Burlington woman a space-age pioneer

52 FACES

By Bob Hansen

For The Hawk Eye

Pour yourself a glass of lemonade, find a comfortable chair and spend a pleasant afternoon talking to a pioneer. The pioneer in this case is 87-year-old Carol Hippe, and the comfortable chair is in her spacious apartment at the Burlington Hotel.

But don’t be misled by the gracious surroundings and easy conversation, because Carol is definitely a pioneer. At a time and place when women’s opportunities in the workplace were limited, she carved out a rewarding career in a man’s world and in the process gained a front row seat on some of the most significant events of the 20th century.

It was 1952 and Carol, the child of a chemical engineer and a nurse, had finally realized her ambition of becoming an engineer with her graduation from the University of Southern California. That degree did not come easily and Carol remembers her pathway to the profession.

“I grew up during the Depression,” she said. “That was back in Richmond, Indiana and by the standards of that time, my family was not poor. My father worked as a chemical engineer for – of all things – a casket company where he developed the process for coloring the metal surfaces. Mother was a nurse but I decided early on that I wanted to be an engineer.”

That ambition and a gift for mathematics took Carol to Trinity University in Texas – one of the few schools then accepting women into its engineering program. Romance was to delay her degree process when she married and the couple moved to Southern California.

In California, she was able to continue her work toward her professional certification by earning that treasured degree in mechanical engineering. The 50s job market she entered into was an exciting time to begin a career in the engineering field. The space program was gather headway and the aviation industry was flourishing.

Carol went to work for a research and development corporation – AeroJet – that would produce propellants for the fledgling space and military programs and her experience of those early days offer a window on the country’s first steps to the stars.

“When I got there,” Carol recalls “we were located in a converted garage and were working on JATO (jet assisted take off) propellants. It was a small place but I remember the German rocket scientist, Werner Von Braun, was there. My impression was that he didn’t really do much and he never spoke to the lowly.”

Von Braun was a Nazi scientist that developed the V-1 and V-2 rockets that were unleashed against London and Antwerp. He was accused of utilizing slave labor in deadly working conditions but escaped punishment when he was recruited to the U.S. space program following the war., “We weren’t in the garage for too long,” Carol adds “before they found us a place at an abandoned gravel pit near Azusa because that made it easier to test the rockets.”

Carol Hippe of Burlington earned an engineering degree at the University of Southern California, and parlayed it into work in the space program, including contributions to the Gemini and Apollo programs. [BOB HANSEN/FOR THE HAWK EYE]

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Carol’s work duties in California encompassed the Gemini and Apollo programs and she experienced the excitement that came with each successful launch and the disappoint that followed the failures.

Carol also remembers that she encountered little work discrimination from her fellow engineers because of her sex. “I found that there was no problem from men that knew their business. It was from the men who weren’t really sharp enough and worried about me getting their job. Those were the ones that sometimes slammed the door in my face but I just killed them with my kindness,” she laughed.

Laughter comes easily to the sprightly Carol whose energy and enthusiasm belies her years. But there has been loss in her life. She has married but lost four husbands and a son has passed. But today her Burlington days are brightened by a corps of children, grandchildren and even a great grandchild.

Her eventual move to Burlington had its roots in a career decision that she would leave the aerospace industry and put her engineering degree to work for the now defunct Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

The AEC moved Carol to a weapons assembly facility inside the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant at Middletown, outside Burlington. There, inside the high security fence surround the Line 1 complex, she worked on the country’s nuclear arsenal. “But before I could work for the AEC I had to have my security clearance upgraded so there was a long period of time where I had nothing to do. I complained about it to new friends and they suggest I talk to the Art Diewald family and I ended up as a waitress at his Arion Restaurant. I think I was the only mechanical engineer to work as a waitress at the Arion” she said.

“I’ve always thought it was funny that so few people in Burlington seemed to know what we were doing at Line 1. Parts for a nuclear weapon come from contractors all over the country but there were only two points were these were all brought together and Burlington AEC was one,” she said.

“The decision to move from California to Iowa was certainly difficult,” Carol continued. “But one of the big factors was the school systems in California were following apart and we heard good things about Iowa schools and that’s where we wanted our children. My husband went to work as a salesman for an oil distributor.”

Carol remembers the struggle she and her husband went through to find suitable housing and ended living in an extremely cold and drafty aged farmhouse.

“We nearly froze to death at the house near Mediapolis after coming from California. We wrapped ourselves in coats and sat in front of the open oven just to try to stay warm.” Carol involuntarily shivers as she recalls that first winter.

“But we came to love the country life and I always will say that Iowa has the worst weather and the best people of anyplace in the country.” Carol and her family became a part of the community but the AEC closed the Burlington facility and Carol followed her job to Los Alamos New Mexico. Carol’s job description also changed and she became an environmental engineer She remained in New Mexico for 47 years and after retirement her children argued she should return to Iowa to be near them. The daughters argued they would find her place where she would not suffer from the cold so based on that promise, she returned to Burlington.

That return, however, was not without its problems. She was within weeks of moving into a carefully selected apartment in the refurbished Tama Building when she received a phone call telling her careful plans had just gone up in flames.

There was a frantic search for an alternative that ended when Carol moved into a 1200 square foot apartment in the Hotel Burlington complete with killer views.

Today she spends coffee times with new friends, looks after family and cherishes memories of her adventuresome career. She also worries a little bit about staying warm when winter arrives.

Everybody has a story to tell. Tell yours, or encourage someone you know to tell theirs, in 52 Faces, each week in The Hawk Eye. Call (319) 758-8135 or write to news@thehawkeye.com.