NASA Headquarters Oral
History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Mary (Tut)
Hedgepeth
Interviewed by Rebecca Wright & Sandra Johnson
Bakersfield, California – 12 June 2001
Wright: Today
is June 12, 2001. This interview with Mary (Tut) Hedgepeth is being
conducted as part of the NASA Headquarters History Office “Herstory”
Project. This interview is being conducted in Bakersfield, California,
by Rebecca Wright and Sandra Johnson.
Good morning, and thank you so much for taking time to meet with us
to discuss your experiences while you were employed with the NACA
[National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] Flight Research Center
in California. We would like to begin today by gathering some brief
background information about you. Would you tell us where you're from
originally and how you got your start in your career?
Hedgepeth:
I was actually born in North Carolina, but grew up in Eastern Tennessee,
where I went to high school. And then I went on to college at the
Woman's College at the University of North Carolina, where I got a
degree in mathematics. My mother had also gone to that college and
graduated in 1922, and then it was called the North Carolina College
for Women. It is now called the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
and it is coed now.
At the time that I graduated, I was offered a position with [NACA]
as a computer at Langley Field, [Hampton,] Virginia [NACA Langley
Aeronautical Laboratory / (1958) NASA Langley Research Center]. My
salary for that year was $2,300 for the whole year, and my children
are amazed at that, but it was a good job at that time. My father
even told me that he had never made that much money in any time in
his life, so it was not bad and it was interesting.
Just lately, our son made a big display for over his mantle, one part
of me at about my college age and the other part of my husband when
he was in the service at about the same age, and pointed out to me
that one of the Wright Brothers was on the Board of Directors at NASA
[NACA] at that time. I had not even remembered that, and it made me
feel pretty old.
Wright: Well,
or pretty special, I guess, to be part of that time.
Hedgepeth:
When I went to Langley to work, I was first assigned to the 19-foot
tunnel. I was in a kind of computer pool and that was the first place
I happened to be assigned. Didn't stay there very long before being
transferred to Flight Research Division, and stayed there the rest
of the time I was at Langley. I worked there with a college friend,
Lillian Boney. Actually, she was my roommate in an apartment there,
too. And with a girl named Barbara Weigel. I lost track of her after
I went to Flight Research and hadn't seen her since those very first
days, but at the ninth [NACA] reunion in Lancaster this last year,
she was there, so we got to see each other. I have a picture of her
with me. This is another friend of hers [Alberta M. Smith], but this
is Barbara, and this is me, at that reunion, in front of the [NASA
Research] Center there [Edwards Air Force Base].
At Flight Research, I had an interesting job. I liked that a lot and
worked with some really good people. One was Mel [Melvin N.] Gough.
He was the head of the division and was an old flight test pioneer,
just a real wonderful person, used to make airplanes and fly them
around in his office. We had fun with that.
I also worked with an aeronautical engineer there named Chris [Christopher
C.] Kraft [Jr.], and you probably do know about Chris, who went on
to become the Cape Canaveral mission control officer—I think
I've got that right—and director of the Johnson Space Center.
Interestingly, he grew up in the same little town in Virginia where
my husband grew up and they were about the same age, so they knew
each other as children. It was fun working with Chris.
I also worked with an aeronautical engineer there named Jim McKay,
and he was the twin brother of Jack [John B.] McKay, who was a NASA
test pilot and happened to have gone to the place here at Edwards
[Air Force Base] before Jim. Later Jim went out there, too. But when
I started to go to California, Jim told me, "You might run into
my brother out there. He's out at Edwards." Or it was [NACA]
Muroc [Flight Test Unit] at that time? I went in to work that first
morning and this person walked in, and I thought that Jim had fooled
me. They were identical twins and I just about said, "Why did
you tell me your brother—" but they really were twin brothers.
About all I can remember of those days at Langley was that I just
assisted the flight test engineers in calculations that they'd give
me to do and I'd give the results back to them. I do remember that
jet aircrafts were just starting to be tested there and I really wanted
to see one, but they went so fast that I'd hear a jet aircraft go
over, it seemed, and I'd run to the window to try to see it, but it
took me several attempts before I was able to actually see one because
they went so fast.
Wright: Were
you among other women that were there or were you one of the few women
that were working there at Langley at that time?
Hedgepeth:
There were a few others that were working there, yes. I can't remember
any of them that worked at Flight Research. I pretty much was in the
office with the engineers, just helping them get their numbers together.
Well, in 1947, my husband and I got married. He was an Air Force sergeant
at that time. He got out of service just a little later. He had worked
for [NACA] before the war, before he was in the service anyhow, as
an apprentice electrician, but he, during the service, was trained
as a photographer and lab technician. So he wanted to get into that
kind of work, and it happened that they were just building this little
small group out here at Muroc then, Muroc Air Force Base. I guess
it wasn't an Air Force base then; it was an Army base.
They offered him the job of setting up a photo lab here because they
did not have any photographers or photo lab, and they said, of course,
I could transfer, too, out here. Johnny had been at Muroc during the
war for training missions, so he kind of knew where it was, and alleviated
a little of my fears because people kept telling me, "Now, when
you go out there, you have to, at night, pound a stick in the ground
and hang your shoes over them so the rattlesnakes and things won't
get into your shoes." It was not that bad, but close. [Laughter]
I didn't have to pound a stick to hang my shoes on.
Wright: What
was your first impression when you saw it?
Hedgepeth:
Well, I pretty much knew, since he had been here a couple of years
before on maneuvers, and so we sort of knew what to expect, but it
was interesting. [NACA] had arranged for the people who came out to
live in some old Navy housing built for World War II when some Navy
pilots were at Mojave [California] for training, and they weren't
there anymore at this time, so the places were available and they
were mostly built four in a unit, real small places.
But when we got there, the man that showed us our place said, "Now,
you're really lucky because we just cleaned this place. Somebody just
moved out, so it's clean for you." It had just minimal furniture.
It had a bed and a table, but we could bring some stuff in ourselves.
So we walked in and the dust was nearly that thick on everything,
the tables. And after the man left, we said, "Oh, he's not telling
us the truth." This place obviously hadn't been lived in for
months, but we found out that that was really true. No matter how
recently you cleaned the place, it had dust all over because it had
so much wind and sand around, no real grass or anything like that.
And even though the windows were built not to open, they were exactly
sealed windows, the sand just blew through there anyhow and would
be standing on all pieces of furniture. There was nothing we could
do about that. It still blows a lot in Mojave, though Mojave has grown
some since that time.
Well, in November, anyhow, in 1948, November, shortly after Chuck
[Charles E.] Yeager had broken mach one [sound barrier], we'd arrived
at the [NACA] facility out there. Do you know the meaning of Muroc?
It was named for some people that used to be old ranchers on the property
out there. Their last name was Corum [Clifford, Effie, Ralph]. They
tried to get a post office named Corum, but somewhere somebody had
already used that, so they just turned the name backwards, spelled
it backwards, and named it Muroc. That's how it got that name.
Well, later, I was going to say that the base was renamed Edwards
Air Force Base, after Captain Glen Edwards, who was killed in a crash
with the flying wing here. This is a picture of him, that the base
was named for. But of course at the time we went there it was Muroc.
I worked there, now, with a small group of women, headed by Roxanah
[B.] Yancey. I don't know if you've heard her name. She died a few
years ago, but was the head of our group, and was very particular
about how we did data. Everything had to be done by one person and
checked by another, so everything we did was double-checked, and probably
third-checked by her, I'm not sure.
I can name just a couple of the people I remember working with then.
Mary [V.] Little [Kuhl], who still lives around Lancaster, was one
I thought you might be going to talk to.
Wright: I
did talk to her, and she declined.
Hedgepeth:
Oh, did she?
Wright: Yes,
she said her health was not good right now and so she wanted to not
do it. So hopefully in the future we can connect and visit with her.
Hedgepeth:
I saw her the last time at the reunion last year. We don't get to
Lancaster really often.
And there our duties were—I can name just a few of the things
we did. We measured data that came from onboard recorders. They were
in the cockpit or wired into the airplanes, and recorded it on special
forms and then the calculations were done after that, and then the
numbers put on those forms also. Of course, we didn't have computers
in those days. We certainly didn't have little handheld calculators
like we do today.
We used, at that time, sometimes a slide rule, but mostly big desk
computers that were built by Friden and Marchant. They looked about
the size of a cash register that you see, and couldn't do what our
little ones today can, that you can hold in your hand, of course.
And then we plotted data for the engineers and assisted them in analyzing
the data.
Actually, our job was called computer and that's exactly what we did,
of course very slowly, not like they turn out today. So when I retired
from the Air Force, one of my favorite engineers over there, they
had a dinner for me and he spoke at it and he said, "Tut, we
remember, back in the old days, when we engineers would go up in the
airplanes, we'd write numbers down on our little lap thing there,
you know, with a pencil, and come back down. We'd give you some of
the data to do and you'd do the calculations and hand it back to us,
and probably that afternoon we'd have results from our test flight."
He said, "Things have changed a lot. We've got tapes on the aircraft
to record the data, and we've got computers to process it, and now
we get the data done in about two or three weeks." [Laughter]
Of course, we got a lot more data done in two or three weeks than
we got in that one day. It was fun working in those days because it
was really informal and we worked closely with the engineers, and
it was an interesting place to work.
Some of the aircraft that we worked on, that I helped process the
data on, anyhow, were several X-1 aircraft, X-2, X-3, X-4, and I wrote
some of those down for you that we processed data.
