NASA Lowrimore, Clyde and Carolyn - June 5, 2000
Interview with Clyde and Carolyn Lowrimore
Interviewer: Angie Kirby-Calder
Date of Interview: June 5, 2000
Location: Lowrimore home, Austin, Texas
KIRBY-CALDER: Today is June 5, 2000. The time is 10:55 [a.m.]. This oral history with Clyde and Carolyn Lowrimore is being conducted at 24 Glen Rock Drive, the home of the interviewees, in Austin, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the NASA/Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University, History Department by graduate student Angie Kirby-Calder. Mr. and Mrs. Lowrimore, are you aware that this interview is being conducted for the NASA/Southwest Texas State University Oral History Project and will be available for research purposes?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yes
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yes
KIRBY-CALDER: Thank You. OK, first a few background questions. You were married in 1959?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yes
KIRBY-CALDER: And your daughter was born in 1963?
MR. LOWRIMORE: That’s correct.
KIRBY-CALDER: And, Clyde, you graduated from St. Mary’s in ‘61?
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yes
KIRBY-CALDER: And then went to work for the Texas State Comptroller’s office?
MR. LOWRIMORE: That’s correct.
KIRBY-CALDER: You worked there till ’66, when you went to work for NASA. Could you tell me about how you came to work for NASA?
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yes, I had decided that I didn’t have much career potential working for the state comptroller’s office. I had gone about as far as I could go in a short period of time and the space program looked real exciting to me and there appeared to be a lot more growth potential in my career by moving to NASA. So I applied for a job, was interviewed, and started working March of 1966.
KIRBY-CALDER: Thank You. Carolyn, you worked for the FBI from 1958-1980?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yes
KIRBY-CALDER: Which sounds really interesting.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: It was.
KIRBY-CALDER: Then you went to work for NASA. How did you come to change jobs?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: I lived in the Clear Lake area and the FBI office is in downtown Houston and the drive got to be too much trouble for me. It was a long commute every day. So I decided I would try to get a job at the Johnson Space Center which was only a couple miles from our home. And, so I applied and got lucky and got a job there.
KIRBY-CALDER: Clyde you worked for the budget office until 1982 and the Space Shuttle Program Control Office for a year.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Right. Special Resources Control Office. Right
KIRBY-CALDER: Then for the Office of the Comptroller for the tenure of your NASA career.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yes
KIRBY-CALDER: Can you tell me a little bit about your responsibilities and how your position changed over the years?
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yes, when I first went to work for the Johnson Space Center, I was hired as a cost accountant in the Cost and Property section. My primary responsibilities there were reviewing contracts and entering in cost accrual data into the JSC accounting system. Also, reviewing labor distribution records from our civil service employees to make sure they were reporting their labor properly. And also, in addition to that, I had to produce a number of reports that went to NASA headquarters and also to the Center [Johnson Space Center], to Center management – things like overtime reports, compensatory time reports, voluntary time reports. During that period is when I got a little exposure to some of the Center management, because they were so interested, of course, in how much overtime the Center was using to work on the various programs that were going on at that time. We were in the peak of the Apollo program but we also still had the Gemini program that was still in progress. So, overtime, compensatory time, and voluntary time was very important to Center management. So, I was producing reports that were going all over the Center and that was reviewed by, like I said, various Center management and got me some exposure to the, some of the management at the Center at that time.
Later I’d worked in accounting, like I say, for about two years and they were forming a new office, called the Central Budget Office. And it was going to be headed up by an individual that was the chief of the General Accounting Branch and I worked within that branch. He had come to know me over the years, over the first couple years I had worked there, and asked me if I would like to move over to the budget side of the house. And, of course, I jumped at the opportunity because it sounded real interesting and exciting. Accounting, back in those days, it had some interesting things to it but it was, its accounting work and it can get a little boring at times. So I was ready to move on to something different and so I jumped at the opportunity to move into this new organization called the Central Budget Office.
Moved into the Central Budget Office, specifically working in a branch of that office called the Research and Development Resources Branch and I was an analyst, budget analyst, along with several other analysts in the branch. There was probably about six or seven of us. And we each had responsibilities for different things, different programs, because NASA had a lot of different programs going on at the time even though Apollo was the major thing, there were all sorts of other activities that the Johnson, well, no, it was the Manned Spacecraft Center back then, was spending its resources on. And we were responsible for integrating the Center budget, in total, the Research and Development budget. Also looking at all the manpower that was being utilized, both contractor and civil servants and how the manpower was being utilized on various programs and producing reports to headquarters and monthly, explaining how we were performing against our budget plans on a monthly basis. We were also responsible for, at least twice a year, developing, or going through major budget exercises and putting the budget together for the Center. And then once a year, well actually once and then an update at mid-year, an update of our current-year operating plans. So it kept us quite busy.
It was a very dynamic group back then that I worked with. Most of the people in my organization were all young people, say thirty years old or younger. The management, generally, back then, was in their mid-thirties, some of them in their forties. But generally, it was a young group and that was the way it was, essentially across the Center. Not only on the administrative side of the house where I worked, but on the technical side of the house that it was a young group of people that were very career-oriented, eager to work, didn’t question what it took to do the job – just worked long hours. And we did, we put in a lot of long hours.
What I remember about those days, we did not have the benefit of workstations, personal computers, and things like that, that was before those days. We had big mainframe computers and anything you did from a computer standpoint had to be put in on keypunch sheets, punched overnight, run and then get printouts the next day that you had to check for accuracy, rerun it with your error listings, and what have you. So it was a time consuming process. And everything, essentially, back then, both in accounting when I worked there and budget was done with spreadsheets and pencils. And if you wanted to draw any charts, you hand drew the charts and what have you. But anyway, back to the people. They were dynamic, good people – young, smart, aggressive and eager to do whatever it took to get the job done.
I worked as an analyst in the R&D Resources office for five or six years until I had the opportunity to apply with the branch job, or management, or branch chief job came open. I applied for the job and I became a branch chief, moved into management and I became the chief of that office. And I was the chief of that office for several years, I can’t recall now, time escapes me, how many years, probably another five or six years. And then an opportunity came along to, for a promotion, to become, to apply for a job as the manager of the Space Shuttle Resources Management Office. And it was a promotion. I was competitively selected to that position. And I moved on to head up that office. And the job, primary responsibilities there was supporting the Space Shuttle management at the Johnson Space Center. And I had analysts that worked for me that supported the various major system and sub-system managers of the Space Shuttle program and we were responsible for integrating the shuttle budget, which was one piece of the Center budget, that went to the Central Budget Office, my previous office, that we integrated the Shuttle Budget Office for the Center, did a lot of analysis of that budget and did normal budgetary responsibilities associated with integrating and supporting the management of the Space Shuttle program.
