My parents just celebrated their 40th anniversary. On a apparently unrelated note, yesterday my wife, children, and I found ourselves at the National Air and Space Musuem at Dulles Airport outside Washington DC.
As we walked through the space exhibits, I noticed a large ring packed with electronics that was used on the Saturn V rocket during the Apollo missions. Its official name is the Instrument Unit (IU) and it was responsible for guiding the rocket throughout the mission.
I know about the Instrument Unit because 40 years ago during the Apollo missions, my mother worked for IBM and helped develop this technology. Along with many others that worked on Apollo, she worked in Huntsville, AL and travelled to Cape Canaveral for the launches.
While there was clearly a glass ceiling in those days for women, she became one of the top paid employees at IBM.
When she got married 40 years ago, she decided to quit that lucrative and exciting work and focus on starting a family. I get the feeling she never looked back. In fact, I remember only one souvenir from Apollo in the house--a vinyl record about one of the early missions. (She quit only a few months before Apollo 11, the mission that landed people on the moon.)
Here is a picture that represents her choice. This is Marla and I standing under the IU (the ring hanging above our heads). I hope my mom still thinks she made the right choice when she chose to work full time on grubby kids rather than working on what was one of the most high profile and important projects going on at that time.
I do not believe that all women have to make the choice my mother did. Certainly, women can be great mothers while successful in business just as men can be great fathers while successful in business. I know that many mothers have to work and I respect those that after working a full day, come home to be a mother.
But I do appreciate my mother's choice. She decided that her family trumped the Apollo missions. That was a decision that hopefully will bring pay dividends for many years to come. As a matter of fact, here is a picture of four of them.
