Sally Ride Read online

  That duality—dollops of nonconformity bubbling beneath the aura of custom—would characterize the Rides and their children into the next century. The rebellion of their ancestors and their search for new opportunities recombined beneath the Pacific sun to produce a family that would make its own distinctive way into postwar America. The newlyweds moved into a small starter apartment in Santa Monica, certified members of the Greatest Generation eager to live their version of the American Dream. Two years later, on May 26, 1951, they made their first contribution to the national baby boom. It was a girl. A California girl. They named her Sally Kristen.

  You don’t remember Crusader Rabbit? To understand Sally, you must! She was the Rabbit and I was Rags the Tiger, his sidekick. She was like that—the fearlessness. Throw yourself into danger’s way and your hapless sidekick will help out. Someone’s got to save the world!

  —Bear Ride, Sally’s younger sister

  CHILDHOOD

  As a child of the television age, it is more than appropriate that one of Sally Ride’s earliest heroes appeared in the first made-for-TV cartoon—a black-and-white series starring a bunny in knight’s armor who charged across the plains (or the sea, or the jungle) to make the planet a better place. Some of his causes: battling Texans who wanted to rid the state of jackrabbits by shipping them to the North Pole; rescuing tigers whose stripes were being stolen to make India ink; foiling a plot by bloodthirsty pirates to rob New York City of its silverware. And always, aided and abetted by his loyal helpmate. The clever little Crusader was the perfect role model for a pragmatic child with an emerging sense of irony: he was tiny in size but took on gigantic missions; he had guts, but not superpowers. He couldn’t fly or stop trains, but he could run really fast. And he oozed the sort of upbeat optimism that moves mountains. Swap the shining armor for a flight suit, add even more focused brainpower, and you’ve got the real-life mind-set of Sally Ride. She also wanted to save the world—quietly—with plenty of best buddies along the way.

  As an infant, she was both sunny and willful, from her pure blue eyes and corn silk Nordic hair to the tireless little legs that never seemed to stop moving. “Sally was a child who knew what she wanted,” Joyce says. “Her first word was ‘No.’ ” Contrast that to her sister, Karen, who came along just over two years later: brown bob, equally bright smile, but “My first word was ‘thank you,’ ” she says.

  The siblings got off to a rocky start when Joyce was nursing the baby. “Sally came over and bonked me on the head with the telephone,” Joyce says; she was so jealous, Joyce soon stopped nursing. Earlier, when she was pregnant, “Sally would run at me and say, ‘Pick Sassy up!’ ” Little “Sassy,” as she called herself, also had trouble pronouncing “Karen” as a child, so morphed “Kar” into “Pear,” and then finally “Bear.” The name stuck and the pattern of their sisterhood was set.

  “Sally loved being in control,” Bear says, without rancor. “She always dictated what the game was going to be and what the television show was going to be, and it was fine.” Also, “she’d always win. She liked to win, and I learned how to be a gracious loser.” Bear shrugs off the role she was assigned, steering me to another favorite TV cartoon, Rocky and Bullwinkle, with an intrepid flying squirrel and a loyal backup moose. “I think it was just the prerogative of being the older sibling. And having a younger sibling who would go along with it. Sally always struck me as being much braver and much smarter, so she should be Rocky to my Bullwinkle.”

  It took a special sister to permit—and laugh off—such dominance; special parents, too. After Sally’s first spaceflight, a colleague approached Dale and asked, “Aren’t you proud of your daughter?” “Which one?” he responded. Bear would take her own road less traveled, inheriting her ancestors’ churchgoing bent to become a Presbyterian minister. Her gift for connecting the spiritual to the mundane was evident to everyone, including her mother, whose highest compliment tended to be, “That wasn’t half bad.” Joyce did much better in a letter to Sally some years later, writing about Bear, “Preaching I can take or leave, but she’s good.”

  Bear also remembers being with her dad as a child when a friend asked, “Are you the tennis player?”—meaning Sally. Dale answered, “No, she’s the saxophone player.” Sally may have been the golden child, but the Rides always shared the glow equally. “Absolutely,” Bear says, “I never doubted that they loved me as much as Sally.”