The single [NACA] women that worked in our group lived in dorms on
the south base, and these were converted Army barracks. My husband
and I lived, as I told you, in World War II Navy housing near Mojave.
In addition to the sand, we had a lot of desert creatures that were
prominent around the area, like rattlesnakes and scorpions, and sometimes
these things drifted into your living quarters. I never saw a rattlesnake
in our house, but I did remove a scorpion or two that were crawling
around in there. We saw horned toads. It was real easy to see animals
on the road that had been hit by cars because they weren't used to
that many cars, and the snakes were always out there.
My husband had mentioned, even before we started, about our first
dinner, our first going out to dinner anyhow, that we came to Bakersfield,
not knowing that we'd, of course, live here later on. But we had a
nice dinner and one that we could afford, less than a dollar at the
Chinese restaurant here, The Rice Bowl, which is still going.
After living in Mojave about two years, we moved to Lancaster, but
again into World War II housing. There just was no building going
on in this area at that time. These housing units that we had there
were built to house British pilots who were being trained in a little
airfield outside of Lancaster, [War Eagle Field] Polaris [Flight Academy]
Field. Now, when we actually started getting houses the first time
in Lancaster, FHA [Federal Housing Authority] housing, a contractor
came out to [NACA] and brought plans and they gave him an office to
use there and he offered houses to be built in Lancaster, so the first
housing group in Lancaster was mostly inhabited by [NACA] people because
they actually came out there, and we signed up for the third house,
which cost $8,700.
I was very insecure, since we had two little boys, and I was really
worried. Our payments were about $60 a month, maybe, that included
everything, and I was worried that one of us might lose our job and
we might not be able to pay for this. But of course we did pay for
the house and sold it many years later for about ten times what we
paid for it. It was a good investment.
When we lived in Mojave and Lancaster, we had about twenty-five miles
from Mojave and thirty-five from Lancaster, to go to Edwards. Of course,
over the desert, going from the Mojave Desert there, we saw mirages
in the summertime, you know, with water out there, apparently there.
In the old days, there was a leftover mock Japanese battleship that
was out on the lake. It had been left over from some of the war training
missions there, and that was really interesting to see. As we would
come upon that thing, apparent water under it, it looked like it was
really a battleship sitting there.
Also there were train tracks at that time across the desert, and when
we happened upon a train coming along, you could see the real train,
but in the mirage water, you could see also a reflection of the train
upside down. It was interesting. It looked so real, as if it really
was going over the water and you could see the reflection there.
A couple of funny things that we remember from that time. We carpooled
mostly with other [NACA] people from Mojave and Lancaster, and we
had one interesting engineer that really thought things out and when,
along the way, a car was not headed toward him, he just moved over
and drove on the wrong side of the road because he felt that his tires
would wear more evenly if he went over and part of the time drove
on this side and a little bit on the other side. We used to think
that was funny, but he did that with a reason. He was trying to save
his tires.
We also were in a carpool one time with [A.] Scott Crossfield. Do
you know Scott? He lived in one of the same houses that we did in
Lancaster and he was an excellent pilot, but he did better with airplanes
than he did with cars. We now and then would run out of gas in his
car on the way to work. He forgot to fill up the gas and we'd have
to send for gas to help us out.
One sort of interesting thing. On the lake beds that were used for
emergency landings, it was important, and still is, that these lake
beds be dry, because if they're wet, we'd have to stop flying until
they dry off because they can't be used when they're wet. But that's
important to the lake bed, to have it wet, then the wind blows and
it makes the surface of the lake beds hard, just like clay.
Some of the interesting things that happened there, besides the mirages
that we saw, is that when they were wet, one real interesting thing
that happened was that shrimp that would lie dormant in the dry season,
from this really hard lake bed, when it got wet, would come out of
hibernation, or whatever you might call it, and would be there, and
birds, seagulls and things, would somehow sense that and fly over
there. We'd have all kinds of birds down there, picking those little
shrimp up. They were just little. Not edible, I'm sure, but just little
shrimp-looking things. And the birds would not be there except when
the lake bed got wet and was starting to dry out, then they'd come
up through the mud.
We even had snow. There's one picture—my husband took most of
the old pictures there because he was the only photographer and processor
there, so most of the ones that you might see—you may have a
copy of this. And one that has me in it is the snow picture right
here.
Wright: That
was a rarity, to have it snow that much?
Hedgepeth:
We don't get a lot of snow, but maybe once or twice a year, some that
sticks, and occasionally a really big snow. But generally not. We
don't have snow.
At that time, the [NACA] facility was in a Quonset hut-like hangar.
The airplanes were there, too, and then on the sides of the hangar
were offices and labs and things like that. All the office cooling
was done with what we called swamp coolers. We didn't, of course,
have air-conditioning in those days. These were evaporative coolers
that do a pretty good job in the desert of cooling things down.
Because it was so hot in the summer there, early morning cooler times
were better for flights to be done. In the summer we mostly worked
from about 5 a.m. to one o'clock in the afternoon so we could get
there early. So we got up early and got to work about five o'clock
and the flights could get off while it was still reasonably cool.
We didn't have a lot of medical facilities around in those days, and
both of our two sons were born in San Fernando. That was the closest
real equipped hospital anywhere around, so we went there.
The early [NACA] group was pretty sociable. We had a lot of parties.
One of the outstanding places was the Dude Ranch at Quartz Hill that
we had parties, and then some, but not all people, would admit to
going to [Florence] Pancho Barnes' place. We had a beer garden in
Lancaster that was fun to go to after work, that was just really informal
and actually had trees and horseshoes that you could throw and things
like that.
Now, that is about my story on my work at Langley and at Muroc or
Edwards, because about that time—do you want me to go ahead
with—
Wright: Whatever
you feel comfortable doing. If you want to go on through and then
we can come back and touch on some questions.
Hedgepeth:
In 1953, I was offered a job, a supervisor job, by the Air Force.
The head of the engineering group there offered me the job and I accepted
it, but because of, I believe, the projects I was working on at [NACA],
they wouldn't release me. In the meantime, I became pregnant with
our second son and it was about three weeks before he was going to
be born that [NACA] released me to go on to the Air Force.
So I went over and talked to the head of the engineering group who
hired me and I said, "Would you like me to just come over here
after my baby is born?"
He said, "Well, no, it doesn't make a bit of difference to me.
You can do the work. It doesn't matter to me if you're pregnant."
So I took a new job about three weeks before my baby was born.
At that time, you had to go to the Air Force hospital for a physical
before you actually started work, and I had a lot of fun up there.
A lot of people would see me getting a physical and they would say,
"Are you leaving your job here or something?" I'd say, "No,
I'm just starting a new one." [Laughter]
The person who hired me there was Paul [F.] Bickle. I don't know if
you've ever heard of him. He was really outstanding, mainly in glider
work. He held a lot of records for that. He was really ahead of his
time on women's rights. I appreciated him. I worked until a week before
my baby was born and I came back to work about two weeks later. He
was just the greatest supervisor and just didn't pay a bit of attention
or worry about having a pregnant person working in there. I was really
well. I never had any problems, so I could do the work and he was
satisfied with that.
I worked with that group for a while, actually doing almost the same
thing I was doing at [NACA], except I was supervising a group of people.
Then real computers came along, so I wanted to get into that rather
than keep on with what I was doing, and I requested a transfer to
their setup for their real computer programmer group, and worked there.
Of course, our first computer about filled up our whole living room
here with stuff and didn't do much, even at that. But that was fun
to get into something a little different.
Then later I became a supervisor of the programming group, and before
I retired from the Air Force was moved a little out of that field
into project management and I supervised a group of people that were
doing that, and didn't have my hands on a computer much anymore after
that point. It was kind of interesting that most of the groups that
I supervised, most of them [were] men. We had a few women, but most,
still, were men, and I had a lot of funny experiences with people
being sure I was the secretary of the group. I was with one of my
mathematicians one time, and somebody asked him, "Does she work
for you?" He said, "No, I work for her." [Laughter]
I don't recall having much trouble with any of the men. In fact, one
of them said to me, "Well, I never think of you as a [woman]."
I said, "Well, thanks." I thought that was a compliment.
I retired from the Air Force in 1979 and had worked with a lot of
General Dynamics [GD] people and managers that came from Fort Worth
[Texas] out here. After I'd been retired for about a year and a half
or so, one of them called and asked if I would be interested in coming
out of retirement to be a data engineer for one of their projects
they were coming to Edwards to test.
I was busy being retired, but I had signed up for too many things.
It sounded like a good deal to me to get back to work and kind of
get out of all the volunteer things I'd been in, and start over next
time a little smarter. So I did. He said, "We'll just be out
there for a year, testing this one aircraft, the AFTI [Advanced Fighter
Technology Integration] F-16." I think I have a little folder
here. I've got one somewhere that I can show you on that program.
But it was really interesting, and at first I was the only person
at Edwards on that program. They hadn't brought the airplane yet or
any of the people out, you know, so they had me go out there and just
attend meetings for the group. I enjoyed that, and then I'd report
what happened at the meetings back to the Fort Worth people, before
the airplane came out. But this project that meant to be a year stretched
out to twelve years, so I worked twelve more years for General Dynamics
and at that time I was seventy years old and CSC [Computer Sciences
Corporation] had, in the meantime, bought the Fort Worth Data Division,
so I was actually working for CSC toward the end of that time.
