Breaking barriers young
Johnson was young when she first got accustomed to being the only woman in the room. As a child growing up in Illinois, she got a job delivering papers, and became the first ever papergirl for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In those days, she was styling her hair like her idol, Amelia Earhart, and buying hats to imitate her distinctive style. By high school, she was spending hours watching the airplanes at a local runway and then getting taken along on rides. “Pretty soon I’d be getting to fly,” she recounted. “And then later I could taxi. … And little by little, I could fly.” She attended college at the University of Illinois, and recalled going to dances and chatting up the officers with airplanes, eventually winning rides there as well. One man she dated had his own plane that she says she learned to fly, though not without incident.
“I ran out of gas once,” Crawford admitted. “I had to land in an orchard. I sort of set it down on a tree.” She recalled a farmer and his son putting a ladder up so she could climb down, and using a crane to lift the plane out and set it on the ground again. “It was damaged, but I think the insurance took care of it.”
When she wasn’t getting stuck in trees, she took engineering classes, and became the first woman to graduate from the engineering program at her university. “I really wanted to take aeronautical (engineering),” she explained, “but at that time they didn’t have an aeronautic program. … But actually, I had fun in college. The only thing I regretted was on finals the B-12s (Navy students) had — well, they had access to all the old exams. They had files from the fraternities and things, I think. And of course, we didn’t have any in the places where I lived. I thought that was a little bit unfair.”
She had to pay her own way through college, and took a variety of jobs. “I worked as a waitress in the student union building. I counted bugs in the biology department, checked hats in the student union. I worked in a bar for about three days. I remember that’s the most money in one day because of tips. But then they found out I wasn’t twenty-one. I had a fake driver’s license — well, it wasn’t fake, it was some other person’s driver’s license. But anyway, that didn’t last long.”
By the time she graduated in 1946, she had a choice of jobs, from graduate studies and teaching, to building bridges, to an offer from North American Aviation. She took the aviation job, and never looked back.
The space program
Johnson’s work started in missiles, specifically the Navajo cruise missile. “I did the boost trajectory to start, but then I evolved into sort of handling the whole thing, the aerodynamic performance,” she explained. After the Navajo she moved on to an air-to-ground missile. And then, North American Aviation won a major contract to work on the Apollo program.
When Johnson started her career in 1946, NASA didn’t even exist as an organization. Working on missile projects, her work had largely fallen under the Air Force’s jurisdiction. The creation of NASA in 1958 was a new world opening up. She was part of the team that wrote the proposal for North American to earn the Apollo contract, and said that everyone was surprised when they actually won.
It was around this time that Johnson started moving up in her organization. “You might say I had been honchoing a bunch of people around, which I love to do anyway, but without title,” she said. “And I thought I should have a title.” She nearly moved out of her team when a supervisory role opened up in another division, even though she was eager to work on the lunar project. When she mentioned why she was leaving, her boss offered her the supervisory position on the Apollo team instead. “So, I stayed.”