[I] worked at that job for, oh, about two or three years and then was asked to come back to, they had an opening in the Central Budget Office. The Center went through a major, was going through a major reorganization. They asked me if I would come back and head up the Central Budget Office. My previous job there was chief of the R&D, or Research and Development Resources Management Branch and I was moving back to the Central Budget Office to become the chief of not only the R&D Resources Branch but also the Institutional Resources Branch. So I moved back there and was chief of the Central Budget Office for a number of years.
The Center, we decided as a Center, or on the administrative side of the house that our budget and accounting systems needed major systems upgrade from an automation standpoint. So we set up a new systems office and they asked me to go head up that office to get that started. So I went over and headed up a systems office that was looking at an integrated budget and accounting system for the Center. And I headed that up for about a year, got it started and then they asked me to come back, they had some other turnover in personnel, to come back and be chief of the Central Budget Office again. So I moved back to the Central Budget Office, worked there for a number of years, integrating the total budget for the whole Center, not only the research and development portion, but also the institutional budget. And by the institutional, I mean the civil service salaries, the human resources aspect of it in terms of where all of our civil servants were working for all the various programs and doing reports on that, the contractors, the prime contractors, the sub-contractors, because all of that had to be accounted for to headquarters – how our manpower was being utilized across the whole Center. And putting together the budget for the civil service employees because we were the control point for the budget of all civil service employees as well. As well as the things I had done previously on the R&D Resources side of the house, integrating the Research and Development budgets for the whole Center.
Stayed in the position as chief of the Central Budget Office for a few more years and then there was a change out in the management of, and we all worked at that time within the Office of the Comptroller, that position became open, the Office of the Comptroller, the individual that was selected to that position, by the name of Wayne Draper, became the comptroller and he asked me if I would become his deputy. Sure. I moved up to become his deputy. I was more than happy to do that. Another opportunity to move up in the financial management arena and I became Wayne Draper’s deputy and we served together, he as the Comptroller and me as the Deputy Comptroller for about seven or eight years, up until the time that I retired.
Very fulfilling period of time. Was exposed to, actually going back to my days in the Central Budget Office, because of the dynamics of the budget and Center management and all the technical management across the Center being so concerned and interested in the budget and having enough resources to do the jobs that they had in hand gave me a lot of exposure to the technical management across the Center, from the Center Director all the way down to a lot of the branch and division chiefs across the whole Center. So I got a lot of exposure and had a lot of dealings with those people. Which was very rewarding because I learned, I met a lot of interesting, smart, dynamic people.
And when I was the chief of the Central Budget Office, of course, I had a lot of exposure to not only the management of the Center, but headquarters management as well because I would have to go to headquarters to defend the budget during the budget review process. And also they would come to the Center and we would have a lot of budget reviews at the Center. And so I had the opportunity to stand up and present lots of budgets and do a lot of quick thinking on your feet, with personnel from headquarters. Also we had outside oversight committees that came in, groups of people from other endeavors that were given assignments to come in and review NASA’s budgets. So I was given the opportunity to make presentations to them.
But anyway, to continue on, we, I had a lot of exposure to management because of the dynamics, like I said before, the dynamics of the budgets. We got to deal with a lot of human resources issues in my management jobs. You know, dealing with people, which was very, which I enjoyed a great deal. I thought that was very interesting. Very seldom did we ever have any personnel problems with our people because it was amazing that the people were so motivated to do their job, that that was hardly ever an issue which was very rewarding to me. You know, that you didn’t have to deal with a lot of human resources issues. And I say that’s because the people were so challenged and wanting to do, you know, a good job.
KIRBY-CALDER: Thank You. Carolyn, you started in the Propulsion and Power division?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yes.
KIRBY-CALDER: And worked there until 1984? And then you moved to the Space Station Program Office, where you became a program analyst in 1987. Can you tell me about your responsibilities and how your position changed over the years?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: When I first started with NASA, I started as a branch secretary in a branch within the Propulsion and Power division and did that for six months or so. And my bosses told me about the Upward Mobility program that NASA had in effect which gave women, it was primarily for women in secretarial positions, to get to higher rated jobs by demonstrating certain skills and abilities and characteristics. So my bosses encouraged me to apply for that and they supported me and wrote a recommendation. So I was selected for that and was competitively selected for a new position the division, the Propulsion and Power division, developed called an administrative assistant. So I was selected for that and moved up to the division level from the branch and had the total responsibility for handling all the personnel matters for that division, the budget matters, the space, the property management, the intern program. We had interns that worked there for three months at a time and then went back to school. We had summer interns and then oversight over the secretarial staff as well.
And in that capacity, I got to, had to learn everything from scratch. Coming from a law-enforcement environment into a technical world was a big challenge for me. But I had a wonderful support group within the division, the management of the division, and I found that I had to interface with all the different various organizations within the whole Center. And I found that everywhere I had to interface, they trained me, they told me what it was I needed and how to get it. So I felt very lucky that I had the opportunity to interface with so many different divisions. And I learned to make presentations, stand up presentations on the budgets, our division’s budget, to our director-level staff, which was the next level up. And then often I would make them also to the program-level, which the directors reported their budgets to the program directors. And so, I had to do that also.
And because of my exposure with the various other organizations, I was asked to participate in the secretarial reviews, when secretaries applied for jobs. I was on the, asked to be on the secretarial review panel, and, also on the Federal Women’s Program Committee, which I did for a couple of years, two or three years. And on that committee, we prepared and developed a week’s activities, an annual weekly activities of training seminars for women on the Center. Although they were seminars that men attended also. They were of a general nature, of motivational-type speakers, or different time-management, different training-type of activities. Then how to speak, how to make public speaking.
