Sally Ride

by Lynn Sherr

  ASTRONAUT RIDE TO PURSUEDUAL INTERESTS AT UCSD

  —Los Angeles Times, June, 1989

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

  Nearly five hundred miles down the coast, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) knew that getting Sally Ride was a coup, which they secured with a dual appointment: professor of physics (with tenure) and director of the California Space Institute (CalSpace), the statewide coordinator for space-related research throughout the UC system. “The package of these two was very attractive,” Sally said. “This will allow me to pursue my interest in physics and in the space program.” She hoped to expand satellite coverage of Earth to permit more remote sensing of environmental problems. And, she said, “I’d like to have an impact on [space] policy.” Earth was not just her scientific priority; it was where she was planting her feet for the next phase of her career.

  And while the Stanford rejection was a situation ripe for resentment, Sally never uttered a word of regret. “I was furious,” Tam O’Shaughnessy tells me. “But she took it in and then just spun it around. She said, ‘Okay, they don’t want me, just move on.’ So instead of dwelling on the failure, she just wiped it out of her brain and replaced it with UCSD, who valued everything she’d done.” Sally never held a grudge. “She still loved Stanford. She just thought about it the way she wished to. She was a genius at doing this, to maintain her positive attitude, her confidence, and move along.”

  This from the woman who’d told a reporter before STS-7, in 1983, “I haven’t had any major disappointments or any major failings.”

  It was just like the photo of her victorious tennis match on the shelf; like the letter home from Swarthmore about making the hockey team; like getting an A (first semester) in Melvin Schwartz’s Electricity and Magnetism class. “Sally would always turn things around so that it was her decision,” Tam says. “She learned very young to turn things in her favor, to always maintain her self-confidence. Anything that was negative, she’d turn her own way. So I imagine there might have been some negative things out there, but she wouldn’t see them, she wouldn’t hear them, would not respect the professor who tried to exclude her.”

  Tam knew Sally better than anyone. Their relationship had solidified over four years and tens of thousands of miles, as they crisscrossed the country regularly to be together. When Sally was at Stanford, with a reasonably flexible schedule, she spent many weekends in Atlanta, where Tam was finishing her master’s program at Georgia State and about to embark on her doctorate in ecology at the University of Georgia. “We were always talking about science,” Tam says, “because I was hungry to learn about physics and chemistry, and I loved to talk about biology—living things—and the connections among life, lands, oceans and air.” During both summers, Tam packed up Annie, her three-legged cocker spaniel, and moved into Sally’s condo, half a block from campus. At the Stanford Arts Festival one year, the women bought matching gold rings, Tam’s distinguished by a turquoise stone. Sally’s is visible in many photographs, on the fourth finger of her left hand. One day, at a bookstore, Tam picked up Isaac Asimov’s Is There Life on Other Planets?, a new book for young readers, and showed it to Sally. Asimov’s ability to make complicated concepts clear made them realize that there might be a way to get children interested in the fields that had hooked them both. The germ of an idea was born.

  Each time Tam returned to Atlanta, Sally felt unsettled. The long-distance relationship was taxing. For the second and last time of her life she consulted a therapist, who, she told Tam, said that unlike some people, who needed only “partial relationships,” Sally needed “a full relationship”—intimacy, living together, being in the same place at the same time. So when her future after CISAC looked uncertain, she interviewed at Clemson, Georgia Tech, and other schools near Atlanta, because that’s where Tam was based. The offer from UCSD ended that. Sally prepared herself for more planes and travel, and headed to San Diego.

  Then, in September 1989, another ball Sally couldn’t control. Dale Ride entered the hospital in Los Angeles for routine prostate surgery and had a sudden, massive heart attack. At a very premature sixty-seven, Sally’s father was dead. The man she had trailed as a youngster, the doting dad who had taken her to tennis matches and pushed her ever higher and bequeathed her his ready smile and affable outlook, the proud papa who would brook no bias when it came to his daughters, was gone. Sally was distraught. She called Steve and asked for the phone number of his father, the minister. “I think she just needed somebody to talk to about this,” Steve says.