  By all accounts, love infused the Ride household. It just wasn’t something anyone talked about. Or had to validate. Sally later described her relationship with Bear this way: “The two of us always got along very well and we enjoyed each other’s company, but we were not real close as sisters.” Bear says it wasn’t a traditional closeness, but that they shared “an intuitive way of being connected. With one word or one look, we’d totally get what the other was thinking.” Bear also lays it on the old country.

  “Closeness is not a word that is often used to describe relationships in our family,” she explains, citing the DNA of her Norwegian forebears. “My maternal grandmother used to call our family ‘tight lipped.’ Our people were not overly demonstrative nor given to excessive chatter. I come from a long line of intuitive introverts whose conversations were by and large internal.” Joyce chalks it up to “generations of distant parents.” Her mother and father, Ada and Andy, she tells me, “did nothing but argue, and they never showed any affection to each other or to me, so I was not a terribly affectionate mother.” It is a stark confession, a rare moment of self-analysis and as close as I get to a “Rosebud” moment to explain Sally’s guarded manner. But Joyce says it evenly, with no apparent regrets, which is how things worked in their family.

  None of Sally’s friends remembers a lot of kissing and hugging in her house. Or any at all. And no one ever heard anyone say, “I love you.” That wasn’t the way they communicated. “I taught more by example than by words,” Joyce tells me. Bear calls it “wordlessness, a lack of social skills, or something like that. Sally just picked it up, and I did too, to some extent, but I broke out of it. But I always assumed that my parents loved me.”

  In a culture that took its cues from television, the Rides were neither the warm and fuzzy Nelsons nor the outwardly cozy Andersons, whose Father always knew Best. (Although Sally, as a high school senior, would have a single blind date with actor Jerry Mathers, the star of TV’s iconically perfect family in Leave it to Beaver. Bear peered out the window when Mathers arrived, announcing, “It’s the Beave!”) They were, however, good-natured, good-humored and undeniably loving—a “happy house,” one regular visitor recalls, where the girls felt cared for and where a solid, middle-class family enjoyed the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower years.

  With yet another difference.

  Sally’s parents were free-thinking, open-minded, risk-taking individuals who raised their children to be citizens of the world, like the international visitors who often stayed at their house because Dale and Joyce were on a State Department list to host foreigners. An array of guests of various skin colors and ethnicities were also invited to the regular Saturday night parties where Dale would tend the bar and cook the desserts. “Sally grew up assuming that everyone was a potential friend,” Joyce says.

  Dale, after teaching junior high school social studies and earning his EdD specializing in adult education, became a political science professor at Santa Monica Community College (SMCC). He was gregarious, genial, athletic and a committed Republican. Joyce likes quoting the reporter who described Dale’s “pleasantly ruffled face and tousled white hair. He sunburned easily,” she says. “Sally worshiped him and channeled his happy outlook, literally following him around everywhere.” He was the family extrovert.

  Joyce, still succinct and arch at ninety, is both witty and guarded, favoring one-word answers. Sally fully appreciated Joyce’s quirky humor (her favorite holiday is Groundhog Day) and absorbed both her unorthodox approach to life and her politics. “I cheerfully went out and canceled D
ale’s vote every time,” boasts Joyce. “I never voted Republican.” At UCLA, where she worked in the personnel office after graduating, she refused to sign the 1950 Loyalty Oath, an anti-Communist excess like many sweeping the country during the “Red Scare” tactics of the McCarthy Era (when red was the color of Communism, not Republican states). “I thought it was stupid,” she says today. When she left UCLA, she directed her considerable energy towards a variety of volunteer progressive causes, working mostly with women, especially the incarcerated, for the next half century. “Yes,” sighs Bear, “I told my own children: Grandma’s in prison again! She continues to be my hero.”

