CHAPTER 1THE UPPER PENINSULA
From age ten, Margaret Hamilton lived in a place that might as well have been the Moon to most Americans. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a vast, sparsely populated woodland one fourth the size of Florida. Shaped like the head of a long-beaked bird, it is bordered by three of the five Great Lakes—on the north by Lake Superior and on the south by Lakes Michigan and Huron. Across the water to the south is Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, shaped like a giant mitten, which is where most of the state’s people live.
The Lower Peninsula is famous for its industry, principally the giant automobile plants in the state’s largest city, Detroit. The Upper Peninsula—or U.P., as locals call it—is renowned for its unspoiled beauty, its mineral deposits, and the harshest winters in the United States, with some places averaging nearly twenty feet of snow annually.
* * *
She was born Margaret Elaine Heafield (pronounced “hayfield”) to Esther and Kenneth Heafield in Paoli, Indiana, on August 17, 1936. As a child, Margaret got the nickname Bunny. She would stay Bunny until she was an adult and landed a university job where there was another woman named Bunny. Since that Bunny had seniority, Margaret used her given name from then on.
Clearing snow from the railroad during a typical northern Michigan winter.
Both of Margaret’s parents were teachers, and they moved around the Midwest for several years before finally returning to the U.P., where Kenneth had grown up. Moving around was a tradition with the Heafields, since Kenneth had been born in England before emigrating first to Canada and then to Michigan with his parents.
Margaret’s earliest years coincided with the Great Depression, which was a worldwide economic crisis that lasted throughout the 1930s. At its worst, the Depression left up to a quarter of the U.S. workforce unemployed. Luckily, teachers could usually find jobs if they were willing to move. So every year or two young Margaret ended up in a different town, as Kenneth and Esther shifted between poorly paid, temporary positions.
The Great Depression was followed by another national crisis, World War II, which America entered when Margaret was five years old. Like many young men, Kenneth joined the military and was shipped overseas. This was an even more chaotic time than usual for the family, since Margaret and her brother and sister were often split up, living with their grandparents in Indiana or their mother, wherever she happened to be teaching.
Margaret, about age four.
A few days before her ninth birthday in the summer of 1945, Margaret and her friends were reenacting a children’s book about finding an upside-down country on the other side of the world. They were digging a hole to get there when suddenly all the bells in town started ringing and every car horn began tooting. Had they broken through? Were they in trouble?
No, the war had ended.
Things settled down after that. Kenneth returned, and the family moved to Sault Ste. Marie in the U.P., where he took a job as an English professor at a branch of the Michigan College of Mining and Technology. Esther and Kenneth had another baby—a boy—completing their family with two girls and two boys. As the oldest child, Margaret was often given adult responsibilities.
She was now in elementary school and could finally put down roots. Through high school, she would live in only two towns, both in the U.P.
* * *
For a young person, the Upper Peninsula was a never-ending adventure, with ghost towns, abandoned mines, old forts, vast forests, and miles and miles of lakeshore. When not in school, Margaret and her siblings played outside—summer and winter—until her mother rang a big cowbell that could be heard from far away, signaling that dinner was ready. Margaret later recalled that she and her brothers and sister grew up “like weeds,” meaning they were untended and left free to develop on their own.
Margaret loved searching for arrowheads in the places where American Indians had hunted and lived during the thousands of years they occupied the U.P. Aside from the wealth of fish and game, one reason they came was for the native copper—pure metallic copper that could be chipped out of rock, heated, and easily fashioned into projectile points, knives, fishing hooks, and other tools. These earlier inhabitants could not have known, but they had discovered the largest deposits of native copper in the entire world, which explains why the Michigan College of Mining and Technology later opened in the region.
The Pictured Rocks region in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
American Indians had another connection to the U.P.—at least in the minds of millions of schoolchildren. The peninsula was the setting for a long poem that children all over the country had to memorize, in part, and recite. First published in 1855, The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is based on American Indian lore and tells the story of the Ojibwa warrior Hiawatha: how he grew up “on the shores of Gitche Gumee,” or Lake Superior; how he battled monsters, sorcerers, and nature spirits; and how he and his beautiful bride, Minnehaha, were honored with a magnificent wedding feast. The story is set amid the U.P.’s dark forests, rushing rivers, plunging chasms, and overarching canopy of sky, Sun, Moon, and stars.