  She also called Tam. “She said she needed me in California. So I went out for the memorial service and stayed a week or so. And then she got extremely shaky. She said, ‘I can’t take the long distance anymore.’ So I left my PhD program and moved to California.”

  Sally bought a large townhouse on a bluff in La Jolla, the seaside community just north of San Diego. Tam got a job teaching biology at nearby San Diego Mesa College There would also be a house in Atlanta for a few years. They moved in together permanently, partners for life, despite Sally’s aversion to making long-range personal plans. Setting goals for NASA, it turns out, was infinitely easier than doing it for herself. When it became clear that the relationship was serious, Tam asked Sally, “So tell me how you’re thinking about us. Is this forever for you? What do you feel?”

  Sally answered without emotion. “You know I can’t think more than five years ahead.”

  “And I said, ‘What? Excuse me? You’re supposed to say, “Yes, it’s forever! You’re the love of my life!”’ You know? ‘“This is it.” You’ve got to be joking, you can only look five years ahead?’

  “And she was dead serious. She said, ‘That’s how I’ve always been about everything, I can’t look that far ahead.’

  “So it just became this thing with us. Five years went by and I’d say, ‘Okay, are you going to sign up again? Are we renewing?’ And then another ten years went by.”

  And so on.

  They would live, work and love together for another twenty-three years, hiking and running along the trails and cliffs at nearby Torrey Pines State Reserve; playing catch in the back yard or ping-pong in the garage; reading War of the Worlds or The Invisible Man to each other; toning their bodies with yoga or Jane Fonda’s exercise tapes; two strong women, one’s yin to the other’s yang. When they sat together in the living room, their legs were usually in contact. When they traveled together on airplanes, Tam says, “our little hands would be touching under the blanket.” They would stroll beneath the night sky, looking for constellations or watching the Perseid and Leonid meteor showers. And where once they had boogied together as a group of girlhood tennis players, they now slow-danced to Linda Ronstadt and Madonna and Emmylou Harris. Their language was the romance of the ordinary: “Goose, I’m home!” Sally would call out as she entered through the garage at day’s end, colliding into Tam’s arms. “I love you,” they said to each other as they dropped off to sleep. “Behind closed doors,” Tam says, “she was just a loving little puppy dog.”

  • • •

  It would surely enrich the narrative to add Sally’s own distinctive voice to all this, to see it through her eyes. But almost nothing exists, on paper or in pixels, about her private time with Tam. Her lively letters describing her day-to-day adventures had stopped after college—no doubt she was too busy being an astronaut; then, her celebrity and the distress over various stalkers, made her wary of committing anything personal to print. The only journals she kept as an adult focused on her work, not her personal life. And unlike her days at NASA, when reporters occasionally pierced the protective tiles and secured a comment about, or an image of Sally and Steve together, Sally and Tam’s years together were lived, by choice, out of the public spotlight. Sally never reached out to friends or family members to discuss any of it. That simply wasn’t her way.

  Tam shows me the few existing brief mementoes she kept, tantalizing glimpses of their life together: A computer prin
tout of a reservation Sally made at the Four Seasons Hotel for a surprise weekend in Boston; a hastily scribbled note left on Tam’s pillow when Sally had to leave early one morning, reading, “Sleep well!” And a jocular greeting card Sally once sent her. “You’re not fair!!” says the critter on the front. Inside: “You’re excellent.” Sally signed it with her initials: “Love, SKR.” Once, on a sticky note attached to her solution to a trigonometry problem, Sally wrote to Tam, “Isn’t physics wonderful! (you sure are). Love, The ‘mad physicist.’ ”

  The recollections of insiders are equally engaging and terse. When one friend commented, “You two are great!” Sally said, contentedly, “Yeah, I’ll keep her.”

  Even the modest group of snapshots of just Sally and Tam together—hiking with friends, or cuddling one of their dogs, or speaking on the same stage—lack the mugging-and-hugging quality common to so many couples in today’s image-obsessed generation. They were, Tam says, just too busy with their work to sit down and pose for formal photographs.

