cherokee tribe is the Eastern band
of Cherokee Indians, who are largely descended from people who
remained in the Appalachian Mountains during the removal, which has
its capital in Cherokee, North Carolina. So there are three

(03:50):
distinct but also related Cherokee tribes that are federally recognized today.
But when Mary was born, at least from the US
government's point of view, the Cherokee government had been dissolved.
This was part of both the lead up to Oklahoma
becoming a state and the federal government's overall policy toward
indigenous people and nations. That policy was one of allotment

(04:14):
and assimilation. Starting in eighteen eighty seven, the US had
passed a series of laws that broke up reservations and
dissolved indigenous governments and institutions, even though in many cases
the United States had signed treaties with those governments. This
process was still ongoing when Mary Golda Ross was born,

(04:35):
but it's clear that she and her family thought of
themselves as Cherokee. This included the way she described her
education quote, I started with a firm foundation in math
and some qualities that came down from my Indian heritage.
I had a great deal of curiosity, interest, willingness to study,
to do research, and to learn, to try out new ideas,

(04:57):
and most of all, to work. Education and learning are
culturally important to the Cherokee, and another of John Ross's
efforts had been the establishment of male and female seminaries
in Taalaquah, and those seminaries opened in eighteen fifty one.
These were some of the earliest institutes for higher learning

(05:17):
west of the Mississippi River, and these seminaries continued to
operate until they were dissolved under those assimilationist laws that
we just mentioned. A teacher's college called Northeastern Normal School
was established on the site of the female seminary in
nineteen oh nine. The earlier existence of the seminaries and

(05:38):
then the establishment of the teachers college meant the public
schools in Talliquah were known to be particularly good. Mary's
parents recognized that she had an aptitude and a love
for learning, and she skipped a grade in elementary school
in park Hill, so they eventually sent her to live
with her grandparents in Tallaquas, who she could take advantage

(05:58):
of the schools there. Taliquan park Hill are only about
five miles apart, which is not far at all by
today's transportation standards, but in the nineteen teens and twenties
it probably felt like a much bigger deal. Mary graduated
from high school at the age of sixteen. By that point,
the normal school had become Northeastern State Teachers College, and

(06:20):
she continued her education there. She later told interviewers that
when she was enrolling, she was asked what she wanted
her major to be, and she didn't really know what
that meant. So when she was asked the clarifying question
of what's your favorite subject, she said it was math.
She had loved math from a very early age and
described it as feeling like a game to her. She

(06:42):
graduated with a bachelor's degree in math as well as
teaching qualifications on July nineteenth, nineteen twenty eight. Northeastern State
Teachers College is now Northeastern State University. After graduating, Ross
started teaching science and math at rural public schools around Oklahoma,
and for a year she served as principal at a

(07:04):
school in Osage. All of this was during the Great Depression,
and she was usually boarding with school administrators and other teachers.
She started to wonder if she could find a career
that would allow her to earn more money and maybe
see more of the world, so she took the Civil
Service exam in nineteen thirty four, and she was hired

(07:24):
as a statistician at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington,
d C. In nineteen thirty five. She worked as a
statistician for about a year. Then the Bureau of Indian
Affairs told her that they needed her experience as an
educator out in the field, and she was assigned to
be a student advisor at the Santa Fe Indian School

(07:45):
in New Mexico. This school had been established in eighteen
ninety under the Federal Boarding School program, which separated Indigenous
students from their families and their cultures in an effort
to quote assimilate them into white society. In other words,
this school was established as part of a whole effort
at cultural genocide. President Joe Biden issued a formal apology

(08:09):
for the boarding school program in twenty twenty four. That
followed years of investigations and reports, including the Federal Indian
Boarding School Initiative, which released two volumes of reports on
this in twenty twenty and twenty twenty four. We talked
about this system in more detail in our two part
episode on the Fort Shaw Indian School Girls basketball team,

(08:31):
which came out in twenty seventeen, and in our three
parter on Jim Thorpe, which came out in twenty twenty.
When Ross was hired to work at the school, Federal
policy toward Indigenous people and nations had shifted again away
from assimilation an allotment and toward what is sometimes known
as the reorganization period after the Indian Reorganization Act that