I did that for two or three years and then this new Space Stations Program Office was developed. They advertised for an administrative officer, which would have been, which was a promotion for me. So I applied for that job and was competitively selected for that and moved to the Space Station Program Office and handled the same types of jobs, the budget and the personnel and the training. At that level I just had more responsibilities, the same types of jobs, just at a higher level, which gave me a greater sense of responsibility. And like Clyde, we didn’t have much automation in those days, although we did, that was my first job where I got a personal computer. So I trained myself in LOTUS and started putting the budget information, the travel budget information as well as the other budget information on a LOTUS spreadsheet, so I could track it.
Let’s see, I did that until the Space Station Program Office got abolished. It was moved to, though I should say the program office at the Johnson Space Center was abolished and all those responsibilities moved to NASA headquarters. So I was the Johnson, was the program office’s representative to transfer those functions to Washington [D.C.] and made several trips back and forth to Washington, helping to transfer the administrative functions up there. And after that was done, I had to find another job. So I started searching around and luckily the Space Shuttle Program Office had an opening in one of their branches called Program Management Office, which handled the change process for the Shuttle program, the configuration control of all the changes that were made to the space shuttle and to the drawings that affect the cargo and the buildup and the modifications and documentation, all the documentation. So there’s a change board that approves all of those changes and part of my job was to oversee the contractors that entered that data. I was the program manager’s representative to the award-fee process, the evaluation of the contractors as a whole for the various functions that they performed for this particular office and for the Shuttle program in total.
Toward the end of my career in that job, I was given the responsibility for the Shuttle program’s database, called the Mission Configuration Requirements Control System, and that’s a database that tracks all of the changes to the hardware on all the shuttle vehicles and all of the changes to the drawings that comprised the vehicle as well as the cargos for each mission. And I was the head management oversight over the contractors that performed that job at the Johnson Space Center. And then oversight of the contractors at Kennedy Space Center, the Rockwell people and the Lockheed people too, that entered the data into that system. We had to make sure that all the changes were approved by the Shuttle program manager’s board and a directive documenting the changes that the documentation was prepared and the date and the documentation was entered into the database as well as a record of what the change was to be. And then the verification that those changes were made was also part of this database’s responsibility. Changes to the vehicle and changes to the cargo and what was included in each flight as well as the ferry flights. At that time the shuttle was landing in California, primarily, and they had to be ferried back to Kennedy [Space Center, Florida]. And that required a different drawing. There were puts and takes on the shuttle for every mission and the same database tacked all of those. And the thing that made the job so much fun and challenging was that it was, the people were very cooperative. We had a very team-oriented spirit and a lot of cooperation, and all of my jobs have reflected that. I’ve found the jobs easy and fun to do because of the association with the other NASA contractor and the employees.
KIRBY-CALDER: Thank You. Both of you have talked about the personnel and how well you got along with all the other personnel and the team-orientation and how that made such a big difference and basically everyone that we’ve talked to has said that. Do you think that the reason, or at least part of the reason why people were so team-oriented was because of the importance of the job and really feeling that, I don’t know how to explain it, that you’re doing something for the whole country?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yes
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yeah, I think that was part of it and a major part of it. But I think it was also because it was, at least in my case, in the early days, we were such a, it was such a young group of personnel that we all, we just had the same likes and dislikes. We were all raising families. We were career oriented. We wanted to do the best we could. We were, most of us hadn’t been out of college all that long and we were trying to establish our careers and yea, and the job was a real challenge. I mean, we were doing some things that were different, that were new, even while I was on the administrative side of the house, even some of the things we were doing there, trying to do things better and faster. There were a lot of demands on us. I mean huge demands. And they were important. We could see that they were important, that they needed to be done. And we worked many, many long hours.
I remember when I was in accounting that to close out the end of the fiscal year, it was a major endeavor. We, essentially the whole accounting organization, would work all night at the end of the fiscal year to close out the accounting system. And then we would work long days and many hours after that to produce all the various reports that had to be produced at year end. And people got tired. But there was never any bickering or complaints or what have you, just something that had to be done and we understood. And there were a lot of reports that had to be produced that headquarters required in order to defend its budget position and reports that had to go to other agencies in the federal government, you know, to reflect the overall status of the federal accounting system and also the budget. So, people knew that those things needed to be done.
And that’s not to say that it was just a group of young people there. It was predominately young people. But there were some older people there. And, to me, they added stability that you needed. And they had some insights and knowledge that we didn’t have that helped up and they were good mentors. They mentored the young people like myself in the early days to help us develop as better employees. And I had several mentors as I went through my NASA career, all the way up until probably even after I became a manager. I still had some senior managers on the budget side of the house that were still mentoring me. They probably wouldn’t have called themselves mentors and I probably didn’t think of them as being mentors at the time. But they were. Looking back on it, they were mentors to me, because I learned a lot of things form them that helped me to do my job better and helped my career.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Well, on my experience, I worked with engineers that were responsible for the propulsion systems to start with and those are very dynamic systems and a lot of power and a lot of volatility and danger associated with them. And everyone had a sense of knowing that danger and realizing that they were responsible for the lives of the astronauts. So they took it very seriously. And I think that also followed through to the Shuttle Program Office where the changes that were being made, safety was always the primary concern. And everyone was very thorough. All the engineering staff made sure they understood all the dynamics of the changes and safety, I think, and the responsibility for the astronauts' lives were what made everyone so conscientious about their jobs.
KIRBY-CALDER: Thank you. I was actually going to start to ask you about your, the days you put in, because I know a lot of people talk about those long hours and that some half the year its crazy and the other half the year its not and I wondered if your end, the management and budgeting and everything, was like that as well?
MR. LOWRIMORE: Accounting, when I worked in accounting the year-end was a zoo. I mean, everybody was working long hours, in fact it was almost, back then, I recall, at year end you had scheduled overtime leading up to year end and then after year end closing where you knew, I mean, you're going to have to work, I don't even recall how long, but ten, twelve hour days or longer for several weeks leading up to the year-end closing and the afterwards as well. And like I say, at year end closing usually you worked all night to close out the system because back then we were dealing with mainframe computers and everything had to be batch keypunched and run and then you had to do, you know, go through edit listings what have you to make sure that all the data was valid and various reconciliations.
