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NASA JOHNSON SPACE CENTER ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

EDITED ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT

BETTY S. LOVE

INTERVIEWED BY REBECCA WRIGHT

PALMDALE, CALIFORNIA – 6 MAY 2002

WRIGHT: Today is May 6, 2002. This interview with Betty Love is being conducted by Rebecca 

Wright for the NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] Headquarters History 

Office Herstory Project. The interview is being held at Palmdale, California.

We thank you again for taking time for this project, to discuss your experiences while 

you were employed with the [Dryden] Flight Research Center in California. We would like for 

you to begin today by telling us some brief background information about yourself.

LOVE: I was born in Pasadena, California, and in 1930, when I was eight years old, my parents 

moved to Antelope Valley, and I have lived in the valley except for twenty-five years that I was 

in San Diego or for three years in Glendale, both of them in California.

WRIGHT: What type of interests did you have when you were growing up that led to what 

educational background that you had?

LOVE: We lived on a farm on the east side of the valley where Edwards Air Force Base 

[California] airplanes flew over our home. Also, I had a friend who was a hostess, on an airlines

as they were called then, rather than a steward or a stewardess. I decided I wanted to be an 

airline hostess. When I started high school, I took a lot of science and associated studies, 

because during that time period you had to be a registered nurse to be a hostess. So that was my 
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goal, and all the way through high school and through junior college, that was what I studied, 

subjects that would allow me to enter a nursing school. 

At that time, Los Angeles County Hospital had one of the better nursing schools. So,

after graduating from junior college, or before, you put in your application to be accepted, I had 

taken biology, chemistry, nutrition, and physics, some math courses. So, I had a pretty good 

science background. I think it was two weeks before I was to start nursing school, plans 

changed. So I never got there.

That was what I did with my education. I graduated from Antelope Valley Junior 

College with an A.A. [Associate in Arts] in science background, and that was the extent of my 

education. In fact, that was pretty far to go for a girl during that time period, because normally 

you either were a teacher or a nurse or a secretary, and a lot of the gals from school just became 

secretaries. I didn’t want to be a secretary.

WRIGHT: Were you able to find a job with your educational background? 

LOVE: I never went to work. I became a mother and was a stay-at-home mom and raised the 

two children until they started school.

WRIGHT: Well, I’m sure you were very busy with children. That is always a full-time job.

LOVE: By the time you’re a PTA [Parent Teacher Association] president and work with the 

teachers and parents your day is gone. There weren’t soccer moms then, and there weren’t any

Little Leagues, but there were other kinds of things that the kids did. So you worked with them, 
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and I worked with the school. I was at school a lot, too, doing mimeographing and stuff like that 

for the teachers and the office, just to keep busy, just like I’m doing now in the history office.

WRIGHT: When did you become associated with the Flight Research Center?

LOVE: In January of 1952. I had a friend who raised turkeys, but he was also an electronics 

person, and he worked at [Dryden] FRC [Flight Research Center, California], and he coaxed my 

husband at that time to go out and get a job because they needed someone with his talent for a

position. He went out and applied, interviewed, and was accepted. I was a friend of this fellow’s

wife and worked with her in PTA and other school functions. One night we were having dinner, 

and he said, “Betty, they need computers out there, and you would qualify. Why don’t you go 

out and get yourself a job?”

I said, “What for?”

He says, “Oh, come on.”

So I went out and interviewed. I think Roxie [Roxanah B. Yancey] interviewed me, who 

was head of the computers. I didn’t have a math degree, and mathematicians were mostly what 

they were looking for, but she said, “Well, you’ve had some math, and you’ve got quite a bit of 

science. We’ll try it.”

I went to work in January of 1952, and [NACA (National Advisory Committee for 

Aeronautics) was] at the south base, and I was a computer, and computers, of course, reduced

data.
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WRIGHT: Did you have any idea of what that meant when your friend said “They need 

computers”? 

LOVE: Oh, yes. The friend had explained what the ladies did.

WRIGHT: Had you ever met or did you know any other women at that time that had that job?

LOVE: No. I’d had that whole year of knowing what NACA was doing out there and knew 

what the girls in the office were doing and things like that, because the friend would report back. 

So it sounded like it’d be an interesting job, which was my first job for pay. NACA was at 

Muroc on the edge of Rosamond dry lakebed.

May I read what I had written for you?

WRIGHT: Sure.

LOVE: It says, “Working as a computer, one would reduce the data from research flights by 

calculations, convert the inches of deflection on a record or film to engineering units, and this 

was done by using a scale with the film over the light box and just recording it and calibrating it, 

and you would come out with engineering units.” 

Anyone with any kind of an idea of math—I think it could have been even high school

math—could have done what they really wanted done, except for maybe those that were doing 

loads work. All of the ladies that did the loads were mathematicians, and the rest of the ladies, 
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and there were maybe about fourteen of us in the office, most of them had college degrees in 

something other than math, but were doing the same work that I was. 

The data sheets were all set up. The requests for the data was given to Roxanah Yancey 

by the engineers and she would fill out a sheet that would tell you what information was needed 

and that you were going to work up. You were to work up accelerations or altitude and air 

speed. The sheets would be labeled “Column 1,” 2, 3, 4, and 5, on up, and in each column it 

would tell you what you were supposed to put in there. The first column, of course, was always 

the reading off of the film. After that, if you followed her instructions, when you got to the end, 

you had your engineering units. And if you were reading an air speed and altitude record, you 

would continue by calculating the columns, as the heading directed, and you would look up the 

numbers from tables, or you would look them up from calibrations and keep on multiplying, 

subtracting, or doing whatever you were supposed to until you got your final engineering unit.

The only one that was a long process was air speed and altitude. The roll angles and the 

pitch angles, the accelerations, were all maybe three columns at the most. Maybe you might 

have a fourth column, depending on what the engineer was asking for. And when you got 

completed with them, you had to have them checked. So you would find one of the other ladies 

that wasn’t doing anything other than more data, and she would come and spot-check you, and 

then you had to spot-check also, and you would maybe check five on a page that had thirty 

answers.

I found that the trace made a pattern on the film. Your data also had to follow that, and if 

it had a spike in it, say, you were working with Gs that were running .9, .8, and all at once you 

had one that was 5-something, well, you’d go back and know you’d calculated incorrectly or 
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misplaced a decimal or done something wrong. You could check yourself pretty carefully, but 

one could also miss an error, so double checking was good.

Anyhow, when you got finished with your data request, you gave it back to Roxie. You 

did not have any contact with the engineer. You didn’t know what you were doing. You knew 

what plane you were working on and you knew what units you were after, but you didn’t have

any contact with the engineering so didn’t really have a feel for your work.

I mentioned something the other day to Mike Gorn, and he said, “Tell Rebecca,” that our 

computers office was like a library. Only the hum of the Friedan calculators was the noise that 

you heard. No one spoke. You weren’t supposed to visit with your neighbor. You were 

supposed to keep your work right in front of you and do that. You weren’t to go down and visit 

with the engineers. 