  The family dynamic, says Bear, was simple: “Sally got my dad, I got my mom.” Joyce agrees. “Bear always knew where I was coming from and I always knew where she was coming from,” she tells me. As for Sally: “We were on a very friendly basis.” The casual—or removed—nature of their relationship is evident in lines from two letters Joyce wrote to her older daughter. 1996: “There must be something new in your mundane life.” 1998: “All I really need to know is how’s your life, and as usual, I don’t know what to ask or where to start … I figure you’re taking care of the planet. Heavy responsibility.”

  But for all the lack of intimacy, there was a loving strategy.

  “We wanted our daughters to excel, not conform,” Joyce told a reporter. “We never patronized them or treated them like they were inferior to us. We never talked baby talk to them. We gave birth to persons, not possessions.” She calls it benign neglect. “We just let them develop normally,” Dale explained. “We might have encouraged, but mostly we let them explore.”

  Theirs was an unusually enlightened approach during the Mad Men mentality of the 1950s. At a time when girls were supposed to get married, have a family and cook dinner every night in a kitchen with avocado-colored appliances, the Rides raised their daughters without preconceptions or gender constraints. “I guess I was oblivious to the fact that men were in any way superior,” explains Joyce drily. “Dale was good about giving a hand up to women on the faculty at SMCC. I just assumed that we were equal, and he failed to disabuse me of the fact.”

  In 1985, after Sally’s two flights, Dale was offended by a print ad for financial aid to the nation’s colleges. It showed a picture of a little boy dressed in a spacesuit. “Help him get America’s future off the ground,” read the headline. Dale fired off a letter to the sponsor, lambasting the “unconscious (I assume) bias we have in education… . As a parent of the first US woman astronaut, I know firsthand that girls also aspire to math and science and we should encourage her [emphasis added] to ‘get America’s future off the ground.’ ”

  That is one very hip dad, and the gift of equality from both her parents helped guarantee Sally a boundless future. Born into a world that paid women just over half of what men earned—for the same work—Sally saw her prospects through a positive lens. Or maybe the blinders of the invincible. “There was absolutely no sense—through all the years growing up—that there was any limit to what I could do or what I could pursue,” she said.

  VAN NUYS

  Life was good for the two little girls growing up in their new house on the pie-shaped lot on quiet Gerald Avenue in Van Nuys. Both sets of grandparents lived within babysitting range. Tom and Jennie—Dale’s parents—were in Santa Monica, in the stucco house with the Spanish tile roof that Tom had built himself in 1925 with lumber hauled on a donkey cart before Wilshire Boulevard was paved. He grew berries, kept bees and let the girls collect eggs from a coop full of chickens. Andy and Ada lived one community over, in Brentwood, where they played cards with the girls, and became Grap and Gada from their shorthanded names on the scorecard.

  At home, Sally mastered the backyard trampoline and was “a terror on a tricycle,” according to Bear, rolling through the early years on an array of strollers, wagons, bikes and other modes of travel. “Any way she could get out and about,” explains Bear. Sally also swam, fished, skied, skated, kayaked, sledded and rode a pony, dressed in everything from snow pants to frilly dresses and one spiffy red gingham romper suit. One early photo that captures her climbing out of her crib makes you understand the futility of ever trying to fence her in. Or hold her back. As Mighty Mouse, Bear recalls, she would “launch herself from the front seat to the back” of the family Plymouth, Bear recalls, crying, “Here I come to save the day!”

  Competition came with the territory. Dale helped football and basketball players transfer from SMCC to UCLA, adding coaches from all the teams to his wide circle of friends and bringing his daughters to practice sessions. He and Joyce were both diehard, miss-no-games UCLA Bruins fans, with season tickets for both the football and the basketball teams, the latter even before John Wooden made them champions. Sally inherited their love of the Bruins and would later cherish a copy of Wooden’s famous Pyramid of Success that she bought at auction. After hers became a household name, Wooden, by then a close family friend, absent-mindedly told a sports reporter that he once held little Sally Rand (the popular blonde stripper who both scandalized and enthralled audiences) as a baby—a slip of the tongue he quickly corrected: “No, no, no! … I meant to say Sally Ride, you know, the astronaut.” The Rand/Ride mixup was so common, Sally early included it in her own joke repertoire.

