Bell engineers a successful career

SANDPOINT — Commencement, University of Colorado, 1969. The post-war American economy is at its peak. Millions of barrels of oil had just been discovered in northern Alaska. NASA would be delivering the first human to the moon that summer, and the aerospace industry was in full swing. Nuclear energy is on the rise.

It was a buyer’s market for engineers, and college graduates were landing jobs left and right. Career prospects couldn’t be better.

Especially for one UC graduate who boasted an already impressive resume: a high-profile, hands-on international study abroad; the only person in the UC class of 1969 to receive Tau Beta Pi honors —one of America’s most prestigious of engineering honor societies — plus honors from Pi Tau Sigma, a mechanical engineering society.

But recruiters weren’t knocking down the door of the petite Marsha Bell, a 5-foot-4, newly-minted and highly talented mechanical engineer. Although her abilities and accomplishments were without dispute, Bell had one glaring, unavoidable flaw.

She was a woman.

Born in 1947 in Detroit, Mich., to an electrical engineer father and a farmer’s daughter turned hair stylist mother, Bell’s early years, “definitely shaped my whole life.”

“By the time I was 5, when people asked my what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was an engineer,” Bell said. “I was going to be just like my dad.”

And her parents supported her goals; she was never told, “women can’t do that.”

Bell and her older sister, Patricia, were latchkey kids, and the sisters were required to have dinner prepped and chores done before their parents arrived home from work.

“We were certainly taught a work ethic,” Bell said. Her father was “very present” growing up.

In 1961, Bell was invited to attend what is now called a magnet school, with a specialized curriculum and higher academic standards, based on her high test scores.

A college preparatory program, the school offered a variety of actual academic degrees, and Bell focused on the school’s Product Design curriculum, “the closest thing to mechanical engineering you could get.” Classes included fluid dynamics, drafting, machine shop, and actual design projects. Bell was the only girl in her engineering classes. She was also a majorette.

She graduated in 1965, not with a diploma, but a degree in product design, and planned to pursue a college engineering degree. A high school career counselor, a woman, tried to steer her elsewhere, telling Bell, “You’re not logical, you don’t do well in English … she tried to dissuade me,” Bell recalled.

It was the one of the first of many gender hurdles Bell would spend an entire career overcoming.

Although the General Motors Institute or the University of Michigan where her first college choices, their engineering programs were closed to women at the time. So in the fall of 1965, Bell began studying engineering at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Mich., 600 miles north of Detroit.

Of the more than 4,000 students attending Michigan Tech at the time, Bell estimated 100 were women; 40 of those in the engineering program. Half of Bell’s freshman class were culled by a “weed-out” chemistry course. “It was a tough school,” Bell said.

And she continued to experience resistance to her engineering aspirations. Women didn’t belong in engineering, one female English teacher told her. A male metallurgy professor didn’t call on her once through the entire course.

“It was like I didn’t exist,” Bell recalled. “I couldn’t respond to a question.”

As a junior, Bell had an opportunity to study in Germany for a company known for it’s stainless steel metallurgy. She received a shock when she arrived.

“They didn’t expect me to be a woman.”

Her male counterparts were assigned to work on the production floor. Not Bell. “They wouldn’t let me do that.” Instead, she was assigned to the drafting department.

Bell transferred to the University of Colorado after returning from abroad. There, despite numerous challenges as an aspiring woman engineer, she graduated with high honors.

Bell dreamed of working outside and abroad after graduation.

“I wanted to get out and see the world more. I wanted to go to Alaska. I tried every engineering company up there I could.” A couple of companies told her there were no facilities for woman. Most were less overt.

The unspoken message was clear: despite the need, Bell was a woman trying to enter a man’s profession.

“It got to the point I’d interview with anyone that was coming to look for an engineer,” she said.

By Bell’s estimate, she participated in over 200 interviews. She received three job offers, and “settled” on a job at Westinghouse. She was assigned to research and development, working with a post-war German immigrant, Dr. Bertrand Schumacher, who “had absolutely no problem that I was a woman,” because, Bell surmised, he had worked with women by necessity in Germany during the war.

Together, Bell and Schumacher worked on vacuum-less electron beams for three years, published scholarly papers, and even put an electron beam gun in orbit around the Earth on the Space Lab.

As exciting as the work was, Bell developed other interests, particularly power generation.

“I was very interested in energy production,” Bell said.

In 1973 she transferred to the Westinghouse Advanced Reactors Division in Waltz Mill, Pa. There she focused on cutting-edge nuclear energy fission — breeder reactors — working on mechanical engineering design and testing in support of the program.

“It was certainly not cookie-cutter stuff,” Bell said of her work in those days. “Nobody was doing this.”

Her gender continued to be an issue, however — for everyone else. Bell’s motives for becoming an engineer were frequently questioned. The surrounding culture was very old fashioned, even by today’s far-right conservative standards, a holdover of days gone by. Many wives still didn’t drive cars.

As Bell recalled, “I had men come up to me, and look down at me (and say) why am I taking a man’s job?”

She received a rose with a note written in shorthand, which she couldn’t read. The note, she later learned, wished her a happy secretary’s day.

“They didn’t know how to treat a woman engineer,” Bell said.

President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act eventually put an end to the program. Bell read the tea leaves; although she wasn’t yet laid off, “I was looking for a job,” she said.

The transition was a pivotal moment in Bell’s career, as she stepped out of the original, familiar Westinghouse fold — and into the unknown.

She left with mixed feelings. Even today, after a career of substantial accomplishments, Bell has a hard time containing the emotion she felt about leaving Westinghouse at a time when loyalty was still a strong force.

“Westinghouse — they gave me a job out of college,” Bell said as she fought back tears that betrayed the depth of the hardships she initially endured. “I will be forever thankful to them for that.”

But she also felt her Westinghouse career wasn’t progressing as it should — she felt held back. In 1978, Bell landed a position with Rockwell International at the arid, relatively remote Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, where she found other women engineers. She was emerging out of exile.

“It was like a breath of fresh air,” Bell said.

She would remain at Hanford for the next 21 years, demonstrating her worth through equal measures of ability, hard work, preparation — and sheer grit.