So I retired from two different companies on the same job, without
moving. It was fun. I worked right with the pilots and the engineers,
as opposed to what I'd been doing for the Air Force for so many years
in an office, without actually seeing or touching an airplane. Our
AFTI F-16 was right there. One of our fellows said he just went out
and patted it on the side every day. I felt like that, too. But I
enjoyed that work.
Actually, the defense cutback caused General Dynamics to have to cut
back on their active testing, and they told me if I would come to
Fort Worth, I could have a job there, but at seventy, and we were
thinking about building a house and everything, so I went ahead and
retired.
But [in] my work with the government, with both [NACA] and the Air
Force, of course, I was paying into government retirement and not
getting any Social Security benefits. We hadn't thought about how
important that was, but after I went to work for GD I was paying into
Social Security, had a little bit of time in college and that kind
of thing, but not much. Somebody said to me one day, "Well, you
know, if you work long enough, you'll be able to get Social Security
from this work."
I said, "I'm not going to work that long. It's just going to
be a year or two." But after twelve years, I discovered I did
have enough time, so that made me eligible, and I was glad I did that
twelve years of work for GD, not only enjoyed it, but I got a lot
of benefits.
Then we went to a Social Security meeting one time. My husband had
retired before me, so I was the only one working in the family at
that time. They had a big spread on women being able to get Social
Security as a result of their husband's work, and we said, "Well,
that ought to work for us, too." So we filled out the paperwork
and I sent it in, and the local Social Security people—this
was a long time ago now, and they were even further behind in their
thinking—turned it down and said, "No. Women can get it
on their husband's [earnings], but men can't [on their wife’s
earnings]." We had to do a lot of correspondence with the Social
Security people, but they finally reversed that decision, and so we
both get Social Security, plus, more importantly, Medicare, as a result
of my doing that additional work.
Since I've retired, Lockheed has bought out at least the Retirement
Division of General Dynamics, the Data Division of General Dynamics,
and so I get a retirement check from Lockheed, even though I've never
worked for them. That's kind of interesting. What I would have got
from GD, I now get from Lockheed.
You had asked me to come up with any funny experiences I had and everything,
and one that I remember clearly is that every now and then, back in
those days, people whose husbands were a little backward—mine
wasn't, he was glad I worked—but a lot of husbands didn't want
their wives to work, and a lot of wives looked down upon the women
that did work a little bit and they'd sometimes ask, "Doesn't
your husband mind if you work?"
I was always a little at a loss on what to say, but one of the girls
who worked with me said, "I'll tell you what I say when they
ask me that. I tell them, 'Well, he would kill me if I tried to stop.'"
You know, say it seriously, and, sure enough, if you say that, they
never ask another thing.
Another funny thing that happened in Mojave. Back in those early days,
when we first came out here, the housing was not very good and there
were a lot of animals around and plenty of sand. A lot of people came
out from Langley that we had even known there and they just didn't
stay. It wasn't worth it to them. As interesting as the work was,
they wanted to go back to Langley, where it's a little prettier and
all that.
But the shortest-staying group came and moved into a house very close
to us, in the same housing that we were living in, and the wife was
really unhappy when she first got there. She knew right away she didn't
want to stay, but the man was hopeful that it would work out. So he
got in a carpool, went out the first day for the people to pick him
up, and he was just leaning on a pole out in front of the house by
the street. His carpool came along and the driver stuck his head out,
"I wouldn't stand there if I were you." He looked down and
there was a little Mojave green sidewinder rattlesnake just right
by his foot. He, of course, got out of the way as fast as he could
and he told them to go on to work, and this family actually left that
afternoon to go back to Virginia. They did not stay another night.
They'd stayed one night. They went back.
We had people do that, but most people kind of liked it. It was an
interesting place, real interesting to work, and everybody else had
the same living conditions, so we weren't alone. The group was friendly
and active and people got a lot done by however they could in those
days. We didn't have all the paperwork that they have today.
This is just a personal thing and you may not care about this, but
our son Ted was three years old when we moved [from] Mojave [to] Lancaster,
so I took him on Sunday to church to the little children's class,
and he was a real outgoing little child, and the teacher said, "Do
any of you have something that you want to share, something you've
done this week that you can share with the children?"
Ted immediately got up, went to the front of the class, and he said,
"I went to Edwards Air Force Base last week." Well, he had
not gone, but he could have, so I thought, well. And he said, "I
got a ride in one of the airplanes." Well, of course, that was
not so. He couldn't have possibly done that, and I was a little bit
afraid that maybe somebody would think that somehow he had, you know,
we'd pulled some strings or something. I was getting a little bit
worried about that, but when he finished up, he told the little children,
"I rode in the caboose," so I knew nobody was going to believe
that story.
The other story I wanted to tell is about Harriet [J. DeVries Stephenson]
Smith. Do you know Harriet?
Wright: We’ve
read about her.
Hedgepeth:
Well, after I went to work for GD on the AFTI program, our offices
were down in the NASA area, because it was a joint testing by General
Dynamics and the Air Force and NASA. I was walking through to the
control room or something one day right after I got down there, and
I heard somebody say, "Tut?" and I turned around and there
was this girl standing there and she said, "You're Tut Hedgepeth,
aren't you?"
I said, "Yes."
She said, "Well, I'm Harriet Smith. I worked as a summer aide
with you when you were at [NACA]." This would have been in 1952.
She said, "When I came back the next year as a summer aide, you
had left and gone to the Air Force."
I said, "How in the world do you remember me from that long?"
That was a long time. Must have been thirty or forty years, you know.
I was really pleased and flattered, too, that she remembered me. I
talked to Harriet for a while and then went back to my office and
said to a couple of engineers sitting around there, "You're not
going to believe this. This person remembered me from that long ago
and remembered that I was there the first year and was not there the
second year she came."
One fellow said to me, "Boy, you must have been really mean to
her, for her to remember you that long." [Laughter] I told Harriet
about that later. She said, no, I wasn't mean to her.
But she had an interesting—I think she's still working here,
but I haven't seen her since the reunion. I saw her then. But she
worked for NASA in Washington and had a real interesting career. I
sort of like to think that maybe in addition to her remembering me,
I might have taught her something that made her go that far.
Wright: You
probably did. Listening to your, if I can use the term "career
path," it certainly took some interesting turns, even from the
first days when you were a mathematician. Did you have a particular
interest in math as you were going through grade school?
Hedgepeth:
Yes, I did. I always loved math, and I had a really outstanding teacher
in high school that made me even more interested. My father also was
interested in math. My mother was an English teacher and both of my
sisters were English teachers, but my father, who didn't go to college,
was always pushing me a little bit toward math and he had more interest
in that, and I did, too, than in English. I liked English grammar,
but I didn't care for the literature part that went along with it.
Wright: That
must have been a good combination, because grammar is so structured
and math is so structured. Did that help you as you went through,
trying to explain your data to people?
Hedgepeth:
I imagine that it did. I can't really think of a way it did, but I
should think that a structured-type thing would help.
Wright: During
those years at Langley, and I know you've mentioned that it was such
a long time ago, but that was quite a bustling place back in those
first years, and you might have been able to make a career there,
but you met your husband. You didn't go into details of how you two
met. Would you like to share with us?
Hedgepeth:
This was right after the war years and we met at the USO [United Service
Organizations] at Fort Monroe [Army Base]. That's right outside of
Langley.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
At the YMCA [Young Men’s Christian Association].
Hedgepeth:
The YMCA. Okay, yes, that's what it was. I had gone there with some
of my girlfriends to a dance and some of the military people were
there and I met him there.
Wright: And
this, of course, was a still young age, wasn't it, because you hadn't
been out of college very long.
Hedgepeth:
I was just out of college, twenty-two.
Wright: That's
still young. [Laughter]
Hedgepeth:
It seems like it now.
Wright: And
then to pack up and leave that area and to come so far away, did you
see it as a sense of adventure?
Hedgepeth:
Yes. Well, Johnny [Hedgepeth] says sometimes that we kind of thought
that we would get a free trip to California and maybe later on go
into some other kind of work. And we could have, many times over the
years, got more money, but we really enjoyed our job and we thought,
you know, we didn't want to leave it after we got here.
We were glad that we didn't, because we both get good retirement checks
now, and we know some people who did leave the government service
and go to work for one of the contractors, and, boy, that's iffy,
at least it was back in those days. If a contract went, you got a
lot of money, but if it closed down, you were without a job. And unfortunately,
many of the ones closed down at the same time. I saw that when I was
working for General Dynamics, because GD cut back quite a bit and
I was lucky that my part of the work with them was not cut back, but
we saw a lot of people, some families that both the husband and wife
worked for GD and they were let off. So a lot of people lost houses
in Lancaster that thought they were going to be there for a long time.
We were glad that we didn't change.
Yes, it was an adventure for us, though. We've been married a long
time, fifty-three years now, but the maddest I think that I've ever
seen my husband was—we had an old, it was a secondhand Ford
that we bought when we started to come to California, and we packed
everything we could possibly pack in that car, and he worked hard
at getting it in exactly right, and when we got to the border out
here at California, they made us take everything out of that car,
and he was really upset about that.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
It was about 110 degrees.
Hedgepeth:
I don't think they do that anymore. They did way back in those days.
But now we've been through that same checkpoint many times and they'll
just say, "Go ahead." We wish that had happened at that
time.
