I
spent some time with Sally
Ride in 2000.
We
were both attending a
“CEO Summit” at the Sundance Resort in Utah, an event
hosted by the venture
capital firm that backed the businesses each of us worked
for at the time.
Sally
was the president of a new, pretty cool company called Space.com. Unlike me,
who figured simply as a “gray-hair”/authority/stable management totem
at my firm, Sally was a legitimate
superstar/trophy/marquee figure for
hers, attracting positive press notices and additional investment, both of
course quintessential aspects of dot.com life.
Our
v.c. backers asked Sally to be the
featured attraction at one of the conference’s lavish evening events. (The
other celebrity on display there was Gen. Colin Powell. As big a phony
as he usually seems when appearing on television, in person he really was
a riveting
public speaker.)
Sally’s
presentation consisted of a
fascinating guided tour through her outer space photograph collection and she was
charming, funny and modest describing how putting on slide shows like this one
was an easy, automatic way
to garner positive attention and rapt audience interest.
I
wouldn’t have accosted her, but we happened to be thrown together during a couple of cocktail hours and,
never having met an astronaut, I
wasn’t going to shy away from the opportunity to speak to her. One thing
I knew, apart from the things
every American had learned about her, was that she had
originally attended Swarthmore College, where I also studied as an
undergraduate, so I used this as my “ice-breaker.”
Sally
flashed warmly on
the memory, saying
that she loved Swarthmore, but that she had fooled herself into
thinking that she might be able to live comfortably far away from the California sunshine
of home. One cold, wet
Pennsylvania winter followed by
a disappointing spring and the promise of another gloomy January prompted
her mid-sophomore year
departure for Stanford.
We discussed how we both felt like fish out of water at our respective
companies (and frankly at the conference) and how basically foreign the all the hyper-drive
commercial activities on amped-up
display there felt to her. She said (ever modestly) that she was a scientist
and she felt most comfortable being involved in research
and teaching, although she said she also loved working at NASA
and her time in the astronaut program.
So
I wasn’t surprised when I learned a few months later that she had left Space.com
and all the pressures,
depredations, natterings, dark mutterings and sometimes
violent outbursts inherent in dot.com office life.
I
was so very sorry and sad to learn of Sally Ride’s passing on Monday, late in the afternoon of a very hot day,
sitting in a steamy house in southeastern Pennsylvania, not far from
Swarthmore, waiting for the air conditioning repairman to arrive.
Like
all astronauts, she was a huge, automatic inspiration to me, but
as the “first U.S. woman in space,” of course she held a special place in my
heart.