On the budget side of the house when you had to put together budgets. Here again, we worked many, many long hours. We were always challenged. We always had due dates when the budget was due. We had management reviews they had to go through at the Center. So you were always driven by presentations where you had to present the budget to Center management to get, to obtain their approval, then ultimately put the budget together and get it forward to headquarters. So the end date of when it was due in headquarters was what was driving you.
But you, we worked many long hours. There were periods, I can remember there was one particular year, and I can't remember what year it was that the budget was very critical that year. There were a lot demands and a lot of problems. I worked forty-two days straight without a day off. And those forty-two days, most of those days were twelve, fourteen-hour days. I barely saw my family. And I got really tired and everybody else was tired as well, but we knew it was important and we did it. And, I don't, I didn't enjoy doing that all that much, but it was something that I knew had to be done. And there were periods like that, not as bad as that period, but there were other periods when put in long hours, very, very long hours. And a lot of these hours were not paid overtime. They were not compensatory time where you got equal time off. A lot of those hours were voluntary time, when people just volunteered the time to do their job right.
I can remember nights, working up there by myself, in my office, to do things that I knew had to be done by the next day. And I sometimes wondered "Am I the only one in this building?" And when I would go up to see if somebody else was here working, say in a program office that was working on another piece of the budget, there would be somebody there working. I wasn't the only one there. There were other people that were there working as well, those long hours. But there was a camaraderie, at least in the people that I dealt with. Like I said earlier, the people, we got along together. We became friends, our families became friends with one another. We did things together after work. We went to ball games together. We had parties together. It was just a big happy family.
You know, some of my best friends still are, even though I've been retired for over four years, are people that I met at the Johnson Space Center. We still get together and socialize often. Even though I'm in Austin and a lot of them are still in Houston or in other areas, we’re still very close friends. And I know their children and their children know my children. It was just a neat place to work. Looking back on my career, it was a good situation, for me and my family.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Well, like Clyde, I worked, put in a lot of extra hours also. Not as many as he did because I didn't have the responsibilities that he did, but I did often. I never worked an eight-hour day. It was always ten-hour days and there was never enough time to get it all done.
KIRBY-CALDER: I can imagine. What did you find to be the most frustrating aspects of your jobs?
MR. LOWRIMORE: I guess, in my case, not enough time to get everything done that needed to be done. There just wasn't, there was just so much that needed to be done, it just seemed like you just didn't have the time. It was just drive, drive, drive, you know, go, go, go all the time. When you were in these pressure periods, like putting a budget together or trying to do the year-end closing or getting ready for a bid management review or what ever the subject, it, you know, a status, a current status of the budget or major budget review, that there just wasn't enough time to get everything done. That was the most frustrating thing in my case.
Plus the fact, I guess, also, it was very frustrating that you thought, when you thought you had really done a good job at putting together a budget and defending it all the way through headquarters and then you would get it and it would go to headquarters and because of issues that they had, you know, dealing up and out of the agency, that the budget would still get cut and you wouldn't get all the resources that you'd asked for. And that was frustrating because then it would come back, you thought, boy you'd really done a good job putting together the budget and here they just cut the heck out of it and now you've got to go back and figure out, working with the technical and the Center management, where you were going to take all these cuts and still do the job that needed, jobs, all the work that needed to be done. And that was frustrating to me.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Well, as an administrative officer of divisions and programs, the Station Program office, I had to collect a lot of data from different organizations and I was responsible for putting that data together and then passing it on to my superiors. And I would always set deadlines, but, naturally, people wouldn't meet my deadlines and then I had a deadline to meet. So, that was a frustrating situation for me, as far as collecting the travel budget data, the personnel appraisals, performance appraisals. Then when I got into the Space Shuttle Program Office, it was a little frustrating at times trying to defend the program's documentation about why certain pieces of hardware required approval before it could be changed our on the shuttle. There was sets of documentation, one particular volume that applied to the configuration management, which was a little bit obsolete but yet lended itself to various interpretations. And so that was frustrating, to deal with the people at the other Centers who wanted to interpret the rules a little differently.
KIRBY-CALDER: What did you find to be the most rewarding aspects?
MR. LOWRIMORE: Well, from a career standpoint, I guess that I can be selfish here. Part of it was my ability to obtain promotions and to have a really good career, you know. I never thought when I went to work for the Manned Spacecraft Center, back in 1966, as a junior cost accountant working at Ellington Air Force Base in an air force, old renovated air force barracks, that was about to fall down when I worked out there for two years, at Ellington Air Force Base because there wasn't enough, the facility wasn't large enough, the new facility at the Manned Spacecraft Center, that I would ever be the Deputy Comptroller of the Center. I had no idea that that would happen and, to me, that was a very rewarding situation, to be able to have those advancements in my career – the various management jobs that I had was able to obtain and ultimately become the Deputy Comptroller for the Center. That was very rewarding from a pure personal standpoint.
The other rewarding things was the people. I can't say enough about the people, just the really, really intelligent, hard-working people that I met and my associations with them. That was great. The seeing a major technical accomplishments that occurred over the years, from the Gemini [and] Mercury programs to Apollo, the things we did there, to the Skylab program, where we had the first space station, to the Apollo-Soyuz test project, and I was exposed to some management issues there and management personnel there, to the Space Shuttle program and then, towards the end of my career, the beginnings of the space station. Seeing all those things that were accomplished, it was, to me, and I felt like I was a part of that, even though I was on the administrative side of the house, I was the person over there that was working that budget and defending it, helping to defend it, getting it through headquarters, all those budgets, and, to me, that was an accomplishment, a major accomplishment. And something I can look back on with fond memories, as a part of that.
KIRBY-CALDER: So, you think you have a real sense of being a part of history-making?
MR. LOWRIMORE: Oh, yeah. I think, yes, yes I really do. Like I said before, I think back, I can't think of a career, you know, somebody that had just an accounting degree from St. Mary's University that could have had a more exciting, interesting career than what I had. There was a lot of other areas that I could have gone into, you know, other jobs or positions, but I think, from an overall career standpoint that this is probably more rewarding than anything else I could have done. I might have been able to make more money elsewhere, if I had gone to work for some oil company or something along those lines, but the federal government, even, well, back in the early days, they did not pay all that well. Although there was a lot of other benefits and that was one of the things that kind of, that interested me in going to work for NASA and the federal government, with their retirement program and some other fringe benefits that they had. But it was primarily, it was NASA, and that well, had, of course, a big deal back in the early and mid-sixties, you know, that NASA had a lot of, you know, national attention and it really caught the attention of the young people and I think that's one of the reasons. Of course they were hiring young people, but that's the reason they had so many young people standing in line, wanting to go to work for NASA back then. And they were able to pretty much pick and choose, who they wanted, back then.