Wright: I
imagine some of those first days were so hard out here, newly married
and basically you're coming to a new place. The Research Center wasn't
really even developed, of course, as it was going to be. Were the
days long and the expectations high with part of your work? Can you
give us some examples or maybe tell us about some of those first projects
that you worked on that took so much of your time and energy when
you first arrived?
Hedgepeth:
Well, I wish I could, but actually, the job that I had was pretty
much a desk job. It was a lot of data and I worked with some interesting
engineers on it, but now, looking back, seems like I did the same
thing on all of them. We had engineers who actually analyzed the data
and wrote reports and we helped them, and I've edited some reports
that were written.
But I really enjoyed the work. It was fun and everybody worked together
well. I don't remember being frustrated or disappointed in any way.
A lot of people don't like this part of California because it is hot,
but I basically have been happy everywhere I've lived. I just adjust
to whatever is there, so I don't remember ever being really upset
or disappointed with the conditions. It was just interesting.
Wright: Was
there a project that you found that challenged you more, even in your
Air Force days when you were moved over in the supervisory area?
Hedgepeth:
Well, actually, the project that I felt the closest to was the AFTI
F-16, the GD part of it. I really enjoyed that and had a lot of responsibility
of my own, and I enjoyed that more than just data-handling.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Can I mention something?
Wright: Sure.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
I just want to say one thing she hasn't mentioned, was she also, while
she was on the AFTI program, got pretty heavily involved in SR-71
work, too. I think she forgot to write that down.
Hedgepeth:
I [worked on SR-71 while employed with the Air Force, not General
Dynamics]. That was the AFTI program.
Wright: Would
you like to talk to us about this while we're on that subject?
Hedgepeth:
I can't, really. I would like to.
Wright: That's
one of my questions I was going to ask, is that I have to think that
some of the projects you worked on are classified, and are they still?
Hedgepeth:
Well, probably not. I remember more the people that I worked with,
you know, than I do in details. That's why I told my husband when
you sent some of the information and some of these people had talked
about big responsibilities they've had and what they've done and I
said, "I'm not going to be able to tell that kind of thing."
I didn't have that kind of—you know, I didn't go to the Moon
and that, but I worked closely with Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford and he
went.
One of the biggest thrills in my dad's life, I think, Tom was the
director at the Air Force here for a while after his trip to the Moon
and all that. I called him when my dad came out to visit and I asked
him if I could bring my dad up to headquarters and meet him. He said,
"Sure," so we went up there and my dad was just absolutely
thrilled to shake the hand of somebody that had done that kind of
thing.
Wright: And
he's still so involved in the NASA arena as well.
Hedgepeth:
He was just a lieutenant when I first knew him at the Air Force, you
know, worked on the SR-71. He worked on that—worked with him
on that. It's like a history of things we've seen around here to go
to the Air Force Museum and take a look at all the airplanes that
we've been associated with.
Wright: It's
such an impact that you've made on so many of those planes, and like
you mentioned, too, about the people that you worked with. When you
were talking about having your children, and you continued to work,
was there a childcare facility, or how did you arrange for that?
Hedgepeth:
We were really lucky. There was not a childcare facility, and when
Ted, our oldest son, was born, I didn't know what I was going to do,
and I wanted to work. An older lady was living two houses down. She
was living with her daughter and son-in-law, and they didn't have
any children and her grandchildren were all back in the East. So one
day she asked me, before Ted was born, "Are you going to go back
to work?" I said yes, and she said, "What are you going
to do about the baby?"
I said, "Well, I'm just going to have to try to find somebody."
I wanted somebody to stay at our house with him.
She said, "I would like to do that." So she came to work
for us when Ted was born, and Lee, our second son, was four years
younger, and stayed with us until Lee was about three, when she had
a little heart problem and had to stop.
So we had a few babysitters after that at our house, but she was the
main one and was just a real good influence on both of our boys. She
wanted them to call her "Grandma," but Ted just called her
"Ma" when he first got started, so we all called her Ma
after that.
After she had to quit keeping him, if we did something that Ted didn't
think was just right to him, he called her, and she was real sensitive
to what he was saying, but sometimes she would say, "Let me talk
to your mother or your dad" and she would say, "I think
you ought to do this and that." But sometimes she would say to
Ted, "Your parents are right. What they're telling you is the
right thing to do." So Ted would be satisfied with that.
So it was interesting, and we were real lucky to get to keep her for
that long, that many years. Seven years was just—by that time,
they were getting older, so I wasn't quite as worried. But it is a
problem for working mothers today, more, almost, I think, than it
used to be.
Wright: And
quality care for your children. You mentioned about carpooling. So
you saw your husband quite a bit while you working. A lot of people
who work, you don't see your spouse.
Hedgepeth:
That's right.
Wright: Was
that a perk or did that sometimes cause any kind of tension that you
were both out there at the same time?
Hedgepeth:
No, I don't think so. We were doing different work. Well, he looks
like he might want to say something. Did it cause tension for you?
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Well, I was thinking more about a funny thing that happened one day.
It was in the cafeteria, at the air base cafeteria. At lunch break
or something like that, we'd go over there, and there was a fellow
who worked with us for a number of years in NACA and he had a piece
of paper and he was just writing and writing and writing and writing
and writing and writing, and I said, "What in the world are you
doing?"
He says, "I'm multiplying the number of days I've worked here,
how much time it's taken me going back and forth to work, and adding
them all up and figuring it out in [days], and you know, I'm going
to resign." He went over and resigned that day. He said he was
spending a third of his life going back and forth to work. That was
kind of funny, you were talking about that.
Hedgepeth:
We were lucky to get to spend that time together, going back and forth
to work, and our boys were just immensely interested in our work,
and still are. So I didn't have any of that kind of problem. I, of
course, did run into people that didn't think I ought to be working,
with children. But I tried to spend a lot of time with them and they
were really interested in what we were doing the whole time.
One lady said to me, sort of snippily one time, "Well, I have
all that I need to do, taking care of my family and my house."
Johnny was there at the time.
After we separated from her a little bit, he said, "I felt like
telling her she had, it looked like, more than she could do."
[Laughter]
But interestingly, we still had people that—you know, in those
days, and even today, there are people who don't think women ought
to work, but I think the time you spend with your children is more
important than—if you actually spend some time with them, than,
you know, being at home all day.
I never regretted working, and I think that our boys turned out well.
Our oldest son died last year, but our other son is still living and
he has two children, so we have two grandchildren, have a lot of fun
with them.
I've had some good trips with the government and with GD, and we went
back East almost every year to see our parents. Mostly we flew, but
two or three times we went by train to give our boys the experience
of seeing the country from the train and also talking to people from
different parts of the country.
One time I took the boys back and they were getting ready to play
cards with some little children on the train. A little girl said to
Ted, "Do you want to play Old Ma-yid [Southern accent implied]?"
Ted looked at me and said, "What is that?"
I said, "She's saying Old Maid, the card game Old Maid."
He couldn't understand her, so they got that experience.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
What was your motto at school, Tut?
Hedgepeth:
What, at college?
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Yes, college.
Hedgepeth:
I don't remember.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Wasn't it something to the effect, "Educate a woman, educate
a family"?
Hedgepeth:
Oh, yes.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
And I'll tell you, Tut did an outstanding job. She worked, and I'll
bet she spent more time with those children than the average mother
would with their children, because she was always a very affectionate
and loving mother.
Hedgepeth:
It was, "Educate a man and you've educated a man, but educate
a woman and you've educated a family." I used to take our boys,
when I was home, at picnic time, down to the park for picnics and
I often took some of their little friends along, too. We lived not
too far from a park. And one day, one of their friends' mothers came
over to our house and she was actually about to cry, and she said
her little son said to her, "You probably should get a job like
Ted's mother has so you'd spend more time with me." So he had
noticed that I did spend some time with them.
Wright: Did
the folks at the Flight Research Center become more an extended family?
I noticed that you said earlier that you socialized and you carpooled
and you worked there, and there wasn't lots to do, so did you end
up becoming—
Hedgepeth:
Definitely, in those early years we did, yes.
Wright: Some
people may not have enjoyed that, because like you never escape from
that whole work environment, but was it more than just that, where
you had a chance to get to know these people as, like I said, family
members?
Hedgepeth:
Well, pretty much. In fact, we not only worked in the same place,
but of course, we lived in the same place. At first we lived in Mojave
and those housing places, and then when we did actually build a house,
all the neighbors around were [NACA] people, too, so all their children
were our children's friends, so it was like a family. I think in more
recent years it's not, but back in those days it was.
Wright: One
of the pieces of research that we read was that, of course, many single
men and many single women, or not many, but some single women were
out there, and because of the times and the social climate, they really
didn't want to go places without chaperones. Did you and your husband,
as a married couple, ever work in that job status, where you all would
go with the single people to kind of be the chaperone on a social
level?
Hedgepeth:
Well, I never recognized that. [Laughter] Seems to me like the men
and women went everywhere together. I never knew any women that were
worried about going anywhere, that I can remember. But they were there,
you know, at the parties and things, and women would come and the
men would come. But there probably were some, maybe, they worried
about that, but I never heard about it if they did.
Wright: You
also mentioned, as you were going through some of the places that
you'd gone, that some people even admitted to going out to Pancho
Barnes'. Was that something you'd like to admit as well?
Hedgepeth:
No. I actually never did, but Johnny has. Do you have anything to
say about Pancho's?
Mr. Hedgepeth:
What's that?
