George D. Morgan - Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, Americas First Female Rocket Scientist

This is an imperfect book. It's imperfect because it relates a chapter of history that has not been well recorded. There are many gaps in the narrative that might be filled someday, and I look forward to that happening. Boeing could have been of more help, but, for the most part, they chose not to participate. Joel Landau at Rocketdyne's photo and video department stepped up to the plate and provided several much-needed archival photographs, for which I am very appreciative. Despite the many barriers, the main goal has been achieved: to perform research into the subject matter and create a book that, like my play from 2008, might jog more facts into the open at some future time.

I want to thank my professors at California State University, Channel Islands, and University of California, Riverside, for their contributions to my belated creative-writing degree, a degree I did not seriously pursue when I should have (something about turning 50 made me want to get out of my easy chair and do something). Each one of these instructors has contributed in some way toward making me a better writer, and in toto bringing me to a place where I could finally bring into the light of day my mother's long-buried accomplishments. These professors, in no particular order, are Julia Baln, Joan Peters, Sean Carswell, Bob Mayberry, Andrea Marzell, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Ray Singer, Renny Christopher, Julie Barmazel, Luda Popenhagen, and Greg Kamei from Cal State Channel Islands, and Joshua Malkin, Deanne Stillman, William Rabkin, and Charles Evered from the University of California, Riverside.

I would like to thank all of those who helped with the research: my brother, Stephen Morgan, and my sisters, Ruth Fichter, Monica Weber, and Karen Newe. They helped by providing needed documents and photographs from family history, along with details of stories and events related to them by our mother and other family members. Monica and Karen pitched in to do some interviews when it became apparent I would not have time to do them all myself. Dorothy Sherman Hegstad provided information no one else seemed to have, including a Sherman family genealogy. A big thank-you to Duane Ashby for writing my mother's Wikipedia page.

Friends, colleagues, and former coworkers of my parents were very supportive with historical details: Dan Ruttle, Walter Unterberg, Joe Friedman, Don Jenkins, Bill Wagner, and Irving Kanarek. A special shout-out to Bill Vietinghoff, who pulled some strings and arranged for me to tour the Santa Susanna Field Laboratory just two weeks shy of the manuscript's due date.

The book would never have come about without the stage play, and so I would like to thank Shirley Marneus, Brian Brophy, and all my friends at TACIT for their many efforts and contributions. The book also owes its existence to my tireless agent, Deborah Ritchken of the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency.

Neither the play nor the book would exist were it not for three individuals: my wife, Lisa, who has been so supportive, my father, G. Richard Morgan, who regaled me endlessly with stories from his aerospace golden years, and Bill Webber, one of my mother's favorite and closest colleagues at North American Aviation. Their enthusiasm for this project never wavered.

It took me several years to convince myself this book could be written. As memoirs go, it was full of potential bear traps and land mines. How does one write a memoir about a person who should have been famous, but wasn't? A person for whom there was no historical record to sift through. A person who did everything they could to bury their accomplishments and legacy, like pirates burying booty on some desert island, then burning the map. There came a day when I decided there was only one way a memoir like that could be written: as my own journey and adventure in search for that hidden treasure.

There is wide disagreement in the Sherman family over why Mary was not allowed to attend school for several years. In fact, they seem to disagree on a lot of family-history details. My mother often told the story of how the State of North Dakota gave her a horse so she could get across the river to attend school, yet one Sherman-family descendent claims there was no river to cross at all. That was only one of many muddy research details I had to wade through during this project.

The genre of this book is what is referred to in English writing courses as creative nonfiction. In creative nonfiction, the story is true but the writer must be creative, that is, they must use dramatic license to invent some details in order to make the work readable. This story is true, but many details had to be invented. Unless otherwise cited, the dialogue between the characters, especially the NAA employees, is invented, though the situations during which that dialogue occurs were actual events. For example, the conversation between Mary, Bill Webber, and Toru Shimizu about simultaneous nonlinear equations really happened, but none of the dialogue was recorded at the time. I pieced together plausible dialogue based on my recollections of many conversations with Mr. Webber and Mr. Kanarek, and the memories and suggestions they expressed to me.

Many details of the story of hydyne, and the early space program in general, have been poorly recorded or not recorded at all. General Medaris was a real person, and his working relationship with Wernher von Braun, along with his responsibilities over the Redstone program, are fairly well documented. But the actual mechanics of how the propellant contract was presented to North American were not made available to me by NAA's current corporate descendent: Boeing. Therefore, the character of Colonel Wilkins (invented) and his meeting with Tom Meyers (the actual NAA engineering manager) are invented. The incident with the rocket punching through the Berlin police station was a real event, but the names of the police officers involved could not be found, so I had no choice but to invent both of them. The accident at Santa Susanna involving two technicians inhaling pentaborane and having to inchworm their way to the blockhouse really happened, but Boeing would not release their names, so I had to come up with a couple of names for the sake of the story. Several minor characters are based on real people, but their names have been changed, too (e.g., Nick Toby). The dialogue for Private John M. Galione was inspired by Mary Nahas's story about her father's exploits, The Heroic Journey of Private Galione, but there is no record of the actual conversations in the German wilderness. Also, the story of the California condor taking shade beneath the bell of a rocket during the final countdown to its test firing is true, but its place in time has been altered somewhat for the sake of storytelling.

I hope no one will judge this work harshly for such inventions. Without some creative liberties, the legacy and contributions of Mary Sherman Morgan, as well as the other NAA employees mentioned in this book, would have been lost to history forever.

This is a story about a mother who never talked to her children. This is a story about a wife who rarely talked to her husband, though they were married for fifty-three years. This is a story of a woman who desperately wanted happiness but could never summon the strength to reach for it. This is a story of a woman who had a family that loved her, but who struggled to love them in return. This is a story about a woman whom people admired but could never get close to. This is a story of a woman who harbored many secrets and lived in daily fear that those secrets would one day be revealed. This is the story of a woman who took those secrets to her grave. This is a story about America's first female rocket scientist.