of the space program explain why the famed mercury 7 astronauts went into space but not any of the 13 so-called first lady astronaut trainees. this oral history from 1999 is from the nasa johnson space center history collection. .. this is carol butler and i m doing an oral history for the nasa history office with wally funk, retired ntsb investigator, senior flight instructor, chief pilot, wonderful woman of aerospace. thank you for joining us today. thank you very much for having me. to begin, if we could talk briefly about your early career and your interest in aviation developing and how you moved forward and to the aerospace career as a woman. well, aerospace was not really a name in my young life. flying airplanes was. i had got my first try at flying, just pure flying, by flying my superman cape off my daddy s foreign when i was about five years old. and i was allowed to make airplanes out a blocks of balsam wouldn t hang them from my ceiling when i went on the c
Womens baseball leagues. Her class is about an hour and ten minutes. All right, you guys ready to talk about world war ii on the home front . Last time you guys saw a part of a documentary called total war. I know some of those images were probably pretty gruesome. One of the reasons i show that to you is to give you a sense of what that concept total war means. I dont care what we were talking about, war is never about two armies fighting one another on a battlefield. It is allencompassing and i hi that video probably helped to show that. It gives you an opportunity to see and i think the news reels a remember at the beginning of the semester i told you guys my mantra. I dont know if you remember that or not. But its all about perspective. That he was how i teach, thats how i teach history, thats the my mantra when it comes to my own research and scholarship, its all about perspective. And when i talked to you about that at the beginning of the semester, i used world war ii to illustr
Cutting out, as you remember, africanamericans with the idea that africanamericans are corrupting the vote because they want handouts from the government. Theyre cutting out laborers because of the idea that organized labor also wants a handout from the government. Theyre not always even so sure about the robber barrens because theyre concerned they are the industrialists are switching the congress and legislatures to unfairly benefit them. Theres a lot of people like susan b. Anthony said that maybe shouldnt have a say, maybe they shouldnt they should be taken into consideration. Maybe class should be taken into consideration. Maybe education should be taken into consideration. But women are good wives and mothers. Theyre going to vote the right way, so long as they are wives and mothers. In 1890, the year after that, mind you, theres no direct correlation. Im just giving you the line here. The National Womens Suffrage Association, american National Womens Suffrage Association merge t
I think that video probably helped to show that. It gives you an opportunity to see, and i think the news reels and things, the images on there, give you an opportunity to see what that was like. What the beginning of world war ii was like in europe, specifically, and of course in japan as well. At the beginning of the semester, i told you guys my mantra. I dont know if you remember that or not, but its all about perspective. Thats how i teach. Thats how i teach history. Thats my mantra when it comes to my own research and scholarship. Its all about perspective. When i talk to you about that at the beginning of the semester, i used world war ii as an example to illustrate that. Were going to come back to that now. The images you saw from the battlefield and from the bombings in europe, thats one perspective. If all you do is see that video, if all you do is hear the stories of the infantry men who were on the beaches in normandy. If all you do is talk about the impact of war on sailors
They became doctors and lawyers. One became the first female manager of any department at northrop airlines. They became principals, surgeons, politicians, pilots, and they were able to do that because they had access to professional baseball. So when i asked them what did it mean to you to play in the league and they say everything, its exactly right. What did it mean for this country and the efforts of these women to help during wartime . It meant everything. Ive asked a number of these women, so, what was it like to have to play baseball in a dress . Of course their answers varied. Some i can repeat. Some i cant. Basically the message is we would have played naked, whatever it took. We got to play baseball and we truly believe we helped keep baseball alive during the war. As i said, the league ended in 1954. It lasted 11 years. The league expanded over that 11 years from four teams to 12 teams. Its possible that the expansion maybe happened too quickly. I think the fact there was ex