KW Next I just want to ask you a little bit about some of your professors. You had mentioned that l think Swinton and the Dean...
PB: Oh yes.
KW: Can you tell me a little it about them, either why they were influential or...
PB: Well, Professor Swinton was a graduate of the University of Michigan who had gone to the Philippines before World War II. He was captured by the Japanese. He was a civil engineer and he spent the war in the Santo Tomas prison camp where he was the commander of the civilian population. When he was liberated after the war he went back to Ann Arbor and became a professor and the course that he taught was basic. If you didn`t pass it, you crashed. So, the first semester that I had Professor Swinton we became quite good friends. But, as he admitted to me, "I cannot see women in engineering". Come final exam at the end of the first semester and I get flunked. He apologizes, "I can't do it. I simply cannot". I register for the second semester. I have to take the same course over again. What do I get? I get Professor Swinton again. What do I get at the end of the semester? I get a fail mark. I do not have time to engage in this game. The third time I show up for registration, the time slot Professor Swinton had, I thought "this will not wash". So, I went to Dean Emmon's office, he was friends with the family, and I said to the secretary "I've got to see the Dean now". And I went and I explained to him, he picked up the phone, called whoever was responsible for registration, shifted professors around, and I passed my third semester. And that's how I Stayed in engineering school. But Swinton and I remained good friends, but it went against the grain with him. And when he retired he went back to the Philippines and went to work with the Filipinos in the south and that was the time of the Communist Huk Rebellion, and the next piece of news I had he had been decapitated. He was a
wonderful man but he was a misogynist and then, one of my greatest professors, and I can't remember his name, he taught Descriptive Geometry. He was blind. Get someone to explain to you what Descriptive Geometry consists of and you'll understand. We had to sit in the same seats at every class because that way he knew who he was talking to. And if you made a mistake, you went to his office and you explained to him what you had done and he would say "say that again", and you would suddenly realize the mistake that you had made. He was, considering his handicap, he was one of the best professors I had at the place. Oh yeah, because to teach what he taught being blind was essentially miraculous, if you get somebody to explain to you what descriptive geometry is. Other than that, oh l think I had one Nobel Prize professor. He was a
Dutchman who taught electrical engineering, I can't remember his name either. And I had the semi-friend who was doing his post-graduate work, he got a Nobel Prize.
KW: Do you remember his name?
PB: No, but his Nobel Prize was for the Super Cloud Chamber because somebody had beaten him to the, he was working on the cloud chamber, which somebody else had got the Nobel Prize for, and he souped it up and he got a Nobel Prize for that. And let's see who else...they were all extremely courteous people. One of them, I was in his class and he was very embarrassed because with the boys he would sometimes use slightly off-color language. I looked at him and I said, "Don't worry, you don't know anything that I don't know better." (laughs) That cracked him up and he knew that he could say essentially whatever he wanted.
KW: So, overall, the faculty was relatively accepting with the exception of the Professor Swinton?
PB: Swinton was the only man who simply couldn't swallow a woman in engineering. No problems with any others. They might have thought, "Let's make them sweat at bit more," but I never noticed it. And I didn't really feel that l had to work harder than anybody else just because l was a woman.
KW: That's interesting because so far most of the women I've interviewed graduated in '45, '46 and they've been saying things like "well l felt like l had to prove myself". But you're saying you didn't really feel that way, is that correct?
PB: No, I didn't really feel that way.