  Sally also revered the Los Angeles Dodgers, those more recent immigrants to California, who became her personal obsession (she had boxes full of baseball cards) and an early thwarted career ambition. Playing shortstop for the Dodgers, Joyce would later say, was the only thing she told Sally that she could not do simply because she was a girl.

  At five, Sally raced her father to the newspaper each morning to check the box scores, having learned to read from comic strips. At eight, she commemorated the Dodgers’ 3–2 victory over the San Francisco Giants during a tight pennant race (“tighter than a pair of slacks on Aunt Fanny,” according to one colorful columnist firmly rooted in the ’50s) with a crayon drawing of pitcher Don Drysdale (wearing blue) facing down all the Giants in the field (wearing red). The players, including Willie Mays and Orlando Cepeda, are neatly labeled. Bear is convinced that Sally’s habit of analyzing batting averages and pitching statistics, which she memorized, got her hooked on math early.

  At Hayvenhurst public school, followed by Gault Street Elementary, science and math came more easily than speaking out. “I was a quiet kid when I was growing up,” Sally said in 2006, “and so I didn’t really like to be called on in class. I think that my most stressful moments were probably sitting in class, huddled down, hoping that the teacher didn’t notice me and call on me. Whether I knew the answer or not, that was irrelevant.” She wondered whether she was “an introvert by nature.” Her mother says all the females in the family were, and that Sally was definitely “an ‘I’ [for Introversion] on the Myers-Briggs” psychological scale, the once-standard measure of personality types.

  Introverts gather energy by being alone. They recharge their batteries by turning inward and prefer the company of a small group of people. Their opposites are extroverts, who rev up in social situations, thrive in large crowds and tend to be more talkative and excitable. Being an introvert explains much of Sally’s behavior as an adult. As a child it certainly didn’t affect her academically. She skipped a year in grammar school and supplemented her education with a ravenous appetite for reading. Among the favorites: the Nancy Drew series (solving just about anything), Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint (among others) and bedtime tales of Damon Runyon, because the vivid characters “kind of tickled” Joyce.

  The Rides valued education highly but not conventionally. “[T]hey made sure,” Sally said later in an interview, “that I spent plenty of time studying, but also trying to make it fun and trying to make it entertaining and trying to make me appreciate that it was a good way to get ahead in the world.”

  EUROPE

  In 1960, when Sally was nine and Bear seven, Dale and Joyce turned his sabbatical into a yearlong tour of Europe, global ed
ucation on a grand scale. They pulled the girls out of school (with permission from the principal), sold the house on Gerald Avenue along with most of the furniture, then flew to New York and sailed to Holland on the S.S. Rotterdam. In Bremen, Dale bought a white Borgward Combi station wagon to explore the land of their forebears and the cities he had help liberate in the war. Along with the authorized schoolroom lessons that Joyce brought along, the girls were assigned hobbies and tasks to keep them focused. Both started stamp collections—animals for Bear; sports and Olympics for Sally, whose four albums would one day contain five hundred stamps and hold her attention long into adulthood. The girls were also directed to keep diaries of the trip. Sally’s, in red leatherette, is a charming (if succinct) exercise by an astute (and often funny) young observer that begins the day they arrived:

  Sept. 17 1960. Rotterdam (rain).

  It could be an entry in the notebook of the grownup Sally more than two decades later, a preview of her shorthand style, complete with her lifelong allergy to proper spelling. She writes of visiting the Hage, and the Hauge, never quite getting it right. And she records her first ferryboat ride in Denmark, her first snowfall (and snowman) in Austria, her first ski lesson in the Alps, where they spent Christmas. That’s also where she taught Bear the truth about Santa Claus. “She dared me to stay awake to watch, and I did,” Bear recalls, still amused. Sally also revealed the identity of the Tooth Fairy by telling Bear to look at the handwriting on the note and compare it to their father’s.