Sally Ride Read online

  In Germany, Sally wrote, “I met Wienersnitzel.” No clarification, no adjectives. She meant dinner, not a person, because her first encounter with a breaded veal cutlet was ambrosia to her little palate, setting off years of seeking out German restaurants back home to repeat the thrill.

  She also acted like a proper tourist.

  Oct. 2. Oslo. Looked around.

  Really, how much more do you need? Oslo was the gateway to Lom, where Sally met her Norwegian relatives for the first time. The next day, in Copenhagen, her parents picked out the elegant Danish modern furniture for their new California home.

  It was, by all accounts, an outstanding trip to worlds present and past. In England, Sally and Bear obediently donned their itchy wool Norwegian outfits and posed for a photo in front of the Russell and Ride Memorial Chapel, dedicated to the memory of great-great-great-great Uncle John Ride. They kept the home fires burning, too. Sally regularly tuned in the Dodgers games on Armed Forces Radio (or Yankees, if that was the only alternative) and tore open Grap’s letters with newspaper clippings from the sports pages. She also managed to find a bat and ball at the home of family friends in Paris.

  In Spain that spring, Joyce Ride made a connection with life-changing consequences. She put her nine-year-old daughter on a clay court and taught her how to play tennis. Sally liked it immediately—better than the two weeks of piano lessons she’d had in Vienna. For the rest of the trip, “I had her squeezing tennis balls and exercising her right wrist to make it strong,” Joyce recalls, rotating her hand to demonstrate. It was not the only harbinger of her future.

  During the long road trips, Sally occupied the front seat of the Borgward with a map, the family’s official navigator. Bear and Joyce sat in back and sang, filling the car with lyrics of the catchy, child-friendly tune that Bing Crosby had made famous: “Would you like to swing on a star?”

  Dale and I raised Sally with a lot of help from our collie, Tsigane. The kids were her sheep, and nobody had better raise a hand to them. I tried once, when I was really angry. Tsigane gently took my wrist and said, “We don’t do that.”

  —Joyce Ride

  ENCINO

  Back home in California, the Rides moved into a three-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, the one that gave Valley Girls their name. For $35,500 they were now authentic, middle-class suburbanites, and they had the barbecue, the hammock and the Rambler to prove it. Sally’s bedroom at 4926 Texhoma overlooked a backyard fragrant with a rose garden, a vegetable patch and a small grove of orange and lemon trees. Movie legend John Wayne lived a few streets over; TV star Dick Van Dyke lived around the corner. It may have been a development, but it was, after all, California.

  It was September 1961, and while an ocean had separated them from some major US developments during their European sojourn—the election of President Kennedy, the launch of America’s first astronaut, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba—they plunged right back into the Left Coast’s embrace of civil rights and the counterculture. Joyce taught her Sunday school class to sing “We Shall Overcome,” and “was hauled before the church session to explain herself,” Bear says proudly. She later taught English as a second language to immigrants and got her class of Japanese students to sing “Red River Valley.”

  Joyce also acquired the family collie, inspired by a dog they’d seen catching snowballs in the former Yugoslavia. The girls were so besotted, they adopted the dog’s name, Tsigane, which means “gypsy.” (With no idea that it was also the name of a dog launched, and recovered, on a Soviet rocket in 1951, the year Sally was born.) Sally and Bear were devoted to Tsigane, playing, wrestling and sleeping with her; as an adult, Sally would use “Tsigane” as her email address and password—usually dropping the “e,” a misspelling that I have corrected for consistency. With the dog in residence, Joyce ordered a collie-colored carpet to reduce her vacuuming time. And she was only kidding about sharing the discipline with Tsigane. “The girls behaved,” she tells me.