Hedgepeth:
She wondered if I had been to Pancho's. I never did go to Pancho's.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
I've been over there many times. In fact, I used to do a lot of photography
work for Pancho herself and it was always kind of fun. Also a fellow
worked with me in the area which I was working in. The photo lab was
under instrumentation at that time and he assisted me a lot with my
work. But he also ended up marrying one of the girls that worked at
Pancho's. I used to go over there with him and I went over at other
times, too.
It was an interesting and colorful place and I can remember some funny
stories, some of the type you wouldn't like to hear, wouldn't like
to have printed, but I mean, some of the funnier stories.
When we first came to the base, everything was on the south base.
This was long before the base as it stands now even existed, and everything
was—you had Douglas [Aircraft Company] next to us and Northrup
[Corporation] on the other side of us, and places like that.
It was a real small, cohesive group of people. Everybody enjoyed each
other and got along well and worked well together, and all the companies
worked like, Peter robbed Paul, or something like that. You paid him
back, they'd pay you back. You loaned them something, they'd loan
you something, the Air Force and NACA and that type thing. But it
was really a real neat place to work and we thoroughly enjoyed it.
It was one of the jobs you could hardly wait to go to work on.
We didn't like sometimes the change in our working hours. I think
she probably touched on that, when we were going in early in the morning
and get off at two o'clock in the afternoon. It was kind of a strain
on us, because it made it kind of a short day with having a couple
of children at home, too, for us, getting things done, I guess. But
it was a lot of fun going over there.
Hedgepeth:
Pancho, you know, I heard all about her place and everything, and
there were bad things said about it, but she insisted, always to the
end, that it wasn't a house of prostitution at all. They were just
there to entertain the people, and I don't know that they didn't,
because I didn't go there [to Pancho Barnes’ place].
Interestingly, our oldest son, Ted, was real taken by flying and we
found it out in a bad way. He did fine in high school, but he went
away to college and went as far as you can go in California and be
in the California university group. He failed everything the first
semester. We talked to him and told him to go talk to his teachers
and he didn't do much better the next time. We called the president
of the college and said, "Look in to our son and what he's doing."
That was during the drug years were starting, and we were afraid maybe
he was—and the president called us back and said, "No,
Ted's not into any problem. He doesn't just show up. When he comes
to class, he does fine, but he doesn't show up most of the time."
And we found out that he had made friends with the boy whose father
ran the local airport, and was working at the airport over there in
exchange for flying lessons, while we were paying for him to go to
school. But by the time we found out, he'd got his license.
Anyhow, he, two or three different times, flew with Pancho. He got
acquainted with somebody that worked in her area out there, so he
actually flew with Pancho. That was after the days that she was at
the Happy Bottom Riding Club. We gave him a book about her for Christmas
here a couple of years ago.
Wright: Of
all the data that you looked at and analyzed and worked with engineers,
did you ever have the desire to become a flyer as well?
Hedgepeth:
No, I'm sort of sorry to say that I'm not an enthusiastic flyer. I
fly when I need to go somewhere or want to go somewhere because it's
the quickest and best way to get there, but I don't enjoy flying.
I enjoy more riding on a train, but I do fly. But, no, I never did.
Johnny, in his early years, took a few flying lessons, but he never
did do anything with it. But Ted was real outstanding in all kinds
of flying. He taught flying and he was a big balloon person. He taught
and had a business of balloons, selling and training for them. So
he caught that part from us, I guess. And our other son is a lawyer.
He's not as happy-go-lucky as the first one was, and he attends a
little more to detail. He's a lawyer now.
Wright: Always
good to have variety in families.
Hedgepeth:
That's right. It is, it is.
Wright: Why
don't we take a break for just a few minutes and we can visit and
then we can come back and see what are the things that we might want
to touch on before we close up for the day.
Hedgepeth:
Here's a picture of us at the museum at Edwards. That's just taken
when we went to the reunion.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
That's the new Air Force Museum. We hadn't been to it yet. That's
a picture of the stamp that came out, that they had mounted on the
wall there.
Hedgepeth:
I happened to come across this, and this shows all the airplanes that—well,
actually, most of those while I was there, but all of the early pictures
were taken by Johnny, and any ones you see back in those days were
all taken by him.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Until about the time Tut left to go to work for the Air Force, I was
the only photographer there. I was processing all the flight data,
processing and taking all the pictures, all the air-to-air photography,
all the ground photography, historical photography. Whatever it was,
I was doing it all, taking them and printing them and processing them
in total, and doing everything.
But when we had a lot of flights backed up, I had a number of people
from instrumentation who would come and help me with the processing
of all the data records, and they were all processed by hand. Those
were the days we didn't do anything but black-and-white photography,
no digital cameras, no video cameras. Everything was taken, just a
regular strictly old flash camera and not any special type motion
picture camera and processors processing every inch of it, and everything
was in black and white in those days.
Then I was hired away from NACA about three years after her to go
to work and start a space positioning facility there at the Air Force,
and that was real interesting work for me. I just loved it.
Hedgepeth:
He's told some scary stories about some of the pictures he's taken
from the air, leaning out the back end of a helicopter.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
A C-142, I believe it was.
Wright: Well,
let's stop for just a minute and we'll come back.
Hedgepeth:
Okay, all right.
Wright: Let's
do that.
Hedgepeth:
Really, when I was working at [NACA], I was working in a group, and
the leader of that group actually passed out the work to people, and
it was fairly routine work. I know that the data was important to
someone in describing what the aircraft was doing and what they could
go on and try to do next, but I can't honestly myself relate what
I did to a particular project. In fact, no matter what airplane it
was, we just about did the same thing.
Wright: Did
you know what data you were working on for what project at the time?
Hedgepeth:
Probably I did, yes.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
I'm sure you did, but you just don't remember it.
Wright: There
were many projects going on at one time that you were involved in,
or were you maybe assigned to a team that was working on one plane
and another team was working on another plane?
Hedgepeth:
No, I'll tell you, I think that I was pretty well spread around among
whatever was going on then.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
It was basically a pool of people under Roxanah Yancey, and she would
distribute work as needed to be done by different people, and then
it would be double-checked, and then she double-checked.
Hedgepeth:
And then they'd give it back to her and she was the one who talked
to the—
Mr. Hedgepeth:
She was a very thorough person.
Hedgepeth:
She was.
Wright: She
sounded like she must have been a strong personality in being one
of the first women here and helping to set that up. Did you work for
her for many years?
Hedgepeth:
Oh, no. How long after we came to Edwards before I—four years,
three years, maybe?
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Well, we came out in '48, and then you left—
Hedgepeth:
Early '53. About four years.
Johnson: One
of the things in the book they talk about—I'm not sure if I'm
pronouncing it right—oscillograph film, is that one of the things
you did was read the film?
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Oscillographs were a large recorder which had about a twelve-inch-width
paper roll, just rolled through, and it would read the orifice data
on the plane or any type things that they had that were trying to
record twisting, buckling, or any performance of an individual item
on the airplane, and they'd be feeding data by strain gauges and so
forth to the recorders. I did all the processing of that, and my people
or the people who worked with me loaded all the stuff like that onboard
the aircraft, you know, the instrumentation people.
Hedgepeth:
And then what we did was actually just use a ruler like and measure
how far up from this, and then when it changed and write this down.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
You would have many traces on this thing. It would be this wide and
there might be 100 traces on that, and each trace was coming either
off a strain gauge or an orifice for pressure, or whatever they had
them set up for. They had various things. I'm really not helpful,
but I know that our instrumentation people were always constantly
mounting new things onboard to stress points on the aircraft, or testing
to see how it would hold up under certain G forces and so forth, against
a time base, of course, onboard aircraft.
Hedgepeth:
We had, for instance, something like that on every aircraft. When
I would read those measurements off of there, I was doing practically
the same thing on every one of them.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
They had very simplified equipment. The state of the art was very
poor in those days. In fact, we had a piece of equipment on the base
there which, one of the very first things I got associated with and
got rid of almost as quickly, was what they called a photo grid. A
photo grid was a method of shooting with some wires that were numbered
by distance, and then accurately placed against surveying and then
some grid wire, and you'd shoot through that and photograph an airplane
taking off to see how much time it took them to climb or wheels up
and how fast he'd clear a certain height or something like that and
then when there was a different photo optical system to do that later
on.
It was a very crude method, but that was what they had before I went
over there to space positioning. And by the same means, we were also
using that for recording data for joint Air Force-NASA programs. And
there was a lot of that, you know, joint work together.
Hedgepeth:
We did finally have a few early readers that we could put something
like the oscillographs on and use a pointer, like, to go up there
and then press a button and it might read off three inches, from here
to here, or 3.898 or something. But we did a lot of this, most of
it, as I remember at that time, by hand, actually, and measured it
ourselves and wrote the number down.
Wright: Did
anything that you did at Langley compare to this, or was this all
new type of work for you?
Hedgepeth:
Mostly I did that kind of thing at Edwards or Muroc. Mostly when I
was at Langley, and I was only there a couple of years, I was doing
mostly just calculations there. I don't recall reading anything at
that point. I don't know where that was done.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
You don't even know what the data sources were.
Hedgepeth:
No, I don't. I really don't.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
You were just doing what was handed for you to do and they told you
what to do. Like I say, it was just a computer pool, basically, in
her first 19-foot tunnel job, and then when she went to work for Flight
Research, then she got more into working with real flying airplanes
and the test operation there. I never discussed too much with her
what she did then except we knew she was doing her job okay and that's
what I wanted.
Johnson: Getting
your paycheck, right?
