This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and I'm Holly Fry.

Back in the summer, we got an email from listener Ed about our episode on electrical engineer Edwin Howard Armstrong. And in that email, Ed said that he was waiting with bated breath for an episode on a woman aeronautical engineer. So we ran our episode on mathematician and aerospace engineer Mary Winston Jackson as a Saturday classic after we got that email.

And I also started looking for ideas that might lead us to a new episode on that theme.

I have finally gotten to that episode today with aerospace engineer Mary Golder Ross.

She was the first indigenous woman in the United States known to have become an engineer.

Just for the purpose of expectations management,

if you are really looking forward to hearing about some extremely cool

feats of aerospace engineering, we don't actually have a lot of detail about the specifics of

her work as an engineer because a lot of it was and still is classified, or if not actually

classified, like very highly secretive.

Mary Golda Ross was born on August 9, 1908.

She was the second child born to William Wallace Ross Jr., known as Biscuit, and Mary

Henrietta Moore Ross.

Her other siblings were Frances Curtis, Billy, Charles, and Robert,

and her family and people close to her called her gold.

In her professional life later on, people called her Mary.

That is what we will also do.

Yeah, it felt a little overly familiar to call her a name

that was really her family and community's name when we aren't

part of the family or the community. Mary's great-great-grandfather was John Ross, who was

...