The verses children had to learn included a passage where Hiawatha hears the origin of the human figure that is visible in the full Moon:
“Once a warrior, very angry,Seized his grandmother, and threw herUp into the sky at midnight;Right against the moon he threw her;’T is her body that you see there.”
This episode explains the shape that many people see in the Moon’s dark regions. Some describe the form as a man or even a rabbit. However, in the poem it is a woman, and Hiawatha is her great-grandson. To those who heard the legend centuries ago, it made sense that a great hero on Earth should be related to the inhabitant of the most impressive object in the night sky. That a human might be propelled to the Moon made perfect sense—at least in a story.
The Woman in the Moon, from a tattoo pattern of the Haida people in Northwest America.
WOMEN IN THE MOON
No one can look at the Sun for more than an instant, but the Moon is endlessly viewable. Even without a telescope, it presents a gloriously changing spectacle—from a graceful crescent, resembling the tip of a fingernail, to the brilliance of a full Moon, blazing like a searchlight. Little wonder that this entrancing globe has inspired countless stories, especially because the variation of light and dark areas on the Moon suggests different shapes: a man, a rabbit, a frog, a woman.
Can you find the Woman in the Moon?
In ancient Greece, one legend described the figure in the Moon as the Sibyl of Delphi, a soothsayer who died and ascended to the lunar realm, where she flies around uttering prophecies. Any space travelers in the vicinity may overhear and thereby know the future.
Jean-Dominique Cassini’s telescopic map of the Moon, 1679. The square shows the location of the Moon Maiden (see close-up on the next page).
To the Alutiiq people of Kodiak Island in what is now Alaska, the shape is a mask, shared between a husband and wife. For two weeks, the man wears the mask as the Moon grows from a crescent phase to full. Then his wife takes over, shrinking from full Moon back to a thin crescent.
With the invention of the telescope in 1608, observers could at last see the true nature of the Moon, discovering that it is a world of mountains, valleys, plains, and craters. The dark areas are plains (early mapmakers mistook them for seas). The light areas are mountains. Still, the instinct to discern a face did not go away. In the 1670s the French astronomer Jean-Dominique Cassini produced the most detailed lunar map of his day. On it, at a point of land at the edge of what is called the Bay of Rainbows, Cassini placed the exquisitely rendered head of a woman, with her hair flowing out into the Sea of Rains.
No one knows for sure who she is. But like the other women in the Moon, she lives on in that glowing orb.
Cassini’s Moon Maiden. Officially called the Promontorium Heraclides, the formation resembles the head of a woman under certain lighting conditions.
Margaret in high school.
CHAPTER 2ASKING QUESTIONS
Residents of the U.P. sometimes felt forgotten by the rest of the country. No one passed through the region on the way to somewhere else. There were no major industries. In 1950, the U.P. had no television stations and no big airports. There were scattered public libraries, plus a few small colleges like the one where Kenneth worked. Larger towns usually had a movie theater. But there was precious little that might be considered entertainment or enrichment. Some would even say the U.P. was boring.
But when you grow up in a boring place, you learn never to be bored. For one thing, the U.P. had natural beauty galore, which was on display whenever the Heafields made their long drives to see relatives. On the way to Margaret’s grandmother’s house in Garden, Michigan, they passed through the Hiawatha National Forest, before emerging onto the Garden Peninsula with its spectacular view down Lake Michigan, where ships could sometimes be seen in the distance carrying cargo from Chicago, Milwaukee, and other busy ports to the south.
On these trips, Margaret played games with her siblings, sang songs, or just thought about things: the woods, the lake, the ships, the fact that the car could break down at any minute (which it often did). Or how she might be imagining all of this.
“Do you suppose that we’re just dreaming now—that we’re not really here?” she might ask her father, who was driving.
Some parents would have replied, “Where did you get that idea?” Or, “Don’t be ridiculous!”
However, Kenneth always had a thoughtful response, “Now that is interesting!” he might say. “You know, I’ve sometimes thought that too.”
Kenneth taught English, but he was a philosopher at heart. He took Margaret’s questions seriously and treated her like an adult. Maybe she didn’t know as much as he did, but that was only because he was older. Aside from their age difference, he considered her an equal.
Margaret’s mother, Esther, was more traditional and practical. Above all, she was down-to-earth, and she teased Margaret about having her head in the clouds—which was true. Margaret loved nothing so much as discussing ideas with her dad. Asking questions and searching for answers was her entertainment—and education.
