Martian's Daughter: A Memoir by Marina von Neumann Whitman Page B

interviewed her for the women's page of a Boston newspaper. Instead, she was promoted to foreman within three months and, six months later, became the supervisor in charge of training women technicians at the same RadLab that had recently recruited her husband.
     
    My mother was long on conviction and self-confidence and short on patience, a combination that made her a tough but fair taskmistressin the workplace as well as at home. When the women she supervised were asked to vote on whether they were willing to have “Negroes” as coworkers, she drew on the sheer force of her personality, along with some well-placed Hungarian profanity, to ensure that they voted yes. When she organized annual reunion dances for RadLab and Los Alamos alumni during the spring meetings of the American Physical Society after the war, she was equally adamant. These meetings were held at posh Washington hotels, which, at the time, were strictly whites only. Her insistence that a black physicist and his wife be included in the party meant that she had to find a different hotel every year in which to hold it. These events were, in the words of one of the participants, “the first unsegregated dances at first class hotels in Washington D.C.” 1 Although her enormous energy had been focused virtually 24–7 on winning the world war against the forces of darkness, my mother also seized opportunities to conduct her own small battle against the injustices rampant in her adopted country.
     
    While World War II was engulfing the world, my life in Cambridge was astonishingly, even embarrassingly, normal. Although the rationing of meat, butter, sugar, and gasoline may have made household management a bit more complicated for my mother, about all I remember of it is that mixing yellow coloring into the margarine, so that it would look more like butter and less like lard, was my job. And why was the margarine white? Because Wisconsin farmers, fearful that the substitution of margarine for butter might become a habit that persisted even after the war was over, managed to push through a regulation requiring that it be sold in its original, pasty-white state. Packagers, ever creative, promptly attached little cellophane packets of coloring to each container of margarine.
     
    That manual mixing task, along with collecting tin foil into shiny round balls for recycling and remembering to pull down the blackout shades when the lights went on in the evening, constituted my contribution to the war effort. And, oh yes, I was responsible for pasting the ration stamps that ruled our lives as consumers into the proper booklets and keeping track of the piles of little round cardboard circles, some red and some blue, that represented fractional values of the rationing “points” assigned to each family. This last responsibility made me feel very important.
     
    Most of my waking hours, of course, were spent in school. I had entered first grade, in the middle of the school year, at Shady Hill, at the time one of the leading “progressive” schools in the country. Its reputation arose from its uniqueness in a variety of ways. One was physical; Shady Hill consisted of a cluster of small wooden structures scattered about on its own campus, one for each grade. Running between buildings during the cold New England winter helped to toughen both bodies and minds, in the British tradition.
     
    What really set the school apart, though, were the new ideas about children's education that underpinned it. The academic requirements were demanding, but much of the teaching and learning took the form of individual or group projects, with teachers acting as coaches and guides as much as authority figures standing at the front of the classroom. We reenacted the original Olympic Games as part of our third-grade study of Greek civilization, a project that included making our own garments and athletic props, after appropriate research to ensure authenticity. In the fourth grade, we had