You were allowed out of the office two times, once in the morning to go get coffee, 

which was out in the hangar, and you went in twos, and you were expected to go get your coffee 

and come right back. You weren’t to talk to anyone in the hangar. Well, that was hard for me, 

because a lot of guys that worked out there I had gone to school with. So we’d stop and chitterchat, and the other girl would poke me and say, “Hey, we’re not supposed to do that.” 

And then, of course, you could go to the restroom, but you weren’t supposed to dillydally. You were supposed to go and come right back, and you were to tell Roxie where you 

were going, and I don’t think it was because she was hard about it, like, “I’m going to rule you 

right under my thumb.” I think it was because she was being pressured to produce the data to get 

back to the engineers after a flight, and so she controlled all of the gals in there the same.

But it was, it was very, very quiet. And, of course, we didn’t have cafeterias, so you ate 

lunch in your room at your desk, and you brought a book to read, because you couldn’t talk.
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WRIGHT: Not even during the lunch break?

LOVE: If you did, it was to be quiet because maybe someone was still trying to finish up 

something that was needed right away. So it was a quiet place to work, and it induced you to get 

your work done. But other than to read film when I first got there—oh, I’d been there, how long 

had I been there? About six months, I guess, and Roxie called me up to her desk, and I thought, 

“Ooh, now what did I do?”

She said, “Betty,” and she had some sheets of paper. She said, “Will you take this 

posterboard and print one page on each one of these posterboards?” She didn’t tell me why or 

anything. 

And I took them, and of course, not being there very long, some of the terminology for 

the instrumentation and everything, I didn’t know what it was. So I printed the boards, the 

posterboard-type for her.

Later on I found out they were having a conference and a meeting, and they were using 

them on the displays. Why I was chosen, I don’t have the slightest idea, maybe some of the 

older gals should have been doing that instead of me. But I did it. Don’t ask me why.

WRIGHT: You mentioned that you knew what plane you were working on, but you didn’t ever 

talk to the engineers. Were you working on a different plane every day?

LOVE: Oh, you might work on two airplanes a day. If you came in in the morning and you had 

started a project the afternoon before, you had given it to Roxie before you went home, and then 
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you would pick it up from her desk and take it and finish it. Up in the top of the paper, it would 

say the X-3, the X-4, X-1 number 2. It would also tell you what instrument recorded on the film

you were using. It would have the corrections marked in red for you, so that you knew just 

exactly what correction, which came from the pre- and the post-flight calibrations, before the 

airplane took off and when the airplane came back. If there was a discrepancy in the instrument, 

then that was your correction that you either added or subtracted to your film reading, and you 

read from a reference to a trace, and you read in inches, down to 005—.005, five, I guess it was. 

Then when you turned that in, maybe you’d finish it about ten o’clock and turned it in, 

she’d give you another set of data to do, and it might be on a different airplane. The request was 

for whatever experimental airplanes were flying. When I was there, they were flying the X-1 

and the Phase II’s, and we weren’t allowed to go out and look at the airplanes either, so one

didn’t. 

Our room was right at the edge of the taxi way where they taxied the airplanes off the 

runway. There were windows on the south end of the building covered with Venetian blinds that 

were most always closed. Once in a while, we could peek through the blinds. The ladies that sat 

next to the windows would look at Roxie before they would peek at what was coming in and 

give the rest of us the “hi-sign” to come look too. Roxie must have known what was going on.

Then, of course, once the data was taken off of that flight, why, the engineers wanted 

their data yesterday, like always. Actually, I enjoyed it. I found the work fascinating. I would 

have liked to have asked “Why?” lots of times. What are we doing this for? How’s it going to 

be used? What’s it going to help? But you didn’t have that opportunity.
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Our building—I noticed that you asked what kind of condition our building was in. They 

were a series of Dallas huts put together to form a long building.1 Maybe the Air Force had long 

buildings, but I don’t know what they were called. But they were like the little squared Dallas 

huts, plywood on the outside and a metal torsion bar from one corner down from the ceiling to 

the floor. My desk sat beside one of those torsion bars, and I didn’t have a window. I was on the 

windowless side of the room. The long hall that came up to the middle, we were across the end 

of the building, like a “T.” We were the top on the “T,” and the hall went to the front door, and 

the engineering offices were on either side of that hall. If you walked down the hall, even to go 

to the ladies’ restroom, you’d hear them laughing and joking and having a good time, and you’d 

think, “How come?” [Laughs] But, anyhow.

Walt [Walter C.] Williams, who was the chief of the National Advisory Committee for 

Aeronautics (NACA) Muroc Flight Test Unit, and that was what he was called at that time, and 

De E. Beeler, who was head of engineering, had their offices with a secretary up in the very 

front. The financial and administrative offices were in a building adjoining. Our building had a 

breezeway, a covered breezeway, into the hangar, so you’d never had to go outside to get into the 

hangar, and the Coke machines and everything were all lined up in this little breezeway. Flight 

operations, like you were in today, the head of that was Joe Vensel, and his office was just at the 

other end of that little breezeway. He and his secretary had that office. So he was right near the 

hangar.

1 Dallas Huts were small buildings constructed by and used by the armed forces. They measured 20’ by 

20’and were built with plywood. For more information see: “US Marine Corps Outlying Field, Greenville, NC,” 

US Marine Corps VMD-354 Homepage, Online, http://www.usmarinecorpsvmd-354.com/greenvillenc.html (Last 

Updated n.d.; Accessed 19 June 2002); “A Cal Poly Pomona Chronology,” Cal Poly Pomona Homepage, Online, 

http://www.csupomona.edu/~library/LibraryInfo/special/Chronology/account.html (Last Updated 19 April 2002; 

Accessed 19 June 2002).
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WRIGHT: How many computers were in your area?

LOVE: There were about twelve or fourteen computers, and, like I said, the engineers would 

come in and talk to Roxie. They might even sit on one of the desks in the middle of the room 

and talk to her. All of us could hear these conversations. But there were no male computers. 

They were all ladies, and most of them were—I would say 50 percent of them were Air Force 

wives, and so they came and left within a short period of time.

WRIGHT: Did Roxie ever have meetings with you as a group, or was everything done on the 

individual basis when she communicated information to you? I think we call them today staff 

meetings or group meetings or hands-on meetings. But she never had—

LOVE: Never a meeting. My lands, no. [Laughs] No, there were never any meetings. She 

probably attended meetings at Walt Williams’ direction, because she was head of that unit, so 

she would go and report things. I’ve seen photographs of meetings, and she’s always at those 

meetings. And Mary [V.] Little [Kuhl], I always considered her an assistant, because if Roxie 

wasn’t able to be there, Mary would be there to kind of take her place. The engineers would go 

see Mary rather than Roxie. But Mary tells me that wasn’t so, so I’m not real sure how the 

pecking order was.

WRIGHT: Was Roxanah the only woman that you know of on the base that had that type of 

position, whatever that position was? Were there any other women?
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LOVE: On the whole base?

WRIGHT: Yes, that were working.