KIRBY-CALDER: And Carolyn, your most rewarding memories, aspects?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: I guess, what I learned or what I found rewarding was the growth potential that with NASA, the Upward Mobility program they had for women and the women's training courses and the mentors that I had, the bosses that I had all supported me and gave me responsibility. I grew so much with the abilities to use my responsibilities. When I first started I was a GS-5 stenographer and then I got to grade level GS-13 in a professional position without a college degree. So I felt that that was very rewarding, that I had the opportunity to grow in a career without having the education behind me. And of course, I was rewarded with performance appraisal awards almost every year and that was very, very nice. Well, just the fact that I got the award was enough, but a lot of them had money associated with them, so it made it even better.
KIRBY-CALDER: Did you feel like a trailblazer in any way, maybe for getting into these new programs for women?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yes, very much so. Yeah, I did have that sense that I was being a role model for other women at the Center. In fact, I had people tell me that. So it was, that was rewarding too, that I was helping other people. I remember the first time I had to make a speech by myself – how nervous I was and how flustered I was. And then later, as I progressed, it got to be an easy job for me. I enjoyed it, in fact.
KIRBY-CALDER: In what ways do you feel that you made the most impact on NASA?
MR. LOWRIMORE: That's a tough question. Well, I think I saved, I can't give you any specifics right now, but I think I saved a lot of money for NASA and for the federal taxpayer, by some of the things that I did, some of the, you know, cost cutting measures that we implemented and things of that nature. So I think, oh, we did some things in that regard. I also felt like I, you know, my, if I had a legacy, that I trained and mentored, and I tried to do that, a lot of younger people that are still working there. And, hopefully they will mentor their younger people that their, that are working for them. A lot of those people are now managers at the Johnson Space Center, the ones that used to work for me. A lot of people that I hired, I hired a lot of people during my career at the Johnson Space Center. A lot of those are managers now. I think that's one of the things that I'll remember most about leaving the Johnson Space Center.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: I think, one of my contributions was this Mission Requirements Control System, MRCS, the management that I gave to that system, managing the date input and the validity of the data and the verification of the data and the software changes that were made under my oversight, I guess I should say, of that. I've heard from the people, since I left, how things have gone downhill and how they miss me so much that I obviously did contribute in that arena.
KIRBY-CALDER: That's a nice feeling.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yeah.
KIRBY-CALDER: In what ways do you feel that NASA made the most impact on you?
MR. LOWRIMORE: I'll let you go first.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: I think mine, its just more of what I said before. The personal growth, the opportunities that, for responsible jobs and challenges and the interactions with the other people. I think that's basically what has affected me, what I've gained the most, from the jobs.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yea, I could, you know, it goes back to some of the things I've said. It grew me as an individual because of my positions that I held there and challenged me to be more than probably I thought I ever could be, when I first graduated from college, in terms of being able to stand up and defend to very senior management of an agency like that, defend budgets and to defend my position. And that was, you know, of course the obvious is that, because of promotions and the rewards that come with that, it gave me a lifestyle or a, you know, a better standard of living than I probably ever though I would have too, as well.
KIRBY-CALDER: Are there any significant events that just really stand out for you when you look back on your careers at NASA?
MR. LOWRIMORE: Important things or funny things?
KIRBY-CALDER: Doesn't matter. Whatever comes to mind.
MR. LOWRIMORE: I've got a funny one that was real important to me at the time. When I was probably, when I had first moved over to the budget side of the house and I was probably about twenty-seven years old. I was new to the budget. But anyway, there was a big budget review that or there was a big management review that was being conducted at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. And it was the senior management of all the Manned Spacecraft Centers from the Kennedy Space Center, Marshall, the Johnson Space Center and NASA headquarters. And it was primarily a review of the Apollo program. And it was primarily a technical review, to discuss, you know, when the various aspects of what was going on in the Apollo program, when they're going to be able to fly, what missions they were going to fly. But they were also going to cover, you know, the budget, which was a very small piece of it. But my manager, or boss at the time, said "I want you to attend this review.” And this was a review that you only got into if your name was on the attendance list. Your name had to be put on there by somebody, you know, fairly senior, to even get into this meeting. But anyway, I was put on there and I was probably when I went there, I was probably the most junior person in the whole room and I set back in a dark corner, hoping that nobody would see me or ask me a question. But I was there to attend to take notes, from a budget standpoint, to understand what issues that they might have with the Johnson Space Center budget or any other, you know, things that we ought to be aware of from a budgetary standpoint and take that back to my management at the Johnson Space Center, on the budget.
Well, at this meeting were people like Wernher von Braun, who at the time was the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, Robert Gilruth, who's the Director of the Johnson Space Center, Kurt Devus, who was the Director of the Kennedy Space Center and Chris Kraft, who was, at that time, the Director of Flight Operations. I mean these people were like gods to us, at that time. And, of course, Werner Von Braun will go down in history, you know, as the prime individual that enabled us to be able to put a man on the Moon or to fly in space. But anyway, these people were all at this meeting along with some headquarters personnel that were the senior managers of the agency.
As we broke for lunch, I went and got on this elevator to go down to find a cafeteria to go eat lunch and I was hoping I would get on the elevator and go down and eat, you know, be able to eat lunch and still not be obtrusive. Well, who got on the elevator? Werner Von Braun, Robert Gilruth, Chris Kraft, and me. And there was probably one or two other people. But that was, I still remember that, to this day, you know, and that's just an interesting little side light. That made a big impression on a young man at that time. And I still remember that. I'll stop it right there for right now. I have to think about some other things, I'll let Carolyn say.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Well, I think that the Challenger explosion, probably the one thing that I remember the most. It’s not a happy time, but that just a very - that made an impact on me that will probably be lasting forever.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yeah, I'm glad Carolyn mentioned that. There were two things that were major traumas. One was the Apollo fire – where we lost three astronauts. That was a real, everybody was hit by that. And then the Challenger accident, that was a tough time.