(08:54):
was passed in nineteen thirty four. Multiple factors led into
this shift, including the large numbers of Indigenous people who
had served in the US military during World War One
and the publication of the Merriam Report formerly titled The
Problem of Indian Administration in nineteen twenty eight. This was
an incredibly critical report on the federal government's policies toward

(09:17):
Indigenous people, including the boarding schools. The Meriam Report called
for widespread reforms. Some of the reforms that were put
in place afterward included the repeal of unjust laws that
had targeted Indigenous people, the passage of the Indian Reorganization
Act that we just mentioned, and an end to the

(09:37):
overall policy of allotment. The Indian Reorganization Act was part
of what became known as the Indian New Deal, which
was focused on both helping Indigenous nations recover from the
Great Depression, and preserving indigenous cultures and ways of life,
and indigenous lands and tribal sovereignty. These kinds of reforms

(09:58):
also connected to the b Schools, and when Ross was
working at Santa Fe Indian School, its focus was shifting
toward one of self determination and autonomy for the pueblo
and students who studied there. Ross also advised students at
other schools in the area. During her summers, Ross went
to Colorado State Teachers College now the University of Northern

(10:21):
Colorado to pursue graduate studies. Over the span of six years,
she completed the necessary coursework for a master's degree in mathematics.
She was also fascinated with space and interested in the
idea of sending objects or even people into space, so
even though it didn't count toward her master's degree, she
also took classes in astronomy. Marygolda Ross's career had a

(10:46):
huge shift after the start of World War Two, which
we will get to after a sponsor break. There is
some fuzziness in people's accounts of how Mary Golda Ross
made her way to California in nineteen forty two. Some

(11:09):
of them say that her father really encouraged her to go,
and others say that she was visiting a family member
or a friend and then sort of fell in love
with California. Obviously, it could have been a combination of
all of this and whatever the details were. In nineteen
forty two, she was hired as a mathematical research assistant
at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, California. Her colleagues there

(11:33):
knew her as Mary Ross. This is almost certainly a
job that was open to her because of World War
II and the number of men who had either volunteered
or been drafted into military service. Her job as a
mathematical research assistant likely would have been much like that
of a human computer, including the hidden figures who were
part of the space program after the war was over,

(11:55):
so using a slide rule and a calculating machine to
do complex computations that probably would be handled by a
machine today. Okay, I said at the top of the
show that we don't have that much detail about the
specifics of Mary Golder Ross's work because a lot of
it was and still is classified, and that is why
we keep saying things like almost certainly and likely and

(12:20):
a lot of what we are about to say has
been repeated across a lot of writing about Ross, but
I haven't verified it with official documents from Lockheed or anything.
But one of the things she said to have worked
on during World War Two was the P thirty eight Lightning.
This was a twin boom aircraft, so it had the

(12:40):
main central fuselage and wings, and then it had these
two auxiliary structures or booms that stretched back from the
wings to the tail assembly. Each of these booms had
its own engine, and the P thirty eight had four
machine guns and a twenty millimeter cannon. All together, this
created a very fast, maneuverable and powerful aircraft. It was

(13:03):
described with terms like two planes. One pilot Germans allegedly
called it Dirk gobbleschfund Teufel, or the fork tailed devil.
The P thirty eight was propeller driven, and today's jet
engines are much much faster, but at the time it
set records reaching speeds of more than four hundred miles

(13:24):
an hour. Early models had some issues though At those
high speeds, the tail could become unstable and it had
the potential to stall in steep dives. These issues could
cause the pilot to lose control and even crash, and
one of Ross's projects at Lockheed was helping to fix
those problems. After the war was over, a lot of

(13:46):
the women who had moved into jobs that had previously
been held by men were forced back out of this
part of the workforce, but Ross continued working at Lockheed,
and Lockheed also sent her to the University of California,
Los Angeles Extension School to continue her education and to
train her to be an engineer. So this suggests that

(14:08):
Lockheed saw her as a highly valuable employee. She studied
mathematics as it related to engineering, as well as aeronautics,
missile mechanics, and celestial mechanics. She became a registered professional
engineer in nineteen forty nine, making her the first known
Indigenous woman to become an engineer. The specification of aerospace

(14:30):
engineer did not really exist yet, but that is what
her studies really added up to. Earlier, we talked about
education being important to the Cherokee, and that included making
sure children had access to education regardless of their gender.
But when Ross moved into advanced studies in engineering and maths,