LOVE: Not in computing. There was a woman draftsman that had a group under her, that would 

probably be comparable. But as far as research airplanes, no, and, of course, there weren’t the 

big-frame computers, so we were the big-frame computers.

WRIGHT: Now, every day when you’d get ready to leave, you mentioned you turned your work 

back in.

LOVE: Yes.

WRIGHT: So nothing was ever left on your desk.

LOVE: Oh, no. Our desks were clean. Our Friedans were covered, because there might be a 

quarter-inch of dirt when you came back, and our light boxes were always put away in the 

bottom of our desks in our drawers. But you didn’t keep anything. You kept your supplies, your 

pencils, and your scales. You had a twelve-inch scale, a six-inch scale, and you had several 

French curves that were assigned to you when you came to work, and those you kept in your 

desk, and a triangle for straight lines and things like that. But, no, we didn’t keep our work in the 

desk; it was given back to Roxie. And I suppose, looking back on it now, not then, I didn’t 

know, but looking back at it later, it probably was a good thing to do because if the engineers 
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needed that work, why, then she might get a couple of the girls that lived in the dorm to stay and 

do the work. So it was probably done for a purpose, and it was a good reason. But we always 

have to look at it backwards to make sure.

WRIGHT: There were women that lived in the dorm that had come out to work at Dryden, and 

then, of course, there were women like you that were there. Their husbands worked out there.

LOVE: And they lived on the base, too. They lived in what was called waring housing, that the 

Air Force built for the servicemen. They had started to build a few homes in Lancaster. So 

some of them came from Lancaster, but not very many of them, and, of course, I didn’t live in 

Lancaster. I lived in Littlerock. So I drove from Littlerock in a carpool.

WRIGHT: Were you one of the few that commuted in every day to your group of computers, and 

did you commute with your husband?

LOVE: Yes. We had carpools. There were people from that area that would come in, and they 

would—in fact, most everybody got there by carpools, even those that came from Mojave or 

Tehachapi or Lancaster, Palmdale area. They all came in carpools, and there was usually five or 

six in a carpool, depending on the size of your car. But most of the cars in that time period 

would hold three in the front and three in the back. They didn’t have bucket seats in the front 

seats.

WRIGHT: Did the women ever drive the carpools, or was it always the men? Just curious.
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LOVE: Later on, the women did, because I did. As the place kind of grew—well, I would say 

that until we moved over into our new location, most of the women lived right there on base with 

their husbands or lived in the dorm. The girls lived in the dorm, because a lot of them were 

single and no other housing was available.

WRIGHT: When did your duties change? How long did you do what you were doing when you 

were first hired?

LOVE: Maybe after I’d been there—let’s see, ‘52—in late ‘53, I started to get data that had 

special little notes, and Roxie would give it to me, and I was the only one doing that kind of data, 

and rather than read a trace from the reference up to the trace, I was reading the amplitude of the 

record and counting the frequencies that it might spike. I know that’s hard to visualize, but if 

you took a pencil and just went zigzag up and down, and the film had timelines on it, so you 

could count how many frequencies per second or whatever, and I found myself doing some of 

that, but I still didn’t know why, because I still wasn’t able to talk to the engineer. Well, that 

went on for just a real short period, and I couldn’t tell you, two or three months, or something 

like that. I still did the other work as needed, too. But whenever there was any of this, why, 

Roxie gave it to me. 

Well, then—I should back up a minute, I guess. Whenever you did a sheet of data, you 

put your initials on it so that it was known who had done the workup. Pretty soon I found myself 

going down the hall and having one of the engineers do this [demonstrates], say, “Come on in.” 

I knew I wasn’t supposed to, so I’d stand in the door, and I was working for him. I didn’t know 
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this, and why I was chosen to do it, I cannot tell you, because other than there was two other 

ladies in there that I felt were older than I was, but I was older than the majority of them. The 

majority of them were real young, weren’t married. I was in my thirties. I was thirty-two or 

thirty-three, I think, or something like that. So why I got chosen to do it, I have no idea.

Tom [Thomas F.] Baker worked in structures, what they called Aero Structures Branch, 

and he did all the vibration and flutter and buffet work on the experimental aircraft. So I helped 

him off and on, but still did everything like everybody else, until we moved in 1954. I worked 

just a short time in the computers at our new location. Roxie told me one morning when I came 

to work, she said, “Your desk has been moved.” 

And I thought, “Ooh, now what did I do?” 

She said, “It’s down in Tom’s office.”

And I said, “Oh?”

She said, “Well, Tom has requested that you be in his office.” So my Friedan, everything 

that I’d had as a computer, went down into his office, and there were four engineers in the office 

beside him. Well, there were three, counting him. But they were called a structures group, and 

from then on, I worked with him, and my title changed from a computer to an aeronautical 

research engineering technician. And how that happened, I can’t answer you.

WRIGHT: Were you under Roxanah that way?

LOVE: No, I worked under Tom who reported to Mr. Beeler.

WRIGHT: So that was the end of your time with her.
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LOVE: With the computers, yes. I still worked with her, I mean, if I ran into something I didn’t 

know. The only difference it really meant, I could ask why and what was I doing, and I was told 

and I was shown. I got taken down and shown the airplanes and what we were studying. If there 

was a panel on the side of an airplane that vibrated in flight, I was shown that panel, and if it had 

cracked, why, I was explained how it cracked. So I was in seventh heaven. I knew what I was 

going to be doing.

WRIGHT: Do you believe the information you were getting now could benefit your whole 

understanding of what you were doing?

LOVE: Of what I’m doing now?

WRIGHT: No, what you were doing then. Did it help you do your job?

LOVE: Oh, yes. In fact, I enjoyed what I was doing, but it made more interesting, and it was just 

a fun time. It really was, and I learned a lot. There was a time the boss had gotten himself into 

an auto accident, and he had done all the boundary for a buffet, the buffet boundaries, and I had 

worked with him, and he had shown me how he had done them, and how he had selected the 

right point and everything, and he sometimes would let me, but he was always there to check on 

it. Well, this one particular time he wasn’t there, and they wanted a buffet boundary on the X-3 

airplane, and the engineer who was in charge of the X-3 came down and he said, “Betty, you’ve 

worked with Tom. Can you do a buffet boundary?” 
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And I thought, “Oooh.” But I did it, and I gave it to him, and I said, “You’re not really 

going to use it until Tom sees it, are you?”

And he said, “Well,” he said, “we do need it.”

And I said, “Okay.” I said, “It’s to the best of my knowledge.” 

When Tom came back, I showed it to him, and he said, “You did a good job.” He says, 

“Quit worrying.” But he and I worked together very, very well, and I worked with the other 

engineers and reduced their data also. 

But what I did find, if Tom couldn’t keep me busy, and I don’t think I worked any faster 

than anybody else, but I was steady and just got it done, I guess, so he would farm me out. He’d 

say, “Well, So-and-so down the hall needs some help. They’re not getting his data out like he 

would like it.” So I would go get it and bring it back to my desk, and I’d do that data for him. 