  Sally and Bear were not raised to deal with conflict and never learned the consequences of fighting, Bear says, because their parents (unlike Joyce’s own) didn’t argue. As with most households of the early 1960s, their own little Camelot revolved around the mammoth hi-fi cabinet in the living room, where, starting at five each evening, Dale and Joyce would listen to Dixieland jazz during martini hour while nibbling on nuts or Triscuits. As Daddy graded blue books, Sally and Bear would spread out on the floor to do their homework, one hand on Tsigane’s rump. Dinner was some iteration of “Mom’s special tuna glop” or Swanson’s chicken pot pies. Or whatever anyone wanted, usually consumed in the living room. They rarely gathered around the dining room table, but when they did, grace was said. Then they’d reconvene in the living room to watch Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley deliver the news at seven. The girls had their own appointment shows: reruns of Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, I Love Lucy, Get Smart. Over and over again. TV was important. As an adult, Sally’s ringtone for Tam on her iPhone would be the sexy music from Perry Mason.

  Weekends meant UCLA home basketball games, or Bruins football. Or occasional trips to Disneyland, where Sally appropriated most of the E tickets in the packet—the hottest rides on the fastest machines. She was one of the kids tucked into the toboggan at Tomorrowland when the Matterhorn roller coaster was new.

  On Sundays, the Rides headed across the commercial corridor of Ventura Boulevard to the First Presbyterian Church of Encino, where Dale and Joyce both taught and served as elders. That’s when Bear embraced the church and decided to make it her life’s work.

  Sally, on the other hand, announced in junior high school that she was done with church. Weekend junior tennis tournaments were a handy excuse, and no one objected. “Church is no good if you have to force someone to go,” Joyce explains. She’d so disliked Saturday morning Lutheran church school during her Minnesota childhood, she once found a “Quarantine: Measles” sign and hung it on the church door. There was no class that morning.

  As a nine-year-old, Sally had visited a German Sunday school and pronounced it “just a place to keep kids!” As an astronaut, she deflected every effort by reporters to turn her into an evangelist from orbit. Here’s Tom Brokaw coming up against the indomitable Ride sisters before Sally flew:

  Brokaw: Are you particularly religious?

  Sally: My sister got most of the religion in the family.

  Bear: She’s her own person and she certainly has her own belief system and it doesn’t have to fit into mine.

  Brokaw: Will you see this flight in any spiritual way?

  Bear: No [Laughter].

  Brokaw: A triumph of man and technology?

  Bear: Of woman and technology.

  After Sally’s flight, it got worse.

  “There are a lot of people who have asked me since I’ve come back whether I found religion in space,” Sally told Gloria Steinem in a TV interview, “or whether I had any mystical experiences up there. And no!”

  She attended Encino Elementary, then Gaspar De Portola Junior High, where she barely stomached seventh-grade home ec classes (“Can you imagine cooking and eating tuna casserole at eight a.m.?”) but gulped down more math and science. “People who like math like knowing that equations are going to balance. That something equals something,” explains one of Sally’s later physics colleagues. “It’s an interesting kind of truth.” Thanks to some gifted teachers, she also learned about her aptitude for long math equations, for the elements of physics, for the brain teasers in Scientific American magazine. Sally soon had her own subscription to Scientific American.

  And a new favorite hero: James Bond, the dashing spy created by Ian Fleming during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Fear of atomic bombs led to a rash of backyard fallout shelters, where families thought they’d be safe. At school, Sally hid beneath her desk during duck-and-cover drills, and built a model of an atom out of wire and Styrofoam balls. Like every o
ther kid in 1960s America, when the teacher wheeled a black-and-white TV into the classroom and adjusted the rabbit-ear antennae, she watched the snowy screen with fascination as the early astronauts launched us into the space age.

  Her parents bought her a telescope—a 16-inch-long Bushnell Sky Rover as powerful as the one Galileo used to discover the moons of Jupiter three centuries earlier. As a young teen, Sally would carry the black and silver instrument out to the front lawn at night and focus in on Orion, her favorite constellation (because “I can find it so easily! It’s prominent in the sky,” she’d later explain). Or she’d locate Saturn and point out the rings to Bear. The telescope was a more successful present than the microscope, which went largely unused. The chemistry set, however, produced, as Bear recalls, “something stinky. We would have fun dramatically setting up chemistry experiments, and we’d call ourselves ‘mad scientists.’ Apparently we didn’t blow anything up.”

  Sally spent most of her time on the ball field—any ball, any field. The house on Texhoma dead-ended into a perfect spot for football and baseball, where Sally headed every day after school to play with neighborhood boys. She tossed a pigskin better than most of them. And when the kid next door tried to steal second while she was pitching, she threw the ball so hard to get him out, it broke his nose.

  She was a gifted, graceful athlete who ran on her toes and always pushed harder. But do not make the mistake of calling her a tomboy. “I really don’t like that term,” Sally told a reporter many years later. “Tomboy, when applied to a girl, means a girl acting like a boy. As opposed to a girl acting like a girl.” And the only problem with being a girl, she would say, was that girls’ basketball was a half-court game with only three dribbles.

  The sport that most engaged her was the one she’d learned in Europe. Joyce hired Alice Marble, the power-hitting Wimbledon and US Open tennis champion, to give Sally a few lessons at the Deauville Country Club in nearby Tarzana. It was not a match based on love. “Alice Marble found it hard to control Sally,” according to Dale. “Sally’s not controllable.” Adds Joyce: “I remember Alice Marble saying, ‘I’m fifty years old!’ Because Sally was hitting the ball too hard.” Marble’s penchant for hyperbole—or her frustration with the independent-minded preteen whose athleticism she admired—seemed to grow in retrospect. From her retirement home in Palm Desert many years later, she claimed that Sally had tried to bat her in the head with the ball. “I had to duck like crazy. It wasn’t that she mis-hit the ball. She had perfect aim. I was terribly amused she was chosen to be an astronaut,” Marble said. “I think she probably had these aggressive feelings all her life.” No one who really knew Sally saw her aggression as anything but spirited concentration on the athletic field. But a number of adults had the same reaction. Joyce, who usually beat Dale, stopped playing with her daughter when she realized, “I wasn’t seeing the ball go by.” The headmaster at Sally’s high school would recount the first—and last—mistake he made by showing off with her. “She looked at me, smiled rather malevolently and then fired … three successive drives aimed right between the eyes.”

  Sally was soon playing in tournaments, in the pre-commercial world when racquets were wood and the balls white, the same color as their outfits. Girls’ junior tennis was both competitive and fun, a way of life that would produce Sally’s closest pals, her deepest love, her eternal support group. Some of us were lucky enough to go to summer camp, where we forged our best friendships and enjoyed our earliest athletic victories; some found adolescent outlets at the beach or in the mountains or maybe just the local YMCA. The girls on the tennis circuit learned about life while traveling the United States on muscles and speed. Every weekend during the school year, then all summer long, they played at public parks and tony clubs—in Los Angeles or around the country—stayed in affluent homes and sometimes fancy mansions made available by wealthy CEOs and governors and other supporters, and swung their racquets to advance to the next rung and take home yet another silver tray or trophy or double-handled cup. They spent day after day in each other’s company, practicing and playing and sharing victories and losses, whiling away the downtime over gin rummy. Off the court, Sally often landed at the home of Ann Lebedeff in San Marcos, where she and the other fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds would put on the record player and merrily dance to Russian folksongs or the Beatles. “Sally was a bit shy, so one of us would grab her hand and make her dance with us,” Tam recalls. “But once she got started Sally got into it and had fun, too.”

  In an era long before Title IX would level the playing fields and open up opportunity, scholarships and purse money for female athletes, tennis was Sally’s entrée to the world beyond the San Fernando Valley. Her partners and opponents were the stars of Southern California girls’ and women’s tennis. They rubbed shoulders with tennis royalty: Pancho Gonzalez, Maria Bueno, Rod Laver, Billie Jean King. “Tennis,” says Tam, who was a top-ranked teen, “made us immune to celebrity.”

  Sally learned well, a serve-and-volley player with a wicked backhand, a sneaky drop shot, and a forehand that always needed work. “Start low, racket shaft parallel to ground, butt of racket (as in ‘M’ or ‘W’) pointing toward oncoming ball,” Sally wrote in a ringed green notebook, using the shorthand of those playing with Wilson racquets. But the lessons only went so far. Sally bluntly said her forehand stunk, which may be more a comment on her own standards than on her ability. Whitney Grant, her first doubles partner and close friend, says she and Sally devised a unique system of hand signals. The net player would “alert the server of her intent to poach, to fake a move, or stay still,” whatever. They wrote up their rules in a limited edition of two reference manuals, bound in pink ribbon. “The final statement of the booklet said that we were sworn to keep our signals secret, and if either of us broke that promise we would be required to eat the book!” Whitney can’t find hers, and Sally’s has disappeared, but it is the sort of collaboration that Sally would enjoy forever, on and off the court. She always had a best friend, and she always preferred playing team sports like doubles to singles.

