The late 1940s saw increased flight activity, and more women computers were needed at the NACA Muroc Flight Test Unit than the ones who had originally arrived in 1946. A call went out to the NACA Langley, Lewis, and Ames laboratories for more women computers. Pictured in this photograph with the Snowman are some of the women computers who responded to the call for help in 1948 along with Roxanah, Emily, Dorothy, who were already here. Standing left to right: Mary (Tut) Hedgepeth, from Langley; Lilly Ann Bajus, Lewis; Roxanah Yancey, Emily Stephens, Jane Collons (Procurement), Leona Corbett (Personnel), Angel Dunn, Langley. Kneeling left to right: Dorothy (Dottie) Crawford Roth, Lewis; Dorothy Clift Hughes, and Gertrude (Trudy) Wilken Valentine, Lewis. In National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) terminology of 1946, computers were employees who performed laborious and time-consuming mathematical calculations and data reduction from long strips of records generated by onboard aircraft instrumentation. Virtually without exception, computers were female; at least part of the rationale seems to have been the notion that the work was long and tedious, and men were not thought to have the patience to do it. Though equipment changed over the years and most computers eventually found themselves programming and operating electronic computers, as well as doing other data processing tasks, being a computer initially meant long hours with a slide rule, hunched over illuminated light boxes measuring line traces from grainy and obscure strips of oscillograph film. Computers suffered terrible eyestrain, and those who didn't begin by wearing glasses did so after a few years. But they were initially essential employees at the Muroc Flight Test Unit and NACA High-Speed Flight Research Station, taking the oscillograph flight records and "reducing" the data on them to make them useful to research engineers, who analyzed the data.