Then pretty soon I found out, well, he had farmed me out to flight ops [operations], like 

where you were today, and during that time period everything was transcribed onto a—I don’t 

know what they called them, but it’s a continuous tape, and they were maybe four inches wide, 

and when they were folded together or when they were in the box, they were maybe six to seven 

inches long, and everything the pilot said, everything anyone at the control room said, it was 

recorded on this tape, and they had to be transcribed. So I found myself sometimes down there 

transcribing those tapes.

Then shortly after that, because we ran into, well, the higher speeds, higher altitudes, we 

ran into more difficulties with flutter or vibration that would occur on the airplane. So in order 

to find that spot on the records, I was delegated to go down and sit in the control room, and when 

the pilot reported, “There’s a little buffet here” or, “I hear something,” I would recorded the time 

and what he said, so that when we got the film the next day, why, I could go in and find it, and 
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that way we knew what the pilot said. We didn’t have to go ask him again or anything. And that 

made the job more interesting because that added another factor of “Why? Why do you do all of 

this?”

Of course, it was to see that when the next generation of airplanes were built that they 

wouldn’t have these same problems. But the next generation of airplanes went faster and went 

higher, so they had just about the same kind of problems, but all fixable. But I enjoyed that. 

One of the things that Mr. Beeler called me up and asked me to do—and here, again, I 

don’t know, because he had a whole Center to pull from—would I help Mr. Fiskan, who was our 

illustrator at the time, make a movie. I said, “I don’t know anything about film. I don’t know 

anything about making movies.” 

And he said, “You can learn.” 

Mr. Fiskan, on his spare time, wrote scripts for TV shows, and one of them that he wrote 

was Bonanza, and he knew all the characters and everything, and he knew just how you were 

supposed to do it. So we did a story board, which I guess all movies do, but I didn’t know this, 

which puts down how long or the length in minutes or seconds that you want to show a scene, 

and the words that you might use with it. 

Then I went out and found the film in our photo lab, our movie film, and after we had 

spliced all these short copies of film together and had this story board and the timing down, Mr. 

Fiskan said, “Now it’s time to put it together for real and to have a narrator do the talk over the 

top of the picture so that you have a talking picture.” 

To do that, we had to use Lookout Mountain, which was the depository—is that how you 

want to call it?—for all of the film, for the movies, and the Air Force and all of the military. It 

was underground. There were about five, six stories and they were all underground, and a 
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parking lot was all you saw on top of the ground. You didn’t even know there was a building 

there. So I got to go do that. Then no one would believe there was such place as Lookout 

Mountain. But that was an interesting and fun project, and it was called Pathway to the Stars, 

and what it was, was a day with Joe [Joseph A.] Walker, who was a pilot on the X-15.

WRIGHT: What year was that? Do you remember approximately?

LOVE: 1966, maybe? ’66? ’65?

WRIGHT: That’s great. Do you have a copy of the film now?

LOVE: Yes, and I had them put it on a VCR [videocassette recorder] for me, but it isn’t as nice 

as the film. And it was black and white because they didn’t have much color then. But that was 

a fun-type project.

WRIGHT: And when did it debut? Did the Center people get to see it?

LOVE: Oh, yes. They showed it to the Center people. I’m afraid I’m the type that loves to do 

work behind the scenes, and I don’t want anything, so my name isn’t on it anyplace. Neither is 

Mr. Fiskan’s. The only name on it anyplace is Joe Walker’s and the actor who narrated it, and I 

can’t even remember his name without looking. But it was a project that was different than the 

research airplanes. But I found I got to do a lot of that kind of stuff, and I didn’t do anything 

special for any of that, but it just worked that way.
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WRIGHT: During all this time, did you still have the same title?

LOVE: Yes.

WRIGHT: Were you still in the same office with your desk being in there as well?

LOVE: Yes, and then Tom left and went to Houston [Texas]. In fact, he went with Walt 

Williams when Walt went down, and I’m not real sure—he was one of the boys, the engineering 

fellows, that Walt took with him from FRC. 

Then I had a series of supervisors, but I was still doing structure work on research 

aircraft. So I stayed in structures right up until I retired.

WRIGHT: In what year did you retire?

LOVE: 1974, in May of 1974. I enjoyed what I did. I still do.

WRIGHT: During those twenty years or so that you were there, what other types of changes or, 

for instance, did you see any more rooms of women being computers? How did that change? 

How were women starting to become more of the work force while you were out there?

LOVE: Oh, I think the office of the computers started to change when they got new computer

equipment. One of the new pieces was a telereader that punched data into cards. One could roll 
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6 May 2002 20

the film into this machine, and with the crosshairs vertically and horizontally, you would zero in 

on your reference point, just the once, and then after that you didn’t have to go back unless you 

made a boo-boo. You would cross the hairs over the trace and punch a foot pedal [that would 

activate another machine that would] punch the card. The cards would be given to the 

mainframe operators, and they would, in turn, have program cards from the computers. I’m not 

sure how the process worked, because I didn’t do it, but there was a set of program cards for 

each engineering unit that was requested. A print-out in engineering units was received back by 

the requesting person. (By this time two male computers had been added to the staff.)

So I think the computing section changed quite drastically during that time period. 

During this time period Roxie left the computers and became an engineer with the Flight 

Dynamics Branch, Systems Analysis Section. Another computer received a title similar to mine 

and worked in the Flight Mechanics Branch, working with airspeed calculations and associated 

data. That kind of changed the whole computer section. Mary Little assumed what was left of 

the section, and all the mainframe, calibrations, and everything concerning data reduction. It was 

during this time period when Harriet [J. DeVries Stephenson Smith] came back as an engineer. 

Bertha [M. Ryan] came in shortly after that as a lady engineer. NASA now had two. The first 

lady engineer was Joan Childs Dahlan, who carried the title of computer, and was working at 

NACA when I came to work. She left before the move in 1954.

Before Bertha came, we had two ladies come in that were engineers, but they didn’t stay 

very long. They didn’t like the way the fellows treated them, and since I wasn’t around, I don’t 

know what all of that was about. I always felt that, hey, you treat them right, they’re going to 

treat you right. If you’re going to be snippy with them and want to pull your female attitude, 

what do I want to say? Well, being a gal, you’re just supposed to have privileges over the male, 
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6 May 2002 21

and that didn’t work. You have to be one of them, and you have to have fun with them, and you 

have to work hard with them. 

But Harriet was there, and then later on Carol [A. Bauer Reukauf] that we met today was 

there, and Jenny [Baer-Riedhart] who is head of PACE [Public Affairs, Commercialization, and 

Education Office], came in as an engineer and worked her way up to where she is now head of 

PACE. Most of the girls, when I left, were either secretaries, who worked in finance, or worked 

in administration. There were several girls that had top jobs in those areas. But there weren’t 

any mechanics. There weren’t any shop people. Oh, yes, there was. There was one girl in 

instrumentation, and she was well liked by her crew, and she treated them nice. And then there 

were maybe four engineering women, and, of course, now there’s a lot more out there, and 

they’re not all secretaries. In fact, do we even have any computers? We don’t even have any 

computers anymore.