(14:50):
she was often the only woman in the room. In
interviews later on in her life, she talked about feeling
like the men didn't want to associate with her at all.
She'd sit on one side of the room and they
would sit on the other. But she said she was
able to hold her own with them, and sometimes she
could do them one better. But she didn't want the
fields of engineering and math to stay this way. She

(15:14):
started advocating for more women to become engineers and mathematicians
and for these fields to be more open to women,
and this included becoming a charter member of the Los
Angeles chapter of the Society of Women Engineers in nineteen
fifty two. By that point, she bought a house in
low South Host, California. She made this purchase in nineteen

(15:34):
fifty one and she lived in this house for the
rest of her life. It had an apricot tree in
the backyard, and every year she would make sulfur's dried
apricots and give them to friends and family as gifts.
The sulfur in this extends the shelf life of the
apricots and it helps keep them soft and interviews later on,
a family member also said that she had a fig

(15:56):
tree and gave figs as gifts. She was also fond
of painting in her spare time. Ross's home purchase was
connected to her job. She had been transferred to the
newly established Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, which was headquartered
at Lockheed's Sunnyvale campus. A number of articles about her
also say that this was when she became part of

(16:18):
Lockheed's Advanced Development Projects, or skunk Works, and that she
was the only woman on an elite team of forty engineers.
The name Skunkworks reportedly comes from the Lil Abner comic strip,
where the Skunkworks spelled with an O instead of a U.
Was a foul smelling, run down factory on the outskirts

(16:38):
of the town of dog Patch. Reportedly, one of the
Lockheed facilities was next to a plastics factory, and it
smelled very bad. This is something else that's tricky to
pin down. Though the skunk Works division's whole purpose is
to work on highly secretive and classified projects. Eventually, the

(16:59):
finished prize can become public knowledge, because I can't just
and definitely hide the existence of something like the US
military's first jet fighter, but the details of the development
process and who worked on what can still really be
a secret, and so can some of the specifics of

(17:19):
those finished products. This was alluded to when Ross made
an appearance on the game show What's My Line on
June twenty second, nineteen fifty eight. So on the show
What's My Line, panelists had to ask yes or no
questions to try to figure out the occupation of a guest.
Ross's occupation was described on screen as designs rocket missiles

(17:41):
and satellites, and then in parentheses Lockheed Aircraft. After panelist
Dorothy Kilgallen correctly guessed that Ross's job was related to
designing missiles, she asked a follow up question about how
big the missiles were, since an earlier question had been
whether the product Ross Wren was bigger than a tank.

(18:02):
Moderator John Charles Daily shut down this conversation by saying, quote,
miss Ross isn't free to discuss anything about it. She's
in advanced designs now and can't talk about what she's
working on. So here are some things. Various articles have
said that Mary Golder Ross worked on while working at
Lockheed Martin after the war, rockets that carried either payloads

(18:26):
or human beings, The study of water pressure and ocean
waves and how those would affect vehicles and missiles that
were launched from submarines, the orbital dynamics of the Aegina rocket,
which was used as part of NASA's Gemini program. Submarine
launched ballistic missiles, including the Polaris and Trident missiles. She

(18:49):
was definitely a contributor to NASA's Interplanetary Flight Handbook Volume three,
which was published in nineteen sixty three that included maps, graphs,
and tables to be used in interplanetary missions to Mars
and Venus. Various sources have quoted her as saying that
she wanted to be the woman behind the first woman

(19:10):
in space. In twenty twenty three, Mary Golder Ross's relative,
Gail Ross, gave an interview with PBS News Weekend in
which she said that if so much of Mary's work
had not been classified, she would have earned a Nobel Prize.
Gail Ross also said similar things in other interviews, and

(19:31):
an also similar sentiment has been attributed to doctor Norbert Hill,
who was one of Ross's friends and colleagues and was
the former executive director of the American Indian Science and
Engineering Society, when he said this. Other people who worked
with and were mentored by Mary Golder Ross also described

(19:52):
her as being of the same caliber as the Nobel
laureates they had similarly worked with. Mary golderos USh retired
from Lockheed in nineteen seventy three, and we'll get to
how she spent her life after her retirement after we
paused for a sponsor break. Even without knowing the details

(20:19):
of Mary Golder Ross's work at Lockheed Martin, it is
clear that she was brilliant as a mathematician and an engineer,
and that her work there was important to the US
aerospace industry, spanning military applications and space exploration. After she
retired from Lockheed, she stayed in Los Altos, California, and

(20:41):
she did a lot of work trying to open doors
for women and Indigenous people in the fields she had
spent her whole career working in. In nineteen seventy seven,
she became a founding member of the American Indian Science
and Engineering Society. This organization wanted to increase college enrollment
and grew graduation rates for Indigenous students. We said earlier

(21:03):
that Ross was the first Indigenous woman known to become
an engineer in the US, and by the nineteen seventies,
women and Indigenous people were still extremely underrepresented in the
sciences and engineering, so another goal was addressing this disparity
and making these fields more accessible to women and Indigenous people.
This organization exists today as ACES that is spelled AISES

(21:28):
that's a nonprofit that works to provide academic, professional, and
cultural support to Indigenous people from North America and the
Pacific Islands who are preparing for careers in stem fields.
Ross also participated in the Council of Energy Resource Tribes,
which was established in the nineteen seventies as well. This

(21:49):
was an intertribal organization of Indigenous nations that had valuable
energy related resources on their lands, so things like uranium,
natural gas, and oil. This council worked to help Indigenous
nations protect these resources from exploitation and protect themselves from exploitation.
Really with a focus on retaining their rights and resisting

(22:12):
encroachment by non indigenous people and business interests, and on sustainability.
The council also worked to improve the relationship between the
federal government and Indigenous nations when it came to these resources.
In nineteen ninety two, Ross was inducted into the Silicon
Valley Engineering Council Hall of fame. In two thousand and one,

(22:34):
sculptor Lawrence F. Kenny created a sculpture of her using
steam bent wood panels made from white oak. In addition
to a photorealistic image of her face, the panels include
a number of references to her life and her work
as a mathematician and engineer. This was part of a
commemoration of the centennial of the nineteen oh one Pan

(22:55):
American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. In nineteen eighty nine,
Congress passed legislation to establish the National Museum of the
American Indian within the Smithsonian Institution, which was signed into
law by President George H. W. Bush. We talked about
this a little bit last year in our episode on

(23:15):
George Gustav High, whose collection became part of this museum.
Ross was a huge supporter of this museum. She said
that it would tell the quote true story of the Indian,
not just the story of the past, but an ongoing story.
Her support included bequeathing more than four hundred thousand dollars

(23:37):
to the museum's endowment in her will. When the museum
opened in two thousand and four, Ross was ninety six,
and she attended the opening ceremonies in a dress that
her niece had made for her. This dress was in
the design of a traditional Cherokee tear dress, which Ross
had never worn before. The tear dress has its own
history and connections to the Cherokee Nations real establishing itself

(24:01):
as a nation. Earlier, we talked about indigenous governments and
institutions being dissolved during the allotment and assimilation phase of
federal policy toward indigenous people. The Indian Reorganization Act of
nineteen thirty four had encouraged indigenous nations to reform those governments.

(24:21):
The Cherokee Nation met to elect a new Principal Chief
in nineteen thirty eight, and then that was confirmed by
President Franklin Roosevelt in nineteen forty one. Then, in the
late nineteen sixties, Virginia Alice Stroud, enrolled citizen of the
United Catuah Band of Cherokee Indians, was participating in pageants
for indigenous women. Shelish crowned Miss Cherokee Tribal Princess in

(24:45):
nineteen sixty nine and Miss National Congress of American Indians
in nineteen seventy and then Miss Indian America in nineteen
seventy one. Elements of these pageants included contestants knowledge about
their tribes and wearing of traditional dress, but the Cherokee
tribes living in Oklahoma didn't have a specific style of

(25:06):
traditional dress. Before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas,
their clothing hadn't evolved into a culturally specific style, and
once they were introduced to trade goods from Europe, many
had adopted European style clothing. So contestants in these pageants
often wore buckskin garments that were associated with other tribes

(25:27):
and nations, which could be true of contestants from other
tribes as well. So a lot of people in Oklahoma
increasingly felt this was inappropriate, so Principal Chief W. W.
Keeler of the Cherokee Nation appointed a committee of Cherokee
women to develop a culturally appropriate dress that had roots
in the Cherokee homeland of what's now North Carolina, Georgia,

(25:49):
or Tennessee. After extensive research, their starting point became a
nineteenth century dress that was a family heirloom and had
belonged to to a committee member's grandmother or great grandmother.
With the exception of the neck opening, all of The
pieces of a tear dress are squares and rectangles. These

(26:10):
aren't cut. They're typically created by making a notch in
the salvage edge of the cloth and then tearing it
to the other side to make a perfect square. The
seams where some of these pieces fit together are gathered,
creating a stand up ruffle that sits on the outside
of the dress. There are decorative bands at each shoulder,
around each sleeve, and around the upper part of the

(26:31):
skirt just above a flounce. It's a practical dress that
a person could work in with buttons up to front
to also make it easy to breastfeed children. Tear dresses
for children normally button up the back. Yeah, it would
make sense if the name tear dress comes from this
tearing to create the square and rectangular pieces. But a

(26:52):
couple of the sources that I read about this that
we don't actually know, like who started calling it that
or where they got the name from. In a day
to being warned by Virginia Alice Stroud in a pageant context,
this dress became increasingly associated with the Cherokee in Oklahoma
by being recreated as costumes for the Trail of Tears
outdoor drama that was staged for the first time in Tahlequah, Oklahoma,

(27:16):
in nineteen sixty nine. Today, this dress is recognized as
women's traditional dress by the Cherokee in Oklahoma. There's a
video with a lot more detail about this on the
Cherokee Nations YouTube page. This is in a talk by
Tanya Hogner Weavel who has the designation of Cherokee National
Treasure and is Education director at the Cherokee Heritage Center.

(27:41):
Mary Golda Ross's dress was green with darker green and
a pattern of stars on the decorative bands. Her dress
had these bands at the shoulders and around the skirt,
but not on the sleeves. She also wore it with
a belt at the waist. When she wore it to
the opening of the Museum of the American Indian It
was part of a three day First Americans festival attended

(28:02):
by twenty thousand Indigenous people from all over the Americas,
including a procession down the National Mall to the museum's entrance.
Mary Golder Ross died on April twenty ninth, two thousand
and eight. A public celebration of her life was held
at the Cherokee Tribal Council Chambers in Tahaquah. The tribal

(28:22):
council had been planning to honor her on her one
hundredth birthday, but she died a few months before that
at the age of ninety nine. Her ashes were interred
at Ross Cemetery in park Hill, which is also the
burial place of many of her other family members, including
John Ross. Her grave marker has her name and the
dates of her birth and death, and the words she

(28:45):
reached for the stars. Wilma Mankiller, who was principal Chief
of the Cherokee Nation from nineteen eighty five to nineteen
ninety five, is quoted as saying of Mary, quote, There's
no woman I've ever met who is more intelligent, more compassionate,
and just a great lady. I still have an image
of Mary leaning down to listen to young students who

(29:05):
had the hope of a career in math and science.
She was an optimist who saw the unlimited boundaries of
the human potential. Mankiller also said quote Mary made us
all so proud to be Cherokee. When we came into
a room or we're at an event with her, we
all stood a little prouder in her presence. You're getting

(29:26):
choked up, got me choked on? Sorry. In two thousand
and one, Ross was depicted in a painting titled at
Astra per astra, meaning to the stars from the stars,
by Cherokee artist America Meredith. This title is a play
on the Latin phrase per aspera ad astra, or through
hardships to the stars, which is a motto that's used

(29:49):
a lot. This artwork depicts Ross in a red dress,
wearing pearl earrings and a string of pearls around her neck,
all of which she is shown wearing in various fees
photos of her from her life. She's standing next to
a body of still water, and that water reflects the
landscape around it and the starry night above, and there's

(30:10):
an rm et one agina rocket in the sky. This
painting incorporates elements of Cherokee cosmology relating to the Pleiades,
and there's also a seven pointed star symbolizing the seven
clans of the Cherokee, and text in the Cherokee language.
In May of twenty eighteen, the Oklahoma City School Board

(30:30):
renamed Jackson Enterprise Elementary School to Marry Golder Ross Middle School.
On August ninth of that year, in commemoration of her
one hundred and tenth birthday, she was honored with a
Google doodle. In June of twenty nineteen, the US Mint
issued a Native American one dollar coin featuring Mary Golda Ross.
On the reverse side, she's holding paper and a slide rule,

(30:53):
and there is also an astronaut and an Atlas Agena
rocket taking off, and an equation repenting her work. This
coin was meant to honor not just her, but all
Indigenous people's contributions to the space program, including those of
Chickasaw astronaut John Harrington and Osage and Cherokee flight controller

(31:14):
Jerry c Elliot high Eagle. Jerry c Elliot high Eagle
was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for computing the
trajectory that enabled the astronauts aboard Apollo thirteen to return
safely to Earth. The astronaut on this coin is outfitted
in a way that Harrington would have been for spacewalks

(31:35):
that he undertook while serving on the International Space Station.
Because so much of Ross's work is still classified, designers
had to work with a NASA engineer to figure out
an equation that would make sense to include the one
that's shown is connected to interplanetary space travel involving gravity, distance,

(31:55):
and speed of an orbiting body. I really love that.
They were like, we need an equation to go on here.
We need a science grown up. Yeah, we know so
little about her exact work that we need you to
help us come up with one that's appropriate. In April
of twenty twenty two, a statue of Mary Golda Ross

(32:15):
was unveiled at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City.
This is a life size statue and she is holding
a model of an Atlas, a Gina rocket, and a
slide rule wrapped in a scroll. There is a quote
by her on the base which is we are taking
the theoretical and making it real. She was also inducted
into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in twenty twenty three.

(32:40):
I think she sounds so interesting and we'll talk more
on Friday with the behind the scenes. I suppose do
you have listener mail I do? This is from Cynthia.
It's a correction. Cynthia wrote and said, Hi, Holly and Tracy.
I'm a longtime listener and look forward to your podcast
every evening. It gets me through my least favorite chore
of all time, making one just for my kids, followed

(33:03):
by the sideways a colon in parentheses smiley face. Tonight,
I listened to your episode regarding ghost Towns. I heard
a small error. You mentioned the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter day Saints founder Joseph Smith served an eight
month mission to Hawaii in eighteen sixty four. Founder Joseph
Smith was actually martyred in eighteen forty four. It was

(33:24):
his nephew, Joseph F. Smith, Hiram's son, who served a
mission in Hawaii. It is an easy mistake, as they
both have the same name. Mostly, I'm just sending the
correction because I've always wanted a reason to write in
and say how much I enjoy and appreciate you. Since
I'm here, I would love to request an episode on
the origins of the International Phonetic Alphabet. As a choir teacher,

(33:46):
this is something I use on a regular basis, and
I'm curious as to how it came to be. I
have no current pets because my husband can't have them
in the house, but I'll send a few animal pictures
from some of the forty three national parks we have
visited in the last few years, and then got a
follow up saying, hi forgot to add my name on

(34:07):
the email I just sent me. Probably got it from
my email address anyway, thanks again, Cynthia. I sure did
mess that up, but I had also in a different
part of the episode. I had realized that I had
messed it up related to something else and that it
would be confusing. So I just took that confusing part
out because it was kind of an aside. It wasn't

(34:29):
actually related to what we were talking about, while the
missions to Hawaii were related, so I should have caught that.
I'm very sorry, thank you for sending that note to us.
And then boy, we have some very cute animal pictures.
One of them is a horse with just a stunning
desert and I think kind of butte background in the

(34:51):
background of it a mountain goat. I love that too.
It has only been within the last I would say
five years of my adult life that I have actually
seen a mountain goat doing the thing that they do
on the near vertical rock faces. I've seen, you know,
pictures of that, but I was at a zoom and

(35:13):
was like wow, I did not realize that it was
quite that dramatic. So I love these animal pictures anybody.
I'm not sure what the first picture is of. It
looks like it could be maybe a marmots or maybe
a badger. It is, it would be easier if I
could see what the animal's tale looked like. Anyway, Thank

(35:34):
you so much since Cynthia for that note and these pictures.
As I just said, if you would like to send
us a note about this or any other podcast or
at history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can
subscribe to the show on iHeartRadio app and anywhere else
you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in

(35:56):
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more pot
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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