KIRBY-CALDER: What was the attitude at the Center like during that time?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: A state of mourning.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Well, it was a very emotional time, because these were people that you saw – the Challenger accident and the Apollo fire. These were astronauts that you saw everyday at the cafeteria, JSC cafeteria. So, even though you may not have known them personally, they were very close to you. And you could relate, and it was a very emotional time.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: And that put a lot of new safety oversights and a total review of the whole shuttle vehicle system. That's, at the time, right after the accident, is when I transferred to the Shuttle Program Office. And there were no more flights, but there was a very thorough review of every sub-system and every piece of hardware that was on the vehicle, all the vehicles.
KIRBY-CALDER: Well, to switch gears just a little bit, you raised your family in the Taylor Lake Village, which is a NASA community. And earlier you indicated that it was a very strong NASA-Centered community. Could you tell me what it was like to live in, basically, your job?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Part of the time I lived there I worked downtown. So, I knew the people who worked at NASA, but I, we didn't, we weren't that close to them because I was traveling so much. But then after we, after I changed jobs, that allowed me to be, to spend more time in the, at home and in the Clear Lake area, so we got to know more of the people that we worked with and attended more, had more social contact with them. There were a lot of other people, you know, our neighbors, that worked in industry jobs, some in the local area and some in the downtown area. They were always interested in what we were doing at NASA. There was a, it seemed like people were always were more interested in knowing what we did at NASA as opposed to telling us about their jobs, with the chemical companies.
MR. LOWRIMORE: No, there was a nice mix of other, you know, people working in private industry that had no dealings, you know, with the, or connections to the space program. So, that gave you a break, you know, our neighbors, in fact, on either side of us, most of the time, none of them worked for the space program. There were a lot of people that lived in our neighborhood that did work for the space program, but it was not a, you know, it never bothered me at all, that I was so, had or saw the people after work that I saw during the day at work. So, that was not a factor.
From a, we lived, because of the Space Center, though, it was, I would say, it was considered probably a more upper middle class or affluent neighborhood, that area out there. And as a result of that, the school district was a very good school district, the Clear Lake school district in which our daughter went to Clear Lake High School. And a lot of her friends, it turned out, were the children of employees of the Johnson Space Center. She even had some friends that were the children of astronauts and what have you. And to her, it was no big deal, "Oh, I know so and so, you know, he's some astronaut's son.”
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Spend the night over.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Or spend the night over at their house, or they would come to, their kids would come spend the night at our house, these, the astronauts' children, but that was not a big deal to those children, that's just he way they were raised. That was not a big deal to them. You know, so what, they’re an astronaut, you now. Now it was probably a bigger deal to the parents, like to Carolyn and I, "Oh, that's so and so astronaut's child?" Well, to us that was interesting, because those were very, you know, the astronauts were, and still are, considered a very dynamic, brilliant set of people.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yeah, an elite, elite group unto themselves.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Elite group. It turned out, when we, towards the end of both our careers, we had, we knew several astronauts on a more personal, social basis, that were very good friends of ours. But again, they were considered an elite group. But, that had an influence on our daughter, being raised in that environment, because she had the benefit of a very good education at Clear Lake High School and the benefit of some very smart kids around her, which I think has helped her to this day. She's now a professional person, working here in Austin, for Motorola and has a professional job and her husband is a, as it turns out, she met her husband, he was a co-op at the Johnson Space Center. He was an electrical engineering major at the University of New Mexico and was a co-op there and she was working as a summer job at Johnson.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: As a typist.
MR. LOWRIMORE: As a typist, at the Johnson Space Center during the summer, between breaks, between years, between her.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: College career.
MR. LOWRIMORE: College career, college education. But anyway, they met and later married and, of course, neither one of them work for the space program now. They decided they liked living in Austin better than in Houston. But he could have gone to work, he was offered a job after he graduated from college, to go to work for NASA, but he decided he wanted live in the Austin area.
KIRBY-CALDER: Still, a very JSC-Centered family.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yes, oh yeah.
KIRBY-CALDER: Do you feel that being a NASA family had any adverse effects on your, raising your family? Maybe the long hours?
MR. LOWRIMORE: Well it probably did in my case. You know, because I did, I worked a lot of long hours, which took me away from the family. And, of course, Carolyn worked as well, the whole time. Either she worked downtown or at the Center. So our daughter could probably better answer this question. But yeah, it’s bound to have had some effect because I know I worked a lot of long hours, particularly whenever she was young, and when I, you know, because at the beginning stages of my career it was just, it was almost demanded that I had to do that. I had to put in those long hours. And, as a result of that, and I know Carolyn and I had some discussions along those lines, that’s the way it was then, that my career almost had to come first, so I had to put in the long hours. So, if we had a conflict, where by Carolyn had to work extra time, it was a real balancing act and probably put her in a position at times where she probably had to tell her bosses she couldn’t work because Clyde was working and probably did not help her career out all that much when she was working for the FBI because she had to go home to take care of our daughter, after hours. Whereas I would still be at work working. So that probably had some effects on our family, though its not obvious to us now, you know. But our daughter seems to have overcome it. But at the time, it probably did have some effect.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Yeah, that’s about all I can think of, nothing negative personally with regard to me and my career.
KIRBY-CALDER: You also indicated that you keep in contact with your friends from NASA.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: That’s right. We developed life-long friends with some of them, we have a close-knit group of friends with the females and males, and some are couples and some are just one partner worked at NASA. But we got a group of about six or seven couples, I guess, that we still feel very close-knit with them.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yeah, we still, we go over to Houston. We don’t go quite as often as we did right after we retired, but we get over there at least once or twice a year and we always try to get together with all of them at that time and we get together with the couples and we’ll kind of, really there’s so many of them that it hard to see them all at one time unless you have one big party and get all together. But we always generally see at least two or three of the couples every time we go over there, to Houston.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: We make certain specific trips, this trip we’ll get together with this group and the next trip we’ll get together with the other groups.
MR. LOWRIMORE: And they’ve come over here to see us, too. They have, we’ve had them over here and they’ve visited with us here in Austin, but its, since there’s just one of us, set of us, over here its easier for us to go and see several different people over there. But, yeah, we’ve been able to maintain those relationships and we hope that we can continue to do so.
KIRBY-CALDER: I’d like to go back to talking about the computer integration. Obviously, when you started, they were the old mainframes.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Right.