WRIGHT: Tell me about the dress code or the expectations of how women were supposed to act. 

You mentioned about women just getting along with the men, but were the women allowed in 

the hangars when the men were working? I know the computers, as you mentioned, were not. 

But were other women—

LOVE: No, they were not. In fact, Walt Williams frowned on it. I’m not so sure that, not 

knowing them and not knowing them socially or anything like that, I have no idea of what their 

feelings were, as far as women were concerned, but I do know that they felt that women 

belonged where they were working and they should stay there; there was no need for them to 

know any part of the mechanical part of it at all. And I noticed in Harriet’s interview about the 
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6 May 2002 22

serving the dinner, and I thought that was cute. I didn’t have to do that either, but I wasn’t asked. 

[Laughs]

The women just weren’t welcome out in the hangars. I think that both Directors felt that 

women out there would distract the guys, and the guys wouldn’t get their work done, or their 

minds would wander, and they wouldn’t be concentrating on the safety of the airplanes and 

things like that. Yet here again, I found I’d be given a work order and go give it to so-and-so. I 

went any place and every place. I really did and never thought a thing about it, because I’d been 

asked to do it, so why not do it? I did, and I knew most everybody. There were some of the 

fellows in the shops I didn’t know very well because I didn’t happen to come into contact with 

them. But, yes, I did. I was kind of free rein. I wasn’t kept from any place.

WRIGHT: You went any place and every place, and when you did it, you went in a skirt and a 

pair of heels, walked all over the Flight Center?

LOVE: Yes.

WRIGHT: Did you ever move into wearing slacks or any other casual attire before you left there?

LOVE: Yes, once. Leta Holleman, who was head of the report section, came in one morning in 

slacks. She was the first one I had ever seen wear slacks, and she was just darling in them, the 

way they fit and everything, and it wasn’t a pantsuit of sorts, because she had a pretty blouse on 

with them. Well, I did a lot of sewing, and I thought, “Hmm.” So I made a skirt and a vest and a 

pair of pants that all went together, or you could mix and match, and I wore the skirt and the vest 
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6 May 2002 23

quite a bit to work, and one day I mentioned to Leta, “You know, I have a pair of pants that 

match this, but I don’t think I would wear them to work.”

She said, “Why not?”

So about this time one of the secretaries up front wore a pantsuit to work, and I thought, 

well, if she can do it, then maybe I could. So I wore the pants. I think I wore them maybe three 

times, and that was all. [Laughter] But the rest of the Center, after I left, sometime or other, 

converted, and you saw a lot of pretty pantsuits and things. 

But today I—well, I’ll tell you an incident that happened, I guess it was about two weeks 

ago. I was coming in, and there were five or six gentleman in suits, dark suits, white shirts, and 

ties, and that kind of caught my eye because you don’t see that around there, and they wore the 

big orange visitor’s badges. And there was a gal walking towards them to meet them, and I 

looked at her and kind of shook my head and went on in the building. When I was up and about 

at about two o’clock in the afternoon, these gentleman were sitting in a conference room right at 

the foot of the stairs, and there were two gals in there, and I stopped and I looked because I 

thought, no, that can’t be. They were in Levis. They were in these big T-shirts with writing or a 

picture on them, and conversing with these gentlemen. I thought, well, maybe what they’re 

talking about is important and the way they look is not important. Of course, everybody wears—

or a lot of them wear Nike shoes, types, and I thought, no, it isn’t a good impression for NASA, I 

don’t think. But a lot of the girls around there do not dress like business people—and it could be 

my generation that I object so strongly. But there are some that you never see in anything but 

pants, and some of them, they’re not pantsuits. They’re khakis or Levis or some of those kind of 

things.
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6 May 2002 24

And I notice that some of the fellows that have been there for a long time, they wear 

slacks and a shirt, or they’re neat and tidy. They might not have a tie, but I bet there’s a tie in 

their office, because when we worked there, the guys wore suits and they wore slacks and sports 

jackets. They always had a tie. But the sport jacket might in the office to slip on, you know, if 

company came, or if they had to go up in the front office. I don’t know what they look like now 

when they go to the front office. [Laughs]

WRIGHT: And this was a time before we had central air and heat in some of the buildings.

LOVE: Yes.

WRIGHT: Tell me how you kept cool in these hot summers out on the base.

LOVE: The fellows wore short-sleeved white shirts, and the material wasn’t as heavy as the longsleeved. They always had a tie, but they were string ties in those days. And us gals would wear 

dresses which were lightweight cottons and things. There were a lot of materials that you could 

use. Didn’t have any trouble.

WRIGHT: And lots of fans?

LOVE: No. We never had any fans.

WRIGHT: No? Not any fans? No?
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6 May 2002 25

LOVE: No. No.

WRIGHT: Nothing?

LOVE: No.

WRIGHT: During the winter, did you have extra things to keep you warm?

LOVE: A coat. You wore a coat, and during that time period, snoods were in. Do you know 

what a snood is? A snood was a heavy-knit, made out of string, like a hairnet, only they were 

colors, and you would wear them so the wind wouldn’t blow your hair to pieces before you got 

into the building, and then when you got in the building at your desk, you took them off. Some 

of them had satin ribbons to tie them on with. Some had elastic in them that you could wear. 

Some of the girls didn’t wear any and then would do their hair, but during that time period, a lot 

of them wore bouffants, backcombed and sprayed. So the hairstyle was different, too, and not 

what it is today. Maybe today styles are more comfortable. I don’t know. [Laughs]

WRIGHT: Well, I’ve never heard of those. That’s interesting in itself.

LOVE: But they were called snoods, and they were S-N-O-O-D-S. I think was how they spelled 

them. But they kept your hair in place if you had to go out. But another thing we had, we were 

all in one building. The cafeteria was right in the building with us. In fact, the History Office 
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6 May 2002 26

today is in the cafeteria, in the old cafeteria. But now I was talking to one of the gals that I know 

out there today, and she said it’s a half-mile walk to walk from the DAF [Data Analysis Facility] 

Building, which is one of the outer-located buildings, to the photo lab, which is in the main 

building, and back again. And not everybody has a golf cart. Not everybody has a bicycle to 

ride in. You walk.

WRIGHT: In the midst of all the work that you were doing, some of your contributions were 

released in publication. Share how this occurred and how your participation was included in that 

work.

LOVE: Here, again, I’m not sure how I was lucky. I’ve had a lot of things that I just consider 

luck, or being in the right place at the right time. I have no idea. But what would usually happen 

was that the report would be started, and “We need to show some of these things in data. Now, 

we want data that will show these vibrations. We want data that will show a buffet boundary. 

We want data.” I worked with Jim M. McKay, who did all of the landing loads on the X-15. 

“We want to show the landing loads. We want to show where the airplane sat down and how 

long before the nose gear rotated over. We want to show some of the—what we’re talking 

about.” 

