aeronautical engineer at NASA, was born Christine Voncile Mann in Monroe, North Carolina, the youngest of five children born to two schoolteachers, Noah Horace Mann, Sr. (a former Latin teacher who later became an insurance salesman), and Desma Chaney Mann Darden credits her success and her early interest in science to her parents emphasis on their children s education She recalls that when she was just three years old her mother began taking Darden and her siblings to classes she taught at the two room schoolhouse across the street from the family home Darden began doing the schoolwork that the other children did and was soon working two grades ahead in school Her father also encouraged his daughter s interest in auto mechanics and fixing things around the house early training for an engineer Because she was younger than her classmates and therefore socially vulnerable her parents sent ...
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Steven J. Niven
astronaut, was born Joan Elizabeth Miller Higginbotham in Chicago, Illinois, to Inez and William Higginbotham. She graduated from Chicago's highly selective Whitney M. Young Magnet High School in 1982, one year after future First Lady Michelle Obama. Higginbotham, who had excelled in math and science in high school, then entered Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering in 1987. She had not grown up dreaming of becoming an astronaut, or even of working in the space industry. Indeed, it was not until 1983, when Higginbotham was an undergraduate, that the first American woman, Sally Ride, and the first African American man, Guion S. Bluford, entered space. (Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet Cosmonaut, was the first woman in space, twenty years earlier, in 1963 while the first person of African descent in space was Arnaldo Tamayo Ménde ...
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Charles Rosenberg
in the landmark church-and-state case, Lemon v. Kurtzman, was born in McDonough, Georgia. He was the second of three children born to George Gilbert Lemon, the owner of an undertakers business, later a porter for a wholesale house, and by some reports, owner of a tailor shop, and his wife, Annie F. Lemon. Alton Lemon had an older sister, Edna, and a younger sister, Modestine.
The family moved to Atlanta while he was still a child, where he attended public schools until the tenth grade. Interviewed in 2004 he recalled that city schools opened every day with a prayer or Protestant devotion and it never really registered with me Hudson He was sent for his junior and senior years to a private high school in Lawrenceville Virginia Raised in a Baptist church to which his parents belonged Lemon enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta after World War II ...
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Caroline M. Brown
aviator and aeronautical engineer, was born in Detroit, Michigan, the third son of Alma (Price) Loving, a homemaker and housekeeper, and Hardin Clay Loving, a railroad conductor and optometrist. Neal Loving had an early love of aviation that remained with him despite family objections. Although he changed elementary schools frequently owing to his family's poverty and related evictions, he read every aviation book and magazine at nearby branches of the Detroit Public Library and raced to watch passing airplanes during school hours. At a schoolteacher's suggestion, he acquired an application for the U.S. Air Corps at the nearest post office, and read it avidly. Deterred by its unequivocal statement that applicants were to be “white, male,” he threw away the application and continued to explore. He saved his lunch and movie admission money to buy model airplane materials, and, when the Detroit City Airport opened in 1929 ...
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Lisa M. Bratton
Tuskegee Airman and prisoner of war, was born Luther Henry Smith Jr. in Des Moines, Iowa, the second child of Luther Henry Smith Sr., a black-eyed pea salesman, and Ida. His father's sales territory included the Midwest, and visiting Des Moines, Iowa, he found that since there were so few African Americans, the effects of segregation and discrimination were minimal and opportunities for economic progress were strong. Smith's mother was from Dubuque, Iowa. Her father had been a trader who later made his home in Des Moines. Smith's parents met in 1918.
Young Luther exhibited an interest in aviation as a child At the age of seven he drew a picture of an airplane and showing it to his second grade teacher announced that it was a picture of the airplane in which he planned to fly his family to Africa At the age of ...
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Jason Philip Miller
astronaut and scientist, was born Stephanie Diana Wilson in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Eugene Wilson, an electrical engineer, and Barbara Wilson, who worked in aerospace. The family relocated to the small town of Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts, when Stephanie was a child, and it was there that she was raised and attended local schools. She was a good student, with interests in music, sports, and science. When she was thirteen, she interviewed an astronomy professor as part of a “career awareness” class and project. She was inspired and later would recount that moment as the one that helped to plot her future course.
Wilson graduated from Taconic High School in 1984 and matriculated late that year at Harvard College, from which she earned a bachelor's in engineering science four years later. She went on to the University of Texas and received a master's in aerospace engineering in 1992 ...