KIRBY-CALDER: What was it like?
MR. LOWRIMORE: It was very difficult, back then because the mainframes really weren’t all that reliable. You never knew when they were going break down or just, they would just stop. And then you were sitting there, you were at the mercy of the computer, because the accounting system was so large, I just, I can’t begin to describe how large it was and how much data was in there.
But you were at the mercy of the programmers and the, to try to find out what the problem is. The computer went down, or a program failed or something and there had to be software patches made by the programmers so you were interfacing, as an accountant you were interfacing with the programmers. And then you had to try to figure out what the problems were and to make the patches. So, you, sometimes you were delayed for maybe a couple of days getting the products that you needed to do your job and that was very, very tough and frustrating. And that’s one of the things that drove a lot of extra hours, because, I mean, you felt like you were there, sitting, you know, overnight, babysitting the computer, a mainframe computer. And it was extremely demanding and at times, very frustrating.
With the advent of, I have to search my memory here, of personal computers, and before them, we just had what they called dumb terminals, where you could call up data, but you really couldn’t manipulate the data or do anything with it. You could call it up and review it and you could enter data, but you couldn’t do any manipulation of data, make reports, do charts or whatever. That helped a lot. And that was a big boon to us, but again, frustrating.
Towards the end of my career, about the last seven or eight years, with the advent of personal computers, what individual analysts were able to do with data was just night and day compared to the beginnings of my career. It almost eliminated the need for secretaries. Back when I was, as a manager in the budget office, every chart had to be typed by a secretary. You hand wrote the chart out, gave it to a secretary to type. Then you had to proof it, back and forth, back and forth, making hundreds of charts for a presentation, I mean, some presentations, we’d have a hundred charts. I mean, we’re talking two- and three-hour presentations. And to produce those, you know, just clerically, from a clerical standpoint, was a major job. Today, analysts produce their own charts and they can do it in half the time. Then it’s, it’s in and they can make changes to them and what and it’s just amazing.
The young people, towards the end of my career, they had no idea of what we used to go through or what we went through early in my career to put together a presentation. What they could do in thirty minutes or an hour, it would take us two or three days, to do, or longer. So, that helped from a manpower standpoint, a lot fewer people to do a much better job than what we were able to do in the early days of the career, or our career, a lot less clerical employees, need for secretarial and clerical support for typing and what have you, proofing, etcetera. So, major, major, major changes from the early days of my career to where we’re at now in terms of automation and what you can do with manipulation of data.
And, also a key point here, which is another whole story, what we were able to do in integrating the accounting system of the Johnson Space Center with the budget system, integrating those two together where you could merge the data and do a comparison of a budget plan to the accounting actual performance data and doing that at a very finite detail level by and within individual programs and track the status of individual budget line items, both from a dollar and from a man power standpoint, be it civil service manpower or contractor manpower, was major. I mean, all of that used to take hundreds and thousands of man hours to try to be able to, even if you could get the data that you needed to do all that tracking, was a major job. Whereas today, it’s almost with the push of a button, you can do it, from, because of automation. That’s how far it’s come. I could ask an analyst, towards the end of my career, “I need the status of a certain program down to a very finite level.” And within thirty minutes it would be on my desk. Whereas if I would have asked for that thirty years earlier, they’d say, “Well you might get that in a month or two” or some, maybe not that long, but almost like, “If we can even get the data; if the data can even be produced.”
KIRBY-CALDER: They had already started the changeover to the newer model computers when you started, right?
MRS. LORWRIMORE: Not really, no.
KIRBY-CALDER: Not really?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: When I started, we were still, just had electric typewriters and the engineers had dumb terminals to some mainframe computers, to help them with some of their calculations. But, I saw the change from electric typewriters to the personal computer and then to the networking and then to the file servers and the larger mainframe computers. And the database that I managed was converted during my time, working with it from an IBM information system to a DB2-based database system. And that, that required a major development process that I was responsible for, but it worked beautifully. It was, it turned out just great and made the improvement in the shuttles program, the ability to know what changes were due for each flight and when they were done.
MR. LOWRIMORE: I have a funny story I’ll throw in here too, about computers and what have you. One of the other things I remember, and this is back when I first moved over to the budget side of the house from accounting, and one of my jobs there was to put together, or to take a deck, a huge deck of cards, which represented the Johnson Space Center’s budget, to Huntsville, Alabama and meet other analysts from the other Manned Space Flight Centers at Huntsville, Alabama. And so, an analyst would come, or a couple of analysts would come from Kennedy, of course. We were in Huntsville, Alabama, so Marshall Space Flight Center was represented, I would represent the JSC Space Center. Then there was an individual from headquarters that was pulling it all together for the integrated budget for Manned Space Flight. But we would meet there and we would run the budget, the agency’s budget, on Marshall Space Flight computers, on their computers, on their, at there, and they would integrate the budget there. The programs had been written and that’s where they would integrate the budget. We would get the cards punched at each of the Centers, like at the Johnson Space Center, the Kennedy Space Center, etcetera, and, then, meet at Marshall.
Well, there was one particular budget, I was new, my boss, we were working right to the last minute. I was supposed to catch a flight to Huntsville, Alabama and we had to be there because we were all driven by these deadlines. And there was one piece of the budget that wasn’t quite done yet and we didn’t have the cards punched. Before I went, you had to have the cards punched and you had the budget all reconciled and you knew what your control totals were that you had to come to for each of the budget line items and I had done all of that except for one little program that hadn’t been finished yet, we hadn’t got it done yet. My boss said, “Go, you go catch your plane,” and he says, “I’ll wait here for these cards to be punched and everything and I’ll meet you at the plane and bring these cards.” Well, I went and got on the plane and I said, “Where’s my boss, where’s my boss.” He never showed up. I didn’t get the cards. And this was my first time going to Marshall Space Flight Center, so I did not have the complete budget. And I didn’t know what to expect when I got over to Huntsville.