So it was up to Betty to find the film, to find where these things were that they wanted to 

show, and reduce it, plot it, do everything for a final plot. The data was my part of the 

contribution, mostly. I didn’t do the final figures; the final figures went to editorial, and they did 

the final figures along with the final text. But it was my responsibility to get the figures for the 

reports. 
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6 May 2002 27

So consequently, they added my name to it, which made it nice, and I’m finding 

something now into today’s part, that—well, I should back up. When I retired, they put all my 

reports into a book and bound them in a hard cover, then printed the name and NASA Reports on 

the outside, and presented it to me at retirement. So I thought that was pretty nice. Most all the 

reports are in there except for two. 

But what I’m finding today—I guess I’ll have to back up. Like, Mr. Beeler used to ask 

me to do the film. Mr. [Paul F.] Bikle [Director of Dryden FRC between 1959 and 1971] said, “I 

want a log kept on the XB-70.” Well, I had already started one on the X-15, and Dr. [Richard P.] 

Hallion used that in his book. But in his flights of—what was it? [On the Frontier]

WRIGHT: Discovery?

LOVE: No. That’s [Lane E.] Wallace’s book. Anyhow, he used it in one of his books and gives 

me credit for it, which I was surprised. But Dennis [R.] Jenkins, who is an engineer and has 

written a book—I can show it to you later, a XB-70 book that is being sold on the market—I 

can’t believe this, and the X-15 book that is coming out soon, both works referenced my name. 

So I’m finding that I’m being referenced and I can’t stay in the background. [Laughs] But it’s 

kind of nice to know that something you had done for another reason is now being used to 

support some of the things that are being written about the projects.

WRIGHT: Share with us a little bit more about what you were talking about keeping a log. You 

said you had kept a log on the X-15. Tell us about that. What does that mean?
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6 May 2002 28

LOVE: Each time there was a flight, or each time there was an abort, I would record the flight 

number—there was a sequencing that we used to report the flight number, and I won’t go into 

that, but I would keep a log of the date, the flight, the pilot, the max Mach number , the max 

altitude, and there were times when we kept the max angle of attack that he went to, because it 

was important for that particular project. But we didn’t keep track of which mothership dropped 

which research plane. Of the two B-52s, that we had we didn’t keep track of which one did the 

drop. I didn’t, and I didn’t keep track of who flew the B-52. So I had to look all that up for 

Dennis Jenkins. So now we have who was NASA 1, who was the panel operator in the B-52, 

who flew the B-52, and which B-52 dropped which X-15. But I kept a flight log of each flight, 

each abort, and when it aborted, why it aborted, and if it flew, if they had a problem, what was 

the problem. And I have one I could show you.

WRIGHT: Was this task something you came up with your own, as just a smart thing to do at the 

time?

LOVE: Well, it fell in line with something else that I did. It seemed like when we were doing all 

of the X Series of airplanes, the engineers were always looking for a three-view drawings. They 

were always looking for a round-the-clock set of photos of the airplane, where you took the 

pictures or the photographs from different angles. And they were always looking for a table of 

dimensions of what was what, and of the maximums and the minimums and so on. And after 

looking them up two or three times, I thought, “This is ridiculous.” 

So I ended up starting a book that had that information in a three-ring binder, and I ended 

up with three binders of them before I got through, three two-inch binders, and when I got ready 
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6 May 2002 29

to leave, “Are you going to leave those? Are you going to leave those?” and I brought them 

home, because when the computers came in, the mainframe computers and the desk computers 

and all of that, there’s no need for those books anymore because they’re in the web or on the web 

now, on NASA’s DFRC [Dryden Flight Research Center]. So there’s no need for the books. 

But I have them here at home. I did take them back and let them make any copies they needed 

to, but I brought them back home, and my son wants them.

WRIGHT: Quite a collection of history while history was being made.

LOVE: Yes, and that was why I did it, because if I went to work for one engineer, “Well, Betty, 

on the X-4, can you find this for me?” Or if I worked for somebody else, “That D-5582 was 

such. Can you find that?” Well, actually I was a gofer, I guess you might say. “Go for this. Go 

for that.” But I enjoyed it.

And you were talking today about the four o’clock bell.

WRIGHT: Share with me about how the time worked out at Dryden.

LOVE: You went to work at seven-thirty in the morning, and when the bell rang at seven-thirty 

in the morning, you should have been down to the cafeteria, got your coffee, brought it back to 

your desk. You should be at your desk ready to work. You shouldn’t be walking in from the 

parking lot. And if you were caught too many times, you were told about it. 

And at four o’clock you should be at your desk, putting things away until the bell rang. 

You shouldn’t be leaving the building before four o’clock. That was get-off time. 
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6 May 2002 30

Me, if I’d get interested in something, I would forget, and when the bell went off, here 

my desk would just be full of stuff, and I’d have to put it away. Well, the fellows in my carpool

were all working on the first floor. They were mechanics, and one was a model maker, and my 

husband was in charge of the simulator for the X-15, and they’d all get after me, because I’d 

come out to the car and they were all ready to go. The engine would be going. If it was cold, the 

heater was on, and if it was warm, the air conditioning, or the windows were down so the car 

would be cool. “Betty, can’t you get out here at four o’clock?”

Well, we got a new carpool member, and his name was Neil [A.] Armstrong, and I’d get 

out to the car before Neil would. So they quite harping at me and started to harp at him, and they 

were always all over him. “Why can’t you be here at four o’clock so we can leave to go home?” 

So that took me off of their list but it was expected of you to put in a full day’s work 7:30 A.M. 

to 4:00 P.M.—and you were expected to take only a half-hour lunch. But the cafeteria was in the 

building, and you could go down for coffee anytime you wanted, and there was always cookies 

or cakes, sweet rolls, stuff like that. And during that time period, everyone smoked at their desk 

anyhow, so there wasn’t any having to go outside like they do now to smoke. But that was so 

neat. I was always in the hot water because I wasn’t down there in time.

WRIGHT: And what a great memory of Neil Armstrong. Other people think of other things, but 

it’s nice that you had one special that he saved you.

LOVE: He sure did. Well, there were a lot of special memories of him.
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6 May 2002 31

WRIGHT: And I’m sure of other times while you were there. Would you like to share some of 

those, some of those special memories that you have just being at Dryden, of those years?

LOVE: I think it was a happier time than it is now because we didn’t have computers on our 

desk. Not every desk had a telephone. So if you wanted to talk to someone, why, it was just as 

easy to pick up your material and walk down the hall and walk into their office and sit down and 

talk to them. So you knew everybody. You talked face to face with a person, and I think you got 

more enjoyment out of that than you do sitting in front of a computer and you don’t see a face. 

Maybe you don’t even know the person if you met them. You might have exchanged e-mail and 

data with them and things like that, but you don’t especially know them.

Because we got to know their families. I mean, they would talk about what their children 

were doing, or their wife, who belonged to WONASA, which was a Woman of NASA. They 

were wives of husbands that]worked out there, and the women employees could belong to it. 

And here again, Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, well, there was always a dance and a 

party, and the fee was maybe two or three dollars a couple or a person. Whatever they had to 

pay out, they got their expenses back, without a big fee and we had a good time, and everybody 

got to know everybody. 