Hedgepeth:
That's right. Good yearly awards.
Wright: Any
training you received when you came to California?
Hedgepeth:
No, just Roxanah Yancey probably telling me what I needed to do. I
didn't have any formal training for that at all. And I don't think
a lot of the people that worked in that group, and I can't remember
for sure, but I don't think they particularly had degrees. I think
it was the sort of a job that they would like to have people with
degrees, because if something more critical in the way of calculations
came up, we could do it, but a lot of this measuring stuff, it didn't
require a college degree.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Well, there were only three of you, I think, that for the longest
period of time did that, Roxie and Mary Little and you.
Hedgepeth:
Mary and me, I think. I think probably the other people did not have
a degree.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
It wasn't necessary, really.
Hedgepeth:
I'm sorry to not be able to tell you something a little more exciting
than that. I felt like my work was important, but I can't tell you
why right now.
Wright: I
think part of it, we were talking earlier about it, the importance
is that it built. What you did was used to build upon the next one,
and the data was to improve.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Well, like we started out with the Glamorous Glennis X-1. We had four
or five X-1s. Every one of them was an improvement over the other
one for one reason or another, and I watched two of them be destroyed,
one in flight and one burned up while it was being mated to the mother
ship. I had to work overtime one night and I was right down there
taking pictures of the loading of the X-1, mating it to the mother
ship, and fire broke out and just consumed the B-29 as well as the
rocket ship that was with the X-1, and it was total disaster.
In the early days, it's kind of funny, we'd just arrived here, and
that's an interesting point that she didn't mention, we had just arrived
shortly after Howard [C. “Tick”] Lilly was killed. He
was the first NACA test pilot ever killed in flight-test work. And
a real good friend of ours, an old-time NACA employee, Don [E.] Borchers,
he was somebody that's been a real close friend to our family and
still is, and his whole family. Don just got so broken up over that
accident. He was the crew chief of that plane, and he always felt
he had a personal part why that plane crashed, and he just resigned.
Hedgepeth:
He felt if he could have done something more—he didn't know
what—maybe it wouldn't have happened.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
He's a wonderful person. He's one of my favorite friends throughout
the years, and he's still living, too. But he took a job at a post
office after that and he did that till he retired.
Hedgepeth:
That's a big responsibility, crew chief on one of those research aircraft.
You know, it happens.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
See, we had two D-558-1s out there, and then we had two D-558 Phase
2s out there, and one was a rocket only and one was a jet engine assisted
takeoff and conducted test, but finally started settling down strictly
on a rocket carrying more fuel, getting more research time, drop it
and could run the tests that they had to.
Hedgepeth:
My experience at NASA certainly earned me the chance to advance with
the Air Force. I realize that what I'd done made that possible. I
really did tell him that I was afraid you'd be thoroughly disappointed.
Wright: Not
at all, not at all.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Really, the point she just made is very interesting. In the early
days, there were no people available with the little bit of information
that we had anywhere, so, man, every company was trying to hire us.
She had a half dozen job offers; I did, too. One would say, "Well,
let's do it, let's not do it, let's just stay with it." I'm glad
we did, after it was all over, believe me, because we have so many
friends who did leave for these high-paying jobs that just turned
out to be disastrous.
They were looking for work for a long time after that. They'd get
another job that may not have been as good as what they left NACA
with, or maybe had to go into another field, and a lot of people who
really got beaten up by that going back and forth. They'd get hired
on, relocate, bam, it's gone. You know what I mean? And that has happened.
We never at any time in our whole life while we were working in NACA
worried whether we were going to have a job or not.
Hedgepeth:
Or the Air Force either. We never did get in that situation.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
We never did have any concern that we were not going to have a job
tomorrow, and we may not have made quite as much money, but we loved
that work at that time, and like both of us, I mean, me in particular,
my job then, I just loved the first ten, twelve, fifteen years of
it, but then it got to where I got a desk job, which I had to look
busy and I couldn't, and I just despised it. I had a chance for an
early out and I took it and jumped on it, but I had thirty-six years
total time, so I didn't get hurt by it. But I've been retired about
twenty-three, twenty-four years now, I think.
Wright: Well,
you were two of the first twenty-two, or two of the Langley twenty-two,
as you referred to them.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
No, I'm not going to say that. There were some people here that were
not [Langley] people—because some of them came out from Wright-Pat
[Patterson Air Force Base]. They didn't come from Houston because
Houston wasn't in the picture at that time. They didn't come from
Cape Canaveral [Florida], so some of them could have come from [NASA]
Lewis [Research Center]. Possibly we might have had one or two from
up at [NASA] Ames [Research Center]. I'm not sure what the status
of Ames was at that particular time, because it seemed like we did
a lot of joint work, joint programs with Ames, too. They'd come down
here and we'd assist them on whatever they were trying to do here
at Edwards for the flight test phase of it.
Hedgepeth:
And a couple of the women were wives of men who had come to do some
other sort of work.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
I think another aspect of it that's kind of interesting is the fact
that just about every program that we've worked on involved people
from the individual aircraft companies that we've worked with. Like
Bell Aircraft. We can name people back that we were real close with
through many years from the base on, and we had meetings with them
a lot, participated in some meetings with them at different levels.
Now, I'm talking at maybe NACA, but not much.
But then as we got on into other work, work with, work for, they worked
for us or one of the other type thing, flip-flopping in some cases,
and that type thing was kind of interesting because most everything
we did, it was a joint Navy-NASA, joint Air Force-NASA-Navy, joint
Marines-Navy-NASA-Air Force-type thing. And they were all joint programs
and a lot of times we were involved in meetings and things like that,
where these people were all participating in it and putting their
inputs in to whatever is going on.
Wright: It
must have been an exciting time to have all those interactions from
all those different people and projects. Was there that feeling? We
read so much in the [NASA] Dryden [Flight Research Center] materials
about the feeling of closeness and teamwork with the people on the
center and that that's what kept so many people interested in the
work was that the work was so interesting and there was that spirit
of teamwork. Could you, either one of you or both of you, give us
maybe an example, or comment on those times?
Hedgepeth:
He might more than I would because his job allowed the actually working
with the—
Mr. Hedgepeth:
For example, it was a feast-or-famine-type thing all the time out
there. You had money, you didn't have money. You had overtime, you
didn't have overtime. Or you had no overtime at all, period, type
thing. And then we'd get to the point where—and we did a lot
of overtime. In fact, we did a lot of overtime, no pay whatsoever.
In the early days, I bet you we averaged ten, eleven hours a day on
a job and did not get a nickel's extra work for it. And a lot of times,
"We've got to get a job done, guys," and so everybody would
come in and work anyway. Everybody, not just me, but everybody, we'd
work a lot of hours.
In fact, in the real early days, they would work a lot of days with
no pay whatsoever, overtime pay. They'd just run out of money. But
everybody seemed to work, and then it was beg, borrow, steal, like
I said from, like the Air Force would run out of film or something
like that, or run out of something, or run out of some kind of equipment.
They'd come borrowing from us, and then, likewise, we'd go borrow
from them. As soon as we got our supplies in, we'd pay them back or
they'd pay us back, and that's the way we operated.
Hedgepeth:
And they're still, I think, doing a little of that, because when we
took the tour out there at the machine shop, I think, one of the fellows
that was showing us around at the reunion said, "This is something
we borrowed from the Air Force."
Mr. Hedgepeth:
But it was. Like I said, everybody worked well together, everybody
seemed to like each other, and even though we had some funny comments
like we talked about the guy who drove on the wrong side of the road,
and we had another guy that wouldn't use his brakes hardly, because
he was going to wear out his brakes.
Wright: Well,
before we close, I was going to ask you kind of a domestic question.
When you mentioned the dust when you first when out there, it made
me think about everyday things that we do now. When we wash clothes
we put them in a clothes dryer, but I don't believe you had those
facilities back then. How were you able to maintain some type of cleanliness
with your clothes?
Mr. Hedgepeth:
We went to laundromats. We didn't have a washer and dryer or anything
like that, so anything like that we had to go to the laundromat.
Wright: Everything
was in town then?
Mr. Hedgepeth:
In the little town of Mojave. There wasn't much in town, the little
town Mojave, and there's still not now. But it's just a small place.
Johnson: Speaking
of that, I was wondering about the dress code at that time. Were the
women required to wear dresses and hose?
Hedgepeth:
I don't believe that women were required to in any way by [NACA],
but at that stage of our lives, women just did. Women didn't wear
pants, you know. I think the first time I wore pants to work was after
I was working for the Air Force, and they had a picnic or something
at lunch, and I took a pair of pants to put on at work and went to
the picnic and I came back and put a skirt back on.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Something I do remember is that it used to be that all men had to
wear suits to work, and if you can visualize the type of temperature,
swamp coolers, and men sitting around in suits, jacket, ties, and
choking and dying on the spot, they came out and said, "From
now on, there will be no more coats and ties. Shirts only, and pants."
Hedgepeth:
At work today, people can wear shorts, but we didn't do that then.
But of course, you see that same thing in church today. We used to
wear a dress all the time, and people just aren't doing it. In fact,
my sister is married to a minister and he retired here about two years
ago. My sister Betty told me that she got rid of every dress that
she had. She said she told Lyman she was never wearing a dress. She
got rid of them altogether and all she has are pants now. But that's
just a change in how we did. But, no, we did not wear pants to work
in those days. Nobody told us we couldn't, it's just that we didn't
wear them.
Johnson: It
wasn't socially acceptable.