  In 1963, when she was starting eighth grade, Sally was ranked number 20 in Southern California Tennis for Girls 12 and under. A year later, Whitney’s father, who informally coached Sally, suggested that she join his daughter at the private and prestigious Westlake School for Girls in Holmby Hills, where she could play serious tennis, get an excellent education and a major start on whatever future she chose. Mr. Grant helped arrange a partial tennis scholarship when Sally entered as a sophomore in 1965, to be supplemented by a class taught by Dale. It is hard to overstate the door this opened to Sally. In a trait that would carry her throughout life, she was ready and willing to sail through.

  Tennis Team Captain … sixteen and single … She thinks; therefore she is, or is she? … takes everything with a grain of salt … gross underachiever …

  —Sally Kristen Ride, from her senior year self-portrait in the Westlake yearbook, 1968

  WESTLAKE

  “I used to think that Westlake was going to last forever,” confessed her best friend, Sue Okie, in the handwritten, two-page, yearbook farewell like those teenage girls have been inscribing to their closest pals forever. “I have never felt so … at home … [as I do] with you.” Sally’s inscription in Okie’s yearbook was considerably less impassioned. “I won’t be sentimental because it’s not in my character,” she began unnecessarily, sliding into her usual set of verbal winks and quips.

  Sally and Okie joined forces the day they met. “She had a blinding smile, glinty blue eyes and gorgeous white teeth,” Okie tells me. “I found her really open and … no, not open. Sally could never be described as an open person. But she was very friendly and engaging, a no-nonsense person.” They were a Mutt and Jeff pairing (Sue was 6-feet tall) of super smart girls who each found comfort in another outsider among their privileged classmates.

  The Westlake School for Girls, then an exclusive singlesex institution (and now the coed Harvard-Westlake)
, was an academically elite prep with a roster of famous alums, including Candice Bergen and Shirley Temple. The Spanish-style mansion with a great hall, elegant stairways and rich lawns, contained fewer than a dozen girls in a classroom; Sally’s graduating class numbered only fifty. Sally and Okie carpooled daily from the un-chic Valley, gossiping and giggling up and over Mulholland Drive and down the winding roads into lush Holmby Hills as somebody’s parent drove. A year later, when a third Valley classmate was old enough to drive her own car, they cranked up the radio with the Supremes or Jefferson Airplane (the scene she would describe to the NASA board) and purposely took detours to get lost in the winding roads or to visit the swans at the Hotel Bel-Air. Anything to be late to assembly. They were California cool—nonchalant, irreverent, carefully cultivating a sense of irony. When Sally and her lab partner had to dissect a fetal pig, they named the cadaver Sir Francis Bacon. Sally’s yearbook photograph—posed like Rodin’s The Thinker—was accompanied by Jean-Paul Sartre’s absurdist riff on Descartes: “I do not think; therefore I am a moustache.”

  Determinedly blasé, Sally sometimes put off studying until the car ride to school. “She could have gotten A’s in every subject,” Okie recalls, “but she didn’t work to get A’s in every subject. If she liked a teacher, she would work. But she could look really snide and roll her eyes, and the teachers could tell that she was kind of making fun of them. I mean, she could be obnoxious. She wouldn’t come out and challenge them so much but she would, you know, just give this look.” Bear calls it the Ride Glower.

  Nearly a decade later, in college, one of her professors would give Sally an A on a paper with the added note, “your class participation was not sufficient to warrant more than a B.”

  Most of Sally’s classmates recall her as an energetic, buoyant teen with total devotion to the school. As seniors, in their white blouses and navy suits, saddle shoes tied neatly, Sue and Sally were among a small group of students handpicked to take early-morning classes at UCLA to stretch their minds. As juniors, they reveled in Dr. Elizabeth Mommaerts’s Human Physiology class, an unusually advanced course taught by a luminous scientist.