Now they either have a Christmas ball or they have a picnic, and the Exchange Council—

which we don’t have anymore, so I don’t know what happens to that, but the Exchange Council 

would help foot the bill, which kept the price down low. But the WONASA, as we called them, 

did the parties. They were the ones who planned them and sold tickets, and they got the women 

out at the Center to help sell tickets and things like that, and we used to have real good times. 
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Betty S. Love

6 May 2002 32

Like I said, I think the fact that the computers came onboard, not everybody knows 

everybody, and maybe we’ve gotten too big for that anyhow. I don’t know. We’re too scattered. 

I’ve heard several comments about our director; they’re not all glowing comments. But it used 

to be that Walt was always down in the hangars to find out what was going on. Mr. Bikle was 

always playing cards with the guys. I don’t remember women ever playing—well, they played 

bridge, but I mean I don’t remember Mr. Bikle going and playing bridge. He played hearts and 

liar’s poker, I guess, with dollar bills. Is that what they—I think that’s what liar’s poker is. He’d 

do it with maybe the pilots one day, or he’d go down and do it with a group of mechanics the 

next, or he’d go to the instrument shop another day. He wasn’t cliquish that way. 

Some of the employees out there now don’t even know what the director looks like, 

except if they’ve gone to an all-hands meeting or something like that, which I think is sad, 

because Kevin [L. Peterson] is very personable. He could do those things. He knows how it was 

done before. He was here at the Center as a co-op, and he’s now director. He knows what’s 

happened, and I think—I’m not in a position to know exactly, but just thinking about it, I think 

Headquarters has changed a lot of this by demanding more paperwork, more “keep me 

informed”-type things, where before they used to make trips out and see for themselves. Now, 

here again, it’s computers and paperwork. So I guess you can’t blame the people. You can’t 

blame the Center. You have to blame the way the nation has transpired and how it operates.

WRIGHT: Society certainly has changed from the time that you went out there until where you 

are now.
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6 May 2002 33

LOVE: Oh, certainly. Certainly. It’s another generation, maybe two generations. So it’s a 

different world by a long ways. So you can’t say, “Well, it was better time,” or, “It was a worse 

time,” or, “This time isn’t good at all.” It’s just people’s attitudes in general, their outlook on 

what’s happened and what’s taking place, I think.

WRIGHT: What did you find to be the most challenging aspect of your career with Dryden? 

What part did you feel like, once you were able to accomplish this task, that you just felt such 

good satisfaction—

LOVE: I think that X-3 buffet boundary. [Laughter] That was a long time ago. But I think 

anything I did, when I accomplished it and it was done right, like the logs that I had been asked 

to keep. To me, that was a privilege, to ask me to do something like that, and, here again, why 

pick on me? I have no idea. It was like the raises. I never once asked for a raise, never asked 

why I didn’t get one. I always had one, and I went as far as my education would allow and felt 

very proud of the fact that I was capable of doing that, because I wasn’t a mathematician and I 

wasn’t an engineer, had no engineering background other than what I had learned while there. 

So I did go back and take a couple of courses at the college in math, because we were doing 

some—I can’t say the words—statistical work, and I needed to know what I was doing. Even 

though the engineers helped, the fellows helped me a whole bunch, I wanted to know why we 

were doing it. So I went and took a couple of classes and did that. After I retired, I went back to 

college, but not in engineering.

WRIGHT: What did you take?
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6 May 2002 34

LOVE: I took law. No, first, I didn’t really take law. What I had to was, because it had been 

forty years since I had been in school, I had to go back and upgrade my A.A. in order to qualify 

to go in as a junior in college. But what I was taking was, I had gotten interested in land law 

because we had built a home and bought some property, and then discovered that the piece of 

property we had purchased with a fence around it wasn’t our legal description. So I got busy to 

find out why, and I found out the whole section was incorrect. 

So through the land title company—and here again, I had a ball—the land title company, 

the bankers, the lawyers, the surveyors, we straightened it all out. We did it by quit-claiming 

back and forth. Maybe it was only five feet of land, but it gave the people legal descriptions to 

what they had fenced, and some people came up short, some people came up a little longer, but 

no one seemed to complain. 

So after doing that, I decided, “I’m going back to school and learn how to be a land 

lawyer.” I didn’t know what else to call them, and so I did that. When I got right ready to go to 

college, I’d been accepted and everything, my husband Jim said, “What are you going to do 

when you get that degree? You’re not going to work,” and he didn’t say—he wasn’t asking me

if I was going to work. He was telling me I wasn’t going to go to work.

And I said, “Oh?” So I quit. I didn’t go any further. I didn’t go on to college. 

Then later when he became ill, he had Alzheimer’s, and later when he became ill, I knew 

I was going to keep him at home. But I found out that twenty-four hours seven days a week, you 

can’t do it and keep your sanity yourself. And there was a Alzheimer’s Daycare Center in the 

church not too far from where we lived, and it was school to him because he took a lunch and he 

went to school and he loved it. So he went three days a week, and I worked in an attorney’s 
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6 May 2002 35

office as a paralegal, a paralegal assistant, I guess was what my title was. I enjoyed that, but I 

kept having trouble. The attorney kept telling me, “Betty, aircraft research is black and white. 

Attorney’s office is gray,” and I had trouble with that. But I worked there for three years, I 

think, and then the rest of the time I could handle Jim; I could take whatever came along. So that 

worked out real good. But that’s what I did afterwards.

WRIGHT: And now you’re back at Dryden, but you’re on your own terms this time.

LOVE: Yes. When we had our fiftieth anniversary, [Dr. J. D.] “Dill” Hunley [Dryden FRC 

Historian] had asked—well, there were three of us, Harriet and Beverly [Swanson] Cothren and 

myself were asked to be on a women’s panel and go out to Dryden and be interviewed on this 

panel. So I said I would go if Harriet would go. Harriet said she’d go if I’d go. So all three of 

us went, and we had a real good time, and we were to bring things to show what we had done as 

computers. I took one of my big books that I had fixed for the research airplanes, and I took 

some of the things that we used for the data, to reduce the data and things. So Dill came out. I 

had never met Dill, but Dill came up to me, and he said, “Betty, you wouldn’t work in the history 

office with me, would you?”

I said, “I don’t think so.” I just answered him that way. 

And later I happened to meet one of our instrument engineers in a market, and he said, 

“Betty, I need some help.”

And I said, “What kind of help do you need?”

And he said, “I want someone to put up—to write a little paragraphs about the airplane 

and the people, to identify the people and the airplanes that are on the web.”
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6 May 2002 36

And I said, “Well, I can’t do that.”

He says, “I think you could.” He said, “Could you start tomorrow?” And this was in 

June.

And I said, “No, I’m going the whole month of July to Minnesota.”

He said, “Well, when you come back, well, you call me.”

And I said, “Yes.” So he convinced me. He coaxed, and I went out and did that for nine 

months, I think. Received paid for that time, though.