Hedgepeth:
It wasn't the thing to do, right.
Johnson: Also
in the book we've heard them refer to the "mole hole," where
the computers were. Was that during your time or was that after? That
may have been after you left.
Hedgepeth:
Must have been. I never heard that expression, and we didn't have
any computers. You mean people computers?
Johnson: People
computers.
Hedgepeth:
I never heard it.
Johnson: That
may have been after you left.
Hedgepeth:
It might have been. That's interesting. I think it would have been
before. I never heard the expression and I don't know how it could
have come about with regard to where we—you know, we had an
office that was on the ground floor, and didn't have windows and that,
but I don't know what that came from.
Wright: I
believe it was a reference when the assignments tended to shift where
the computers were not working so closely with the engineers on a
day-to-day basis, that they had put a lot of the computers into another
room, and they were basically separated.
Johnson: It
refers to in the early fifties some time, so I didn't know if you
were involved in it.
Hedgepeth:
No, I wouldn't have been. Maybe. I didn't go to the Air Force till
'53. But that was the case, that when I got there, we didn't work
very closely with the engineers. Occasionally, one of them would come
in and work with us individually, but mostly Roxanah Yancey was the
one that had any interface with anybody. We worked through her and
she'd talk to them. Somebody could have referred to it like that.
I hadn't thought about that, but that is the way it was. That's for
sure.
Wright: We've
talked about it being warm or hot during the day. Was it cool when
you were working there in the evenings or early in the mornings when
you would get there, were the temperatures such that—
Hedgepeth:
Well, generally. Are you too warm in here right now? Because we do
have air-conditioning today. I'm a real hot-weather person. Hot weather
doesn't bother me. Even in Virginia or Texas, it doesn't bother me.
I like to be hot. When we first got married, all we could find there
in Virginia was, again, old World War II housing, didn't have any,
of course, air-conditioning. The only heat in the place was a wood
stove, which neither one of us had ever had any experience with, and
we needed to use that for cooking and for heating the place as well.
We had snow that winter, too, and the doors had a space about that
big in between the door and the floor of the house, and when it snowed,
it snowed under the door so we'd have snow underneath the door, about
like that, and we just about froze. We would come home from work and
make a fire in the wood stove, and by the time it warmed the whole
place up, it was bedtime, and we never learned how to bank the thing
so it would be warm in the morning.
I often tell people, even if I was sick I would go to work, because
I wanted to get warm so much. I remember saying then, "I'll never
complain about being too warm again." And I haven't much, that's
the truth. I don't mind hot weather.
So, no, I don't remember being—in our offices at work, we did
have evaporative coolers that they use in the desert some, and they
do a good job in the desert, too. I don't remember being hot or cold
here. I think I'm not very sensitive. [Laughter]
Wright: It
probably doesn't bother you.
Hedgepeth:
Well, I guess that's the truth. It doesn't today, does it, Johnny?
We have not had our air-conditioning on this year, and everybody else
we know has them going full time all day.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
They're scaring people right now quite a lot about even running your
air-conditioning, about electrical problems.
Wright: Only
one other issue I can think of to maybe touch on before we close for
the day. We've all mentioned World War II a couple of times as we've
spoken and you served, from what you were saying in there, John, and
you were in college during those years. And then you both came out
to a research center that was testing aircraft that possibly could
be used in some type of Cold War activity. Could you share with us
your feelings on that? Is that something that was discussed much here
on the center, or was it just part of a job that you accepted?
Hedgepeth:
Well, to me, it was just part of a job that sounded interesting to
me. I never really thought about—I have worked in a place where
one person came in and took a job as a secretary, I believe, and quit
that day because she hadn't realized that she would be working in
an area that was testing fighter airplanes, and it was against her
religion to participate in any kind of war activity or support, and
she quit. But I never thought about it. Maybe you have some feelings
on it.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
No, I always liked it. We both just enjoyed our work and we thought
we were contributing to what we were supposed to be doing the best
we could, and we didn't have too much leeway in that type job. I had
probably a lot more than she did. I know I did, in fact. But at that
time, it was just a computer pool of people, and it was a follow-on
from even Langley Field. That's exactly where they would do it.
In fact, this friend of hers, Lillian Boney, who was a college friend
and they roomed together when we got married, her last day she was
still in the computer pool, I think, more or less, doing different
projects, as called upon, or you might be working this today, you
might be working that tomorrow, but basically it was just the numbers
and the data was the same, regardless of what it came from.
A lot of time you just didn't even—well, I'm sure you knew at
the time, but you just didn't think about it, but you just did it
because that was part of the job and it didn't make any difference
to you because it was the same thing. It was pretty repetitious.
Hedgepeth:
And it was financially a good job. It didn't sound like it, $2,300
a year, but at that time it was a good job, so I was glad to be making
that much money.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
The equivalent is about $60,000 today, or better, $70,000 maybe, in
comparison.
Hedgepeth:
Well, I don't know what it would be, but I couldn't have done a whole
lot better anywhere else at that time.
Wright: And
it certainly led you to quite a bit of adventures with other companies
though.
Hedgepeth:
Yes, it did.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Another little interesting thing that has absolutely nothing to do
with what you're talking about, that we think about is that I got
my father a job out here, and what it was, the head of all of our
handling the facility there, a fellow named Harold Richards, I got
to telling him about my dad and what my dad did back then and he said,
"Man, I'd sure love to talk to your dad. I'd love to see if I
couldn't talk him to come out here and work with us."
My dad had worked for thirty-two years for a seafood-packing plant
back in Virginia, for J.S. Darling. It was one of the largest seafood-packing
places in the United States at that time, and he'd worked basically
the same salary and he'd had two fifty-dollar raises in his whole
thirty-two years.
Now, this is the way things were in those days. Like her father, he
probably started at a certain salary and he darn near left the company
making the same salary. That's the way things used to be in those
days. You hardly ever heard of advancing like we do today. If you
haven't gotten an advancement in a week, you're gone, you know, type
thing. In those days, if you had a job, you were damn glad to have
it, and you stayed with it.
Hedgepeth:
With regard to my father, my mother did teach. She quit teaching,
see, when I was born, because that was back in the days when the women
didn't do it, and didn't start teaching again, and got her master's
degree then when my sisters were about in high school. But my dad
was able to, how, I don't know, but not making any more money than
that, put three of us through college. I don't know how they did it.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Of course, college cost about a fiftieth of what it costs today. It's
all relative.
Hedgepeth:
Go ahead and tell about your dad, though.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
So anyway, I was telling Harold. He said, "Do you think you could
get your dad to come out here and talk to me? I tell you what, if
you can, I will get your dad's way paid out here from Virginia to
come talk to me about possibly coming to work for me," and my
dad did. My dad jumped at it, and, in fact, I had talked him into
it and told him what an interesting place and some of the benefits
he would have, which he's never had in his life, and much better pay,
than I knew he was.
So he took that job and his salary was about three times what it was
what he came in doing. And he just thoroughly loved that job. He worked
till his seventieth birthday. So it's interesting, I left a couple
years after Tut went to the Air Force, and that's just about the time
that I talked my dad into coming out here, and he went to work for
them, and he just absolutely thought that was the best job in the
world, and he was making really good money, more than he ever had,
half a dozen raises type thing, as he went along. And then had benefits,
which [were better than] Social Security [benefits].
Hedgepeth:
He would have worked for free, though, he loved it so much. And here's
another family tie-in to NASA. We have a good picture of Pop, his
dad, putting up the sign when the name changed from NACA to NASA.
We've got a nice picture of him actually putting up that sign on the
front.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
On the front of the building after it changed from NACA to NASA. He
was the one who installed the logo over the building.
Wright: And
how proud for him.
Hedgepeth:
Oh, he was. He wore it till he died, I think, a NASA hat all the time.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
But he did. But anyway, he came out here and he took that job. It
was kind of a dual purpose. He did whatever he needed to do, but he
also did the walk-around equipment to check it, a timekeeper or something
like that, or whatever you called them in those days, just walk around
and check his station and punch in that you were here and you were
here and you were here. Like a nighttime guard, I guess, but he really
wasn't meant to be. It was just to make sure all the equipment was
functioning and that type thing. He did that part-time, and he did
a lot of nighttime work, but he loved it. He just did. And then he
could do anything.
But anyway, he worked till his seventieth birthday, and then Tut tried
to match it, and she did. I've always thought that was kind of an
interesting story, and they did pay his way out to come out just to
talk to him about possibly coming to work and pay his way back, and
then they paid to move him out here, of course, and that type thing.
Hedgepeth:
I won't tell this story to embarrass Johnny, but one of the nicest
compliments I think I've ever had came from his father. After they
retired, they went back to Virginia for a few years, and all three
of their children were living in California, Johnny and both of his
sisters. I talked to Pop one night on the phone and he said, "Tut,
I miss you more than anybody in California." Now, how can you
ask for a better compliment than that from your father-in-law? That
meant a lot to me.
Wright: Before
we close out today, you have to tell us why you kept the name Tut,
or is that just what people started to call you?
Hedgepeth:
No, it has a real meaning. My grandmother, my mother's mother's maiden
name was Tuttle, so they named me, when I was born, Mary Tuttle. Whisnant
was my last name. But they, I think, started calling me Tut the day
I was born, and so nobody has ever called me Mary unless they just
see my name in an official capacity or something. I sign my checks
like that. That's about it. But everybody calls me Tut.
What do you want to tell about?
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Why don't you finish the story?
Hedgepeth:
They're not going to get away from here very soon. Our youngest grandson,
who is seven now, when he was born, I had no idea that my son and
daughter-in-law were going to do this, but they named him for my grandfather,
that my son never did even see, and my grandfather died before Lee
was born, and they named the baby Tatem Clay for my father's father,
my grandfather. I just adored him. He was just the most wonderful
grandfather in the world. I guess they'd heard me talk about him so
much.
So when our little T.C., this one here, was, I think, about two years
old, we all went back to North Carolina to the little church which
my grandfather attended when he was about that age. His folks lived
right next to this little country church in North Carolina, the Golden
Valley Methodist Church. We all went back there to have little T.C.
baptized in the same church where we think my grandfather probably
was baptized because his folks lived there and were buried in the
cemetery and everything. The church records are gone for that many
years ago, but it was a real sweet ceremony. It just meant a lot to
all of us.
So that's where that picture came from. It's actually made on the
porch of the house where my grandfather lived. It's still standing
and somebody lives there. We were able to have permission to go in
and look all through the house. It was a real something for T.C. to
remember in his old age, you know, that that happened to him.
Wright: Well,
you all both left quite a legacy to your family and quite a contribution
to NACA and NASA and the Air Force, and so much of the flight research.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
The one thing we really like is that NACA keeps in touch with us all
the time for almost anything going on. It's like we are still part
of NACA and I think we can look back at closer relationships to NACA
than we had with the Air Force because it's an entirely different
type thing and really had hands-on type operation, where you felt
you were participating, and people would say, "Well, Tut's in
charge of this or does this," or, "She sets up the meetings"
[on the AFTI F-16 Program at General Dynamics].
Well, actually for the first year of the AFTI program, she was the
number one person there, running everything. I mean, getting the office
set up, hiring people for it, and doing things like that. She was
really initially involved in that right from day one. They hired her
and let her go her own way and do what she has, select the type people
she wanted to be working with and that kind of thing.
Now she's getting in where she can talk about specifics, you know
what I mean, and where she was unable to at NACA, Langley, or here.
You've got to look at the type job she had, even though she had the
title. It's like so many titles, you really aren't used but maybe
1 percent of what you have and the job you're doing, but you had to
have it to get the job you're doing, and that's the way this particular
one turned out.
Hedgepeth:
We had an interesting experience after we were living in Bakersfield.
Johnny and I went to a meeting, at which one of the professors of
one of our colleges spoke, and he was blind, and was just the most
wonderful speaker. Just had a good sense of humor, he told some interesting
things, and says he considers his sight just a small handicap because
he can do what he wants to anyhow. I was so impressed, and I wrote
a letter to the editor of our local paper and I said, you know, it
was just wonderful to hear him speak and realize what he's done with
the handicap of being blind, and his attitude was so good. They printed
that in the paper, and that afternoon, we were going into a computer
store or something here, and some man came running up and he said,
"Tut and John Hedgepeth." He lives in Tahachapi [California],
he doesn't even live in Bakersfield, but he got hold of the paper
and he happened to read the letter to the editor.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
We hadn't seen this man for twenty-some years.
Hedgepeth:
He said, "I knew that's who that Tut Hedgepeth was. I remember
well going to a meeting years ago, and you were conducting the meeting
and that was the first meeting I'd ever been to that a woman was in
charge of things. I've never forgotten that, and then when I saw that
letter, I knew that was the same one."
Mr. Hedgepeth:
We thought that was so funny that he remembered and that he had that
experience, and had just happened to see that and be in Bakersfield
the same day that that thing came out. It was really unbelievable.
Hedgepeth:
And see us there. Well, he didn't remember me for my ability, particularly,
it was just—
Wright: Ah,
but your ability is what put you in that position.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
A lot of times in the early days, she was always in the high—well,
when she left the Air Force, she was the highest rated woman on the
base, at the Air Force, not NACA, because I think some people might
have gone higher. But that's one reason I left. I was just locked
in for about seven years in a row, couldn't go any higher, and they
just wouldn't. But since then, that same job I had, now is a GS-14
or something like that, but I never got that high. However, quite
often, she was initiating many of the meetings which she got involved
with, with Air Force key people and things like that, and a lot of
people, you know, talked about that. She's even had a case where some
people came to work for her or that were assigned to her that resigned
because they didn't want to work for a woman.
Hedgepeth:
We had one, yes.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
You had one person that you liked him and he liked you personally,
because it wasn't anything against you, but he just didn't want to
work for a woman.
Hedgepeth:
That did happen with one person. Mostly, the men that worked for me,
I got along with them all right, but there was one that—and
I didn't care. I told him okay, if that would bother you that much,
fine.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
She helped him get another job, in fact. However, she had a number
of people that really came out real strong for her in a lot of cases
on different situations. I mean, some really high-ranking people came
up one time and she got in—one time there was one position that
she'd been doing for almost a year, but when they came to assigning
somebody in it, they selected someone else who hadn't even done that
kind of work, but was it a man. They didn't want to have a female
for it. She contested it and really had a pretty lengthy thing on
that.
Hedgepeth:
Unsuccessfully, though.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Unsuccessfully. That's exactly right. But no one said she was wrong.
They agreed that it probably shouldn't have gone that way, but it
had been done and it never was overturned. So she had a lot of things
like that at different points.
Hedgepeth:
Some of the women that were around at that time maybe got a little
encouragement, you know, and they looked into that kind of thing before
a selection was made.
Wright: It's
admirable that those types of things happened to you, but it didn't
deter you from staying and continuing to try to advance and do the
positions that you were asked to do.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
When she was working for the Air Force, she frequently had military
people, both [civilian] and enlisted military people working for her,
but she'd also frequently have captains and majors assigned to her,
at the level she was working at, too.
Hedgepeth:
I had one young lieutenant that was just—I liked him a lot,
but he was just impossible for working. He just didn't, I don't think
wanted to work anywhere, for that matter. And I had to make his annual
evaluation. I told him, "You've got to do a little better or
I'm going to not be able to give you a good recommendation."
He wasn't smart to me or anything, but he didn't do any better. He
was a playboy type. He was interested in a lot of other stuff. Figured
he was going to move on along up into the higher ranks, and I really
gave a pretty poor annual review.
But he came back to me later and he said, "Well, I really sort
of appreciate what you wrote down. I had not been really good at my
work or anything. I can do a lot better. I'm pleased that you didn't
say anything worse than you did." And he did do a lot better
after that. I felt bad, though. I always hate to give anybody a poor
recommendation. That's one of the hardest things as a supervisor.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
You had some early experiences with some early black people, too.
I mean, some real good and some real bad, in the early days. Most
of them have been good, but she did have one case where one was kind
of negative. You just couldn't do anything to make it right. He just
felt misfit. And then we had one couple that we just loved, and we've
had them to our home a half a dozen times. Participated in parties
with them and things like that, and they were just wonderful people,
and we just felt so bad for them.
Hedgepeth:
He had a bad time because they tried to buy a house after they got
here and he said that they didn't show him houses like they wanted.
He said that one person actually told him, "You're not going
to be shown anything that you want here." I felt awful about
them, because he was a really good worker and had a good attitude.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
And she was a wonderful person herself.
Hedgepeth:
Yes, she was.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Beautiful woman.
Hedgepeth:
They finally took a job somewhere else, just mainly because of that.
I can't remember now where they went.
Wright: Did
you see the positions of women change while you were working for the
Air Force? Did you see more women be able to move up through management
positions?
Hedgepeth:
Yes, I did. I don't think it's perfect yet, but yes, I did see that
things were changing for women. It is better but it still—not
too long ago, Johnny was retired and I was still working. He went
to the bank most of the time because I was at work, but one day I
needed to go and get a check cashed for something or other and I went
into the bank. The person I talked to at the bank was a woman—this
made it worse even, you know. I wrote my check and I went up to cash
it and this woman looked at me and she said, "Are you able to
write checks from your husband's account?"
I said, "My husband's account? It's our combined account. Of
course I'm able to write a check on this account." And she actually
went and checked on that before she gave me my money. I told him later,
if it had been a man, I would have thought little of it, but a woman.
And this must have been in the 1990s. I tell you, I just can't understand
how some people—my name was right on the account, but "on
your husband's account."
Mr. Hedgepeth:
I told you I went over and told her to do that.
Hedgepeth:
Yes, he told me that.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
Just to make sure she doesn't give her too much.
Wright: Got
to keep some humor in it.
Hedgepeth:
Yes, that's right.
Wright: Something
to talk about. Well, we have certainly enjoyed learning about the
aspects of your life that certainly have shaped it, and shaped so
many lives as well.
Hedgepeth:
Thank you for letting me participate in your program.
Wright: We've
enjoyed it.
Mr. Hedgepeth:
It's certainly interesting. We think it's so funny because so many
people have gone now that are not available to talk to about different
things, and we feel real fortunate at our ages that we feel as healthy
as we are, you know what I mean? We've slowed down a little bit, but
pretty much do as we always have done. When we get ready to go somewhere,
we do it and just enjoy it as much as we ever did.
Hedgepeth:
We're both seventy-six now. We used to think that people [our age]
were old, and we don't feel old.
Wright: We
thank you for taking time out of that busy life to make time for us
this morning.
Hedgepeth:
Thank you.
Wright: Thank
you and we look forward to sending you the materials for you to review
and enjoy it for yourself.
Hedgepeth:
Well, thank you.
[End of interview]