Well, anyway, I went to Huntsville, we met where we were supposed to meet and I said, “Well, I don’t have this one piece of the budget here.” And the analysts from headquarters was not very happy but he was a nice guy, very nice, became a very good friend of mine, as it turned out. But it was the first time that I had met him. But anyway, he said, “Not to worry. Don’t worry about it Clyde, we get it fixed.” But anyway, we ran the budget that we had, and I ran the cards through their mainframe computer, for the Johnson Space Center and we reconciled it and everything. Then, the rest of the budget, the one little piece I didn’t have, that my boss finally called me and I had to take all that down over the phone, took me an hour or two, or longer, and re, get it re-keypunched, or get it keypunched there at the Marshall Space Flight Center and run it through the budget, or run it through their computers. And then we did, finally, get a complete budget for the Johnson Space Center. But I, that was an interesting little side light.
And that’s just an insight as to how the budgets were put together, one small piece of it. But they were integrated at the Marshall Space Flight Center, for the Manned Space Flight Budget, which included, back then, the Apollo, Mercury, Gemini budgets. And probably Skylab, I think we were into the beginning stages of Skylab at that time, and get those integrated into a total budget for manned space flight. And again, we were at the mercy of the mainframe computers. And I can remember spending all night at Marshall waiting for them to produce reports that we could then reconcile and make sure that it came back to our control totals.
One time we were over in Huntsville, Alabama, they had tornados and all the lights went out on us one night there because they had tornados all over the city of Huntsville, Alabama. That’s just a sidelight. But we were still there, working on our budget, trying to get it integrated to go to headquarters.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Well, we’ve come a long way. [Laughter]
KIRBY-CALDER: Definitely. I was going to ask you, Carolyn, when you first started at NASA, did you feel, I don’t know, any kind of odd attitude about being a woman in a man’s job. I mean, it seems like working at the FBI would also be similar. But a lot of the men we’ve talked to have said there was a paternalistic attitude toward women at NASA and I was wondering if you felt that.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: I didn’t. There were times when I did. But for most of the time I did not. Most of the men that I worked with or for were very supportive and very encouraging. In fact, I probably would have hesitated to try the Upward Mobility program if I hadn’t been pushed into it by the people I worked for. They were very, the men that I worked for were very interested in helping me get into that program and encouraged me in a lot of ways. But there were times when the administrative assistant, or administrative officer job, when I got to the program, to the shuttle, into the station program level, that job was not given the respect that it should have by the, I think mostly, the Personnel Director didn’t give that as high a grade level as it should have, compared with the sense, the responsibilities that went with it.
MR. LOWRIMORE: They did later, though, as it turned out. Eventually they did. It took them awhile to come around.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: It was a struggle.
MR. LOWRIMORE: And that’s a struggle that, back earlier when you talk about frustrating things, and that was some of the frustration, you know, from a, as a minor one, is that trying to make people understand how important certain positions were and how critical they were and demanding they were, in order to get the grade structure, that you’d like to have.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: And its true, there were times when a man held a job, it was a higher level than when it went to the woman that’s succeeded him. But there’s been several instances of that.
MR. LOWRIMORE: There was some of that.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: But I don’t think it was, prevalence, a big prevalence there. I found, in my organizations that I worked in, the women were given equal opportunities for the jobs and promoted based on their skills just like the men were.
KIRBY-CALDER: Good to hear. Are there any other stories that you can think of that, that come to mind when you think of your days at NASA?
MR. LOWRIMORE: I think I told most of mine. There’s a lot of them, but I’d have to think about it. Carolyn, can you think of any, funny?
MRS. LOWRIMORE: It’s hard for me to remember any right now. I guess it was kind of fun riding back on the NASA airplane with the Center Director and the Deputy Center Director, the managers. At one point I was in Washington on one of the trips leading to transferring the Space Station program functions to headquarters and had to ride back on the, didn’t say I had to, got the opportunity to ride back on a NASA plane with the Center Director and the Deputy. That was fun.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Yeah, I guess, in that regard to, I remember, you know, traveling with the Center Director on a NASA, on an aircraft and go to headquarters for budget reviews and what have you and sitting there thinking, you know, this is pretty interesting. Here’s a guy from San Antonio, Texas that’s riding on a NASA aircraft with the Center director of the Johnson Space Center, and a lot of other senior management on the airplane as well. It just gave me pause to think and reflect, that you are accomplishing something in your life here. And, I also would like to add that the Center Directors that I was exposed to were super individuals. I met some very nice, not only the Center Directors, but the Deputy Center Directors, were very nice people that were very understanding, very demanding, I mean they wanted the job done but they were nice and they were understanding people. That’s something I also can think and reflect upon. As well as the, you know, a lot of the other management of the Center as well. Some were better than others, as it always is, but overall, I was, I’d give the management an A+ overall. And that’s not just the Johnson Space Center, but that’s the Center management and the agency-level management that I was exposed to. They were hard working, dynamic people.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: I can’t really think of any stories, as such right now.
KIRBY-CALDER: That’s Okay. Thank you for your time. I appreciate all the information that you’ve given me.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Okay.
KIRBY-CALDER: And it’s been very, very interesting.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Good.
KIRBY-CALDER: And thank you very much.
MR. LOWRIMORE: Thank you.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: You’re welcome.
KIRBY-CALDER: As you were saying.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: That there was a very strong women’s network at the time when we worked at the Johnson Space Center. And how I got my last job in the Shuttle Program Office, when the Space Station Office was abolished. I had to send my resume to different organizations and one of my friends that I had met through Federal Women’s Program Committee and also through the American Business Women’s Association that I belonged to, took my resume to her boss and said, “You want to hire this woman, she’d do a good job for you.” And he thought enough of her that he trusted her opinion, so I interviewed with him and got the job.
MR. LOWRIMORE: And there was a lot of that. The ladies did a lot of mentoring of one another, which was great. In my associations with the ladies I was exposed to, they were every bit as good as their male counterpart. And it was towards the end of my career that we saw more and more women coming into the administrative side of the house, into the financial management side of the house. And when I left there, in fact, most of our managers in our financial management division, which was our accounting operation, were all women, at the time that I left there. In fact, the division chief now, is a lady that worked for NASA for a number of years.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: Which reminds me of the opportunities NASA provides for females. At the secretarial level, college courses are paid for by NASA. There’s certain programs that the women can get into and NASA will pay the tuition for their college education. And I took advantage of some of those courses myself.
KIRBY-CALDER: Sounds good.
MRS. LOWRIMORE: All you had to do was prove that you took the course and got a grade in it.
KIRBY-CALDER: Well, thank you very much.