Hidden Figures - Margot Lee Shetterly

had been set the year before by an
engineer in the Aerospace Mechanics
Division—Katherine Johnson’s group—
but Mary and her young collaborator
were more than up to the challenge. She
was ready to spend all the time it took to
help her son, Levi, build a humdinger of
a car to race in the peninsula’s 1960 soap
box derby.
Since the beginning of the year, Mary
had spent hours, hundreds of them,
perhaps, collaborating with her thirteenyear-old
son the way she worked with
Kazimierz Czarnecki. She and Levi had
gone to the local Chevrolet dealer to fill
out the entry form and pick up a copy of
the official rules, which read like a
familiarization manual for an airplane.
“The car and driver together must weigh
less than 250 pounds. Only rubber