And when their money had disappeared and it was winding down, Dill, we were in the 

same building, that Dill was, and Dill came over, and he said, “Betty, would you consider 

working with me in the history office?” And he said, “Really think about it.” He said, “I know 

you didn’t think about it before.” 

So that’s how I ended up in the History Office. I couldn’t get paid. Dill told me they 

didn’t have funds; I would have to be a volunteer. And I said, “Okay.” So that’s where I have 

been, and I have been there since October, 1996, five years and I work five days a week, seven 

hours a day. So it’s just like a job, only I don’t feel obligated. When I want to take a whole 

month off and go on a cruise or go do something other than history, I don’t feel like, well, I have 

to use up my annual leave. [Laughter] I don’t have any.

WRIGHT: Well, we’re going to stop for just a second and change the tapes out, and we’ll come 

right back.
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Betty S. Love

6 May 2002 37

WRIGHT: We were talking about your volunteer work, and I was just curious on how much the 

volunteer work was different. That pay for your volunteer work is different from the first salary 

you might gotten working out at Dryden.

LOVE: That’s funny, because nothing is nothing, and a GS-1 [General Schedule] was almost 

nothing, and I think it took me something like two years to have a two-week pay period that 

would equal $100 that I could bring home. So my volunteer work and my first years at NACA 

were similar, except now if I work overtime, I get ten times what I get when I volunteer. So that 

gives me a pretty good salary to make up.

WRIGHT: But zero times zero is nothing. [Laughter]

LOVE: Oh, dear.

WRIGHT: The other job that you did before you took your volunteer job is when you went back 

to Dryden and wrote the information for all the planes that went on the web. How many of those 

descriptions of those planes did you know because you had worked on those planes? How many 

of those planes that we have in history books have you contributed to?

LOVE: I would say most all of them on the structure side, or—that isn’t true either, because I 

worked for other engineers on some of them also, and they were doing loads work or they were 

doing stability work, so their requirement would be different than the structure work. But I’d 

worked on all the X Series airplanes, plus the B-47. I worked on the B-47 and the B-50 doing 
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6 May 2002 38

structural work. I was trying to think what else. I think those were all the airplanes that I 

worked. But I worked on the Phase II’s, I, II, and III, and I worked on the X-15, 1, 2, and 3. 

Worked on the XB-70s, 1 and 2 until 2 crashed, and then all the previous ones. 

Something interesting, when not being able to see the airplanes that I said at first, I didn’t 

really realize the size of the planes. The X-4 has returned to Edwards from Colorado from the 

Air Force Academy [Colorado Springs, Colorado]. It’s become obsolete as far as who knows 

what it is, I guess, and they’ve sent it back, and it’ll be at the Air Force Museum [WrightPatterson Air Force Base, Ohio]. But it’s so tiny that when I think of the size of some of our 

pilots, I wonder how they ever got in it, because [Stanley P.] Butchhart isn’t a small man, and he 

wasn’t a small man then. [A.] Scott Crossfield is fairly tall, and he squeezed into some of those. 

I do know that I had heard rumors say that the fellows would put felt on top of their helmets to 

keep them from banging against the cockpit and making a noise or scratching the cockpit. So 

some of them sat pretty high in their seats.

WRIGHT: Did you ever get to see any of those planes fly in or any of the testing?

LOVE: Of the X ones or any—

WRIGHT: Of the ones that you worked on, ever?

LOVE: Only the X-15 and the XB-70, the lifting bodies. I didn’t mention the lifting bodies. 

Only those. I didn’t any of the first that I worked at south base. We didn’t see any. But, later 

on, why, I got to, so that I was in the control room, so you got to see them. So it was pretty nice.
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6 May 2002 39

And the control room then was called “the greenhouse” because it was built on top of the 

three-story building, and it was hot up there during the flight, and it wasn’t very big. But they 

called it “the greenhouse.”

WRIGHT: It must have been very satisfying for you to see that the planes and the pilots. 

LOVE: Oh, yes. They were all great guys. They all had a goal and a purpose, and they did a 

beautiful job, and I think everybody was just as safety-conscious then as we’re being pushed to 

be now, and we weren’t pushed to be back then. But I don’t think they lost that many planes and 

pilots from NASA. The air force did, but that was a different situation than what we had.

WRIGHT: Was there any other time that you were called in to help put information together for 

the planes as a whole, like we just mentioned, of a collection of information? You had 

mentioned earlier about your logs. We talked about that, and you also mentioned about putting 

that movie reel together. So I was curious to see if you had any more—

LOVE: Oh, I did a loop of the X planes along with the D-5582. It was supposed to be a short 

continuous loop film that was used in Washington, D.C., at a meeting or conference that they had 

there that they wanted, and I put that together, and that was used. That was a fun project, too. In 

fact, any of this has been fun. 

I noticed one of your questions—

WRIGHT: About anything being a disappointment or discouraging.
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6 May 2002 40

LOVE: I can’t remember ever—

WRIGHT: That’s a great accomplishment right there.

LOVE: I think so. I think there was always something new. It was never boring. You might 

have to do something over and over and over again, but it was different airplane. It was a 

different time, something different you were looking for in how the plane flew. So it was 

different every time you worked with data. 

You might be interested in a little tidbit. Harriet and I, Harriet Smith and I, put together a 

directory of all the people that had worked from 1946 to our twenty-fifth anniversary, which was 

nineteen-sixty-something, I think, late sixties, and we had an anniversary party. But we did a 

mailing of all the employees who had ever been there, their addresses and their telephone 

numbers and so on and so forth. I left mine there, and over the years it got used and it got lost. 

Harriet said she kept one, but when they moved from Washington back here, she said, “What am 

I keeping this for?” and tossed it. 

For the fiftieth, there was a gentleman, [Weneth] “Wen” [D.] Painter, who put one 

together, but he didn’t take the time to correlate the gals that got married and their married 

names. So the lists had duplicate people in them, or if they’d had a nickname and they went by 

their nickname, and their real name showed up, they didn’t compare them together. But Dill 

said, “Betty, there’s going to be a seventy-fifth.” So I have over 3,000 names and information

the computer here at home, and I work at it at home. I don’t work at it at work. But it’s another 
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6 May 2002 41

fun project. But I thought, what, they just celebrated their fiftieth, so I’ve got a few more years I 

can work on it. [Laughter]

WRIGHT: Well, it’s nice to see that you’re keeping busy and you have such a deadline on this 

one.

LOVE: No.

WRIGHT: Before we close this afternoon, is there anything else that you would to add or any 

other reflections on your work there that you’d like for us to know about?

LOVE: No, just that I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this. [Laughs]

WRIGHT: Well, at least until we get to the seventy-five anniversary.

LOVE: Well, I don’t think so.

WRIGHT: We thank you for all the time and all the efforts and the help that you’ve given this 

project.

LOVE: Well, I thank you.

WRIGHT: And wish you the best of luck.
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Betty S. Love

6 May 2002 42

LOVE: Well, I thank you. You’ve been very patient with doing all this also.

WRIGHT: I’ve enjoyed learning all that I have, and I thank you again for all that you helped.

[End of interview]