Aside from philosophy, another of Kenneth’s passions was poetry, which he would recite from memory on their drives: Shakespeare, Lord Byron, John Keats, Emily Dickinson. These were some of the authors he taught his students. An avid poet himself, he enjoyed writing on philosophical themes, like this stanza from a poem about a train journey, in which he recounts the type of questions Margaret would pose on their drives:
Is this for certain the way things go?What comes after the rain and the snow?Are you and I the travelers tonightRiding this train and talking so bright?Or is it a dream? What would you say?Do you think it might be a story too good to stay?
* * *
Margaret grew up with poetry and philosophy—especially if you consider religion to be philosophy. Both of her parents were the children of ministers, and her mother was strict about church attendance. Later asked if she had had a religious upbringing, Margaret answered, “And then some!”
Kenneth’s father had been a minister in various Protestant denominations. He died before Margaret was born. Her grandfather on her mother’s side lived until Margaret was fourteen. A Quaker pastor, he was like Kenneth in his attitude toward children; he never talked down to them. Young Margaret would sometimes sit on his lap as he was typing his sermons. He would read passages aloud, asking for her comments. His spiritual talks involved concepts like integrity, equality, and community, not to mention God. He knew that children rarely paid attention during church services, but he felt that Margaret was different, and he genuinely wanted to know her opinions. She responded enthusiastically, asking questions such as “What does ‘integrity’ mean?” and “Is it ever okay to lie?” He patiently answered, treating her with respect.
He was attentive in other ways. When they were listening to a baseball game on the radio, he would turn off the set if a beer ad came on, carefully counting the seconds until the ad was over. Then he would turn the radio back on, just as the game was resuming. Of course, Margaret was very curious about what she had missed.
Like many people with an inquisitive spirit, Margaret had a rebellious streak. Once, when she was around twelve, her parents went out of town for several days to attend a funeral. They left her in charge of her brother and sister, giving her a budget for food and other expenses. Seizing the opportunity, Margaret used some of the funds to stock up on the fixings for hot fudge sundaes, making whole meals of the treat so that for years afterward her siblings couldn’t stand the sight of a hot fudge sundae.
* * *
Throughout Margaret’s childhood, Kenneth’s career in education evolved, from high school teacher, to principal, to school superintendent, to college professor, with his salary getting a small boost at each new stage. “My father didn’t think of it as advancement,” Margaret said later. “He needed to raise more money to buy more pairs of shoes and other necessities for the family.” Meanwhile, her mother’s career hardly changed, which was the way Esther liked it. Her specialty was teaching high school English and home economics—subjects she loved.
Home ec was a course required for every schoolgirl. The chief topics were cooking, sewing, and cleaning. Esther especially loved sewing, and she spent hours making most of the clothes for her family. This was common during the Depression and World War II. Home-cooked meals were also the norm, as was zealous house cleaning. These pursuits never appealed to Margaret, and home ec was the only school subject that she didn’t like. She would have much preferred shop—the wood- and metal-working course that boys took.
“My mother used to get upset at me because I would spend all my time on my studies and not want to help around the house,” Margaret remembered. “Of course, she wouldn’t get upset at my brother for the same thing. My attitude was, ‘I will do it if he does it. What’s fair is fair!’”
“I didn’t like to be treated in a way that I didn’t think was fair, and I didn’t like others to be treated that way either,” she continued. “My father and grandfather instilled me with that. It never occurred to them that I was different because I was a girl. To them, I was just a person.”
If Margaret and her mother didn’t see eye to eye about chores, they both loved music. But here, too, they had their differences. Her mother was fond of classical music, which she played expertly on the piano. Margaret was more attracted to popular music, which she listened to on the radio. As Margaret got older, her musical influences changed—from the inspiring hymns she sang in church, songs like “For the Beauty of the Earth” and “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” to the even more stirring gospel tunes recorded by Mahalia Jackson, a Black singer living in Chicago. In the mid-1950s, Elvis Presley drew on both of these traditions, combined with African American blues and Appalachian country music, to create an exciting new sound that Margaret adored. It was rock and roll, and it horrified many grown-ups.
Margaret (center), around the time her family moved to Ripley, Michigan. She is flanked by her brothers, David and John, and her sister, