It Took an Author

I'm still on writing hiatus, but something one of my cobloggers said about not knowing the story behind the story on a recent post inspired this blog.

Some of the greatest stories may have never been told if it were not for a writer who was first inspired by the tale and determined to bring it to the world's attention.

Here are just three of these remarkable authors and their stories behind the books.

Margot Lee Shetterly

Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia, and when her father began reminiscing about the 'computers'--which in former days had been a job title and not a machine--the author realized as a child she'd actually known some of the women who worked at NASA's nearby Langley Research Center.

In 2010, she started doing interviews and scouring archives with historians and surviving members of the Langley computer group about their experiences.

The result was Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. It was Ms. Shetterly's first book, published in 2016, but in 2014 she sold the film rights, and the book was adapted into the recent feature film titled Hidden Figures.

The author once said we can't change history, but we can change how we look at it and understand it. It took that same author to finally bring to light the amazing story of these women and how much they contributed to NASA and the success of the American space program, in spite of segregation and the racial attitudes of the day. How these women succeeded against all odds and barriers is an amazing tale.

And after nearly fifty years, it took an author to bring it to the world.

Thomas Keneally

In October of 1980, Thomas Keneally, an Australian author looking for a briefcase, happened to stop by a leather goods shop off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills while on a book signing tour. Upon learning he was an author, Leopold Page, the shop owner, told Keneally he had an incredible story to relate and desperately needed someone to write it. The many screen writers and film makers he'd spoken to over the years hadn't been interested.

It seemed Page, who's real name was Poldek Pfefferberg, had been searching for decades for someone who'd be inspired by a remarkable man and what he had done during World War II. In fact, Page, his wife, and thousands of other Jews had been saved by this man during the Holocaust.

Page produced photocopies of documents--speeches, testimonies, first hand accounts and lists of names--that provided proof of his incredible story of a German man named Oskar Schindler. A man who was so revered by his selfless acts that that Jewish nation named him a Righteous Person.

Keneally was inspired by Page's story. He conducted interviews with the so-called Schindler Jews living in California, along with other research, and ended up writing that book, thereby sharing with the world this amazing tale of forgotten heroism. His book was titled Schindler's Ark. It was published on October 18, 1982, and won the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction.

Schindler's Ark later was adapted into the 1993 movie Schindler's List directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and is often included on lists of the best films ever made.

It took an author to add this amazing tale to the history of World War II.

Elizabeth Letts

It all began with a photograph--a picture of a horse and rider team jumping over the back of another horse. A woman saw that photo and something struck her about the "absolute trust" in the expression of the horse as his rider guided him over a very unique and challenging living jump.

The woman was Elizabeth Letts, and she couldn't forget the photograph. She had no information about the photo other than the name of the rider, and something compelled her to track him down. She managed to find an address for a man of the same unusual name--Harry de Leyer--and dashed off a letter to him. Just days later she received a phone call back from the man, who was now in his eighties, who began to tell her a wonderful, inspiring tale.

Maybe it was fate, because Elizabeth Letts had been a lifelong equestrian, who as a teen represented Area IV (California and Hawaii) in the North American Team and Individual Championships who'd studied creative writing at Yale with John Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

You see, the horse in the photo was Snowman, a sadly neglected former plow horse from Pennsylvania that Harry de Leyer--a Dutch immigrant--had found on a truck headed for the slaughterhouse at the New Holland auction in 1956. He was looking for an inexpensive lesson horse for his riding stable but had arrived late and missed the sale. The only horses left were the ones no one wanted who had been picked up by a meat buyer and were headed to a terrible fate. Something Harry saw in the eight-year-old horse's eye stirred his heart--just as something Elizabeth saw in the horse's eye had sparked her imagination. Harry asked the dealer to back the horse off the trailer, and bought him for $80.

Harry took the horse to his modest farm on Long Island, and as planned, put him to work as a lesson horse but soon sold him to a neighbor for $160. But Snowman kept coming home--sometimes jumping five foot fences to return to Harry, and Harry soon realized there was a lot more to this horse than he'd ever realized.

The neighbor had  no problem selling Snowman back to Harry, and bit by bit, show by show, the horse began to demonstrate his great talent for jumping, and the duo began to win. In just two years, Harry and his discovery were winning against some of the finest and most expensive horses in the country, eventually climbing to the very top of the show jumping ranks.

That hopeless, cast-off, flea-bitten horse known as Snowman became a champion--the United States Equestrian Federation (the AHSA) Horse of the Year, the Professional Horsemens Association Champion, the Madison Square Garden's Diamond Jubilee Champion and the Open Jumper Champion in 1958 and again in 1959. Many years later, in 1992, Snowmen was inducted into the Show Jumping Hall of Fame.

But the story behind Snowman is so much more than just that. It's a tale of two underdogs who beat the odds and bested the horse-jumping circuit of the mid-1950s when it was all about money and image.

After rediscovering Harry's and Snowman's adventure many decades later, Elizabeth Letts spent three years writing the book titled The Eighty-Dollar Champion: Snowman--The Horse that Inspired a Nation--which is more than just a story about a great horse, but moving social commentary, just like Hidden Figures and Schindler's Ark.

Ms. Letts also wrote The Perfect Horse--the story of the US mission to rescue priceless stallions kidnapped by the Nazis.

Hope you enjoyed learning more about these stories behind the books.

Have a great week.

Enlightened Words and Hidden Figures

I've always admired Martin Luther King, Jr. for his eloquence, his profound crafting of words, but most of all, for the courage of his message. He's long been a personal hero of mine.

I think a good chunk of the world population could probably name the author of the "I Have a Dream..." speech, and many may even know more of the words of that powerful oration by heart:

"...that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Amen to that.

Rev. King wrote the speech in 1963 and it's probably his most famous. But the body of this man's work went far beyond this, and many of his masterfully-articulated thoughts have outlived him, ringing down through the decades as undeniable truths long after his death.

"Darkness can not drive out darkness;

Only light can do that.

Hate can not drive out hate;

Only love can do that."

"The time is always right to do what is right."

"Love is the only force capable

of transforming an enemy into a friend."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

                    -Letter written in Birmingham City Jail

"Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects

revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."

                   - From his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,

tied in a single garment of destiny.

Whatever affects one directly,

affects all indirectly."

 

                   -Letter written in Birminghan City Jail

As we honor the memory and spirit of the man today, the E-X3 technical lab in Chicago has taken it a step further. They will be showing a hologram of MLK Jr. delivering his iconic I Have a Dream speech today. (Wow. Wish I could be there!)

So, yes, Martin Luther King, Jr. has always been a hero of mine.

But now I have three more heroes. Three almost forgotten heroes from the same era, who only now, after more than fifty years, are finally coming into the light and getting the respect and the credit they have so long deserved.

On Friday, I went to see Hidden Figures, the new motion picture about the unheralded African-American women behind NASA's space program. It may be no exaggeration to say that the space program might not exist without them because it could very easily have died a very sudden and fiery death had they not been there as part of NASA's team. Even if they were a part of the NASA team that was shuffled off to the basement of a rundown building at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia and subjected to unconscionable acts of segregation and discrimination. They were present, but not accounted for.

What they did mattered. What they did was remarkable. And their story was so exceptional, it left me wondering, "Why have I never heard about these amazing people before?"

Let's go back to the very beginning. How did these women come to work at NASA in the first place? In 1942, the US became involved in WWII and with a severe shortage of available "man"-power, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 prohibiting discrimination by defense contractors. Later, he signed an order to hire more African-American workers. Shortly after that, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics--NACA, which would evolve into NASA--began hiring college-educated black women with skills in math and chemistry.

It took a war to open the door of opportunity.

Katherine Goble Johnson was a human computer. Literally. Her work predated the first IBM machine ever installed at NASA. They relied on her to check and validate extremely complex mathematical calculations. Her calculations for "First American in Space" Alan Shepard's flight were crucial to the success of his flight. Later, they relied on Katherine to invent math that didn't even exist to apply to John Glenn's Freedom 7 flight--the first orbit and re-entry of an American manned spacecraft. As the movie portrays, it's true that John Glenn insisted she verify the numbers the newly installed IBM computer produced. Yet, her involvement was never brought to light in The Right Stuff, a movie about the evolution of the Mercury space program, with John Glenn as a central figure.

 





Katherine went on to do calculations for Apollo 11--the first mission to reach the Moon--and even did the math for many of the contingency procedures that brought Jim Lovell's Apollo 13 crew safely back to Earth after an explosion aboard their command module. (She was also never mentioned in the very famous Apollo 13 movie about that mission.)

She continued to work with NASA during the space shuttle missions, retiring in 1986. Yet she never received national acclaim for her work during her career.

Hidden figures, indeed.

So how did this amazing story finally get told? You can thank a writer for that. In 2010, author Margot Lee Shetterly visited her father at Christmas. He had worked with many of these women and started a conversation with his daughter about the so-called "human computers"--many of whom she knew from her childhood. Ms. Shetterly decided to write their story, and spent the next three years researching records and archives with the help of Mary Gainer, a NASA historian, and her staff.

In 2014, soon after Harper Collins agreed to publish the book entitled Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped the United States Win the Space Race, producer Donna Gigliotti (Shakespeare in Love) heard about it and decided to do a movie based on the events, recruiting musician Pharrell Williams (who was raised in Hampton) to co-produce and write the score.

Suddenly, the world began to take notice.

When Katherine and her co-workers' story began to surface, she finally received an award worthy of her work and dedication--a Presidential Medal of Freedom--in November 2015, some 54 years after her remarkable contribution to our nation's fledgling space program and nearly 30 years after her retirement from a long and productive career.

In May 2016, NASA opened the $30 million Katherine G. Johnson Computation Research Facility at Langley. Perhaps better late than never. At least she was alive to see the honors bestowed upon her. Katherine G. Johnson is 98 years old.

But she wasn't working alone. Her fellow female African American co-workers, Dorothy Johnson Vaughan (mathematical engineer and Fortran programming expert) and Mary Jackson (the first woman to become an aerospace engineer) had equally remarkable--and until now equally obscure--careers. Unfortunately, they did not live to enjoy the long-overdue recognition.

I'm so glad I saw their incredible story. And I'm so glad they chose to release it just prior to the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial holiday. That probably wasn't a coincidence. And it's the reason this blog is more of a reflection than a review, though I do highly recommend Hidden Figures for all the reasons above, and because I think it's important to understand the inequities these women dealt with--and overcame--on a daily basis.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a visionary, an outstanding writer and speaker, and the leader of a profound movement for peaceful change within our country. He gained respect for his famous words of inspiration and vision at a time of great turmoil in our nation's history--the same era these women were struggling to be heard, recognized and accepted for their capabilities and their vast contributions to our country--their hidden figures.

Have a great MLK Jr. Day.