  Slim pickings for the historical record, but their mutual devotion over more than a quarter century paints an adoring picture. Billie Jean King, who, along with her partner, Ilana Kloss, spent time with them, talks about an affection that went beyond the physical: “You could tell by their tone of voice, the way they looked at each other, spoke to each other. I could see it, I could feel it.” Grenn Nemhauser, a former WTA executive, and her partner, Lindsey Beaven, a onetime top-ten British player, spent many weekends with them, hiking and playing the occasional friendly game of tennis. “They were just easy to be with,” Nemhauser tells me. “And fun. We just laughed the whole time.”

  Kay Loveland, Tam’s psychologist friend in Atlanta, says it was about looks and actions, not words. “I never heard Sally say, ‘I love you,’ to Tam. But you could tell they were in love by the way they would touch each other when they’d go by.” She watched them joke together and tease each other, remembering the “wry Sally smile.” Loveland also was taken by Sally’s tenderness with Tam’s pets, Massie the cat and Annie the dog. “I would see this soft side of Sally with the animals. She was just gentle and sweet with Annie when she took her for a walk,” she tells me.

  And it could harden to stone if anything threatened the animals. Once, on an airplane stuck on a hot tarmac, Sally uncharacteristically used her famous name to get results. With Maggie and Gypsy, their two bichon frises, confined to the hold, she approached a crew member and got the dogs out of the belly of the plane and into the first class cabin with her. Sometime later, Gypsy, at seventeen, was so weakened by cancer and chemo, she could barely walk. Sally would put Gypsy in the passenger seat of her black Porsche Boxster, drive to the nearby soccer field, and set her softly into the grass for fresh air and a feeble attempt at exercise. One day, Tam went along. “And this young guy came over to Sally and said, ‘I hope when I get old that somebody takes as good care of me as you’re taking care of that little dog!’ ”

  Remembering the scene, Tam tells me, “That’s why I actually think she would have been a wonderful parent. She had that gentle, soft, caring side of her.” Tam says she loves children herself, and earlier in her life foresaw having her own, “when I felt like I had my act together and could be a really good parent.” She also remembers talking to Sally about it, “and I told her she’d be a remarkable parent. And she said she just really didn’t think she wanted kids. She was just dead certain about it, the way she could be about some things. Zero interest.” The subject went away.

  • • •

  Sally and Tam traveled—to Santa Fe and Taos, where they developed an appreciation for Native American artwork; to Hawaii, where they hiked Diamondhead and where each had her first massage and spa experience; and to Australia for twelve days, where Sally delivered a series of talks. It was, Tam says, “the longest vacation we ever took together.”

  They also worked through each other’s family issues, with Tam pushing against Sally’s natural reticence to express her emotions. She helped Sally think through ways to get Joyce, her mom, through some health problems. Sally helped Tam figure out how to help get her mom, Judy, resettled in a supportive community when Judy retired. When Tam was afraid to go on an interview for a PhD program in biology at the University of California, Riverside, near where she grew up, Sally packed up the dog, got on the plane and accompanied her to the university. Years later, that’s where Tam would earn her doctorate in school psychology. “Sally helped me get over some of the hard memories of when I was a kid,” Tam says. “She helped me blossom into who I really was. Sally liked to fix things, make them better.”

  Sometimes, though, Tam found that frustrating. Because “on an emotional level, sometimes there isn’t a fix, and what you have to do is just talk about things and get to the depth of things. Sally and I were able to talk about everything, but it doesn’t mean I always got the answers,” she adds with a laugh. “She did open up more and more over the years, and I think I helped Sally at least reach into her emotional side. But a conversation about how Sally felt about something or someone lasted about five minutes while I could have discussed it for much, much longer.”

  They were two independent women with a shared life in a shared home, where they had separate phone lines, separate bank accounts. And for a long time, separate careers. When Tam started as a professor at San Diego State—doing research and writing while training school psychologists—Sally was evolving her own teaching style, motivated by the same perfectionism for her classrooms that had driven her to success at NASA. And the same challenge. Before her flight on STS-7 she’d said, “There are a few people waiting to see how I do. There are people within NASA who need convincing … [It’s important that] I don’t do anything dumb.” That’s exactly what she found when she first got to UCSD in 1989.

  PROFESSOR

  Inevitably, there were skeptics. “She came as a full professor in the physics department, but she didn’t look and smell to many people like a full professor,” explains Richard Somerville, a climatologist whose office was directly above Sally’s CalSpace digs at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “She hadn’t published a large number of research papers, and not everyone was enthusiastic. Some people felt that she’d been hired as a celebrity and imposed on us. So she arrived under a bit of a cloud.”

  A very famous cloud. That fall, Billy Joel released “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” ticking off the names of fifty-six historic figures or moments over the past forty years. “Sally Ride” came between “Wheel of Fortune” and “heavy metal suicide.” As the song shot to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100, Sally heard it on the car radio. So did Billie Jean King, who would turn up the volume to catch Sally’s name every time it played.

  At UCSD, about one hundred requests poured in each week: “Could Sally autograph my child’s report?” “Could my child interview her for a report?” “Could she send a photo?” Sally stopped answering her listed phone and got back to work.

  She hunkered down, preparing for her classes by spending countless hours researching, writing, and even sketching the concepts she wanted to convey on pages of binders that filled several shelves. No detail was too tiny. For Plasma Physics, a rigorous, upper-level course, she made notes to herself about what to write on the front board and what to write on the side board. She flagged which theorems to spell out, which to circle, planning everything, never just winging it. And just like the examples that had so captivated her during Elizabeth Mommaerts’s physiology class at Westlake, her analogies came from real life. A very exotic real life.

  To explain the refraction of waves traveling through media of different densities, she used the space shuttle, showing how communicating with Earth meant using different wavelengths to travel through the ionosphere—which is, after all, plasma. Landing the shuttle gave her another easy-to-grasp explanation: as the orbiter reenters the atmosphere from the ionosphere and glides down to Earth, losing altitude, the air gets denser, so the shuttle goes slower. “Th
e plasma changes, it puts drag on the shuttle, and that’s how the shuttle lands,” explains Karen Flammer, her colleague in the physics department and close friend, who would fill in when Sally had to miss class. “The shuttle doesn’t need to put on the brakes, it’s just natural plasma physics! It’s an example that all students can not only grasp, but would be excited enough to remember and to understand the physical concepts.” Flammer says it was a very unusual approach. “When I took the course as an undergraduate, the professor wrote the final equation on the board and never took the time to explain it. Sally really tried to simplify it, step by step.”

  She illustrated her lectures with graphs, tables, charts and pictures, some of which she drew by hand on transparencies for projection. “Sally liked to model science,” Flammer tells me. “She just became this Excel freak, got really excited when she tried to graph something.” Her creativity was especially evident in a course she conceived for first year physics majors called Exploring the Solar System (Physics 163). To compare the environment on Earth to that on planets at different distances from the Sun, she invented an astronaut visiting San Diego and an astronaut visiting Mars. And she described the kind of space suit an astronaut would need to visit both locations, which explains how the temperature and atmosphere are different. “Who else would think of that, wearing an astronaut suit?” Flammer asks.

  Sally’s examples spanned the solar system. She asked her students to compute the trajectory for a spacecraft mission to Venus, to consider why there might be no ozone layer on Mars, and to estimate the kinetic energy an asteroid of a certain size, speed and density would have when it crashes into Earth. Sometimes she brought the examples closer to home. “It was not just learning how to solve an equation about why a raindrop is in a spherical shape, the physics of it,” recalls Lauren Martin, who taught science for ten years after taking one of Sally’s classes in 1991. “It was more, when the raindrop falls, how are you going to know where it’s going to pool, and where it’s going to puddle? Now this you can apply it in your real life, almost the engineering of it. Because the way I’d always experienced physics majors, they think it is the be-all and end-all of the world—everything stems from physics. And that’s true. But if you don’t understand how it fits into the real world, you don’t understand it or see it that way. And she brought it to life and made it applicable.”