BY ELIZABETH HAMILTON
Midway through our interview at her home in Arcadia, California, Susan Finley ’58 says, somewhat embarrassedly, “You won’t believe it, but my daughter-in-law called me the other day to tell me that I have a Wikipedia page! I can’t imagine who set it up.” Finley is genuinely surprised about her celebrity; as she sees it, she has just been doing her job all these years. Since 1958, that job has evolved from “computer,” to software tester, to programmer, to subsystem engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on some of the center’s most important space missions—making her the longest-serving woman employee in NASA history. Originally from Central California, Finley attended Scripps on a scholarship. She pursued a major in art, intending to become an architect, but regarded herself as a terrible artist—at the end of her junior year, she dropped out to avoid having to complete a senior thesis project. But she was also interested in math, and while a student, she worked for a professor in the math department at Claremont Men’s College (Claremont McKenna College became coed in 1976), correcting student papers and helping to collect and analyze data. Looking for a job after she left Scripps “is where Scripps really came in,” Finley recalls. “From my time at Scripps, I knew I liked math, so I applied to an engineering company as a typist. I couldn’t type very well, but I could type.”
Susan Finley ’58 stands next to a prototype for the Mars rover Curiosity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, California, 2016.
She did not get the typist job. In fact, Finley is pretty sure she flunked the typing test. “I took the typing test, and then it was quitting time, and so they said, ‘Well, come back tomorrow.’ And so I came back the next morning, and they said, ‘That job is already gone, but do you like numbers?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I like numbers much more than typing!’ So they said, ‘Would you like to be a computer?’”
Photo by Sarah Soquel Morhaim
So, for her first job after college, Finley was a computer. She and one other woman, also a computer, worked in a room alongside 40 thermodynamic engineers, all men. Whenever an engineer needed a calculation done, he would give it to Finley or her coworker to execute on a Friden electromechanical calculator—essentially a giant adding machine. Finley would set up the equation on the Friden and then plug in the numbers the engineer wished to test. During the 1950s and early 1960s, this kind of computing was considered “women’s work,” although it was higher in the chain of command than secretarial work. “All the computers were women,” Finley recalls. “But I never had any problem at all. I was always treated as an equal—and I know the secretaries weren’t.” 35