I grew up hearing pieces of this story. Betty — that’s what everyone called her — worked in computing during an era when most people didn’t know what a computer was. She started at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia in 1949, the same year they were finishing the UNIVAC. When Remington Rand bought the company in 1950, she stayed. When it became Sperry Rand, she stayed. That’s how it worked then.
What I didn’t fully understand until recently is what that work actually connected to.
I have an official photograph. It was taken inside a computing facility at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The back is stamped by the PNSY Photographic Laboratory and marked “not to be released for public purposes without proper authority.” The date on that stamp is November 22, 1963.
The day Kennedy was shot.
The people in that photograph were at work that day, inside a secure computing installation at the Navy Yard, doing whatever they did every day. And my mother’s work is part of why that courtesy visit to that facility happened.
I’m not trying to overstate what I know. Employment records for that period were destroyed in a fire in 1972. What I have is family memory, this photograph, and enough historical context to understand the environment she worked in.
What I want is for anyone who was there — or anyone who knew someone who was — to reach out.
My cousin Sandy knows about the work. There are others. If you grew up hearing these stories, if someone in your family was in computing or engineering at the Navy Yard in the 1950s or 1960s, I want to hear from you.
These people were thrown into a rapidly expanding technical world driven by Cold War urgency. They worked with systems most of the public had never heard of. Some of them paid a price for that work that nobody talked about at the time, and that wasn’t understood for decades.
My sister Dorothy later died of mesothelioma. The connection between the environments these engineers and their families moved through and the diseases that followed them — that’s part of this story too.
I’m not here to assign blame or build a legal case. I’m here because this history deserves to be recorded before the people who lived it are gone.
If you have a memory, a photograph, a name, or even just a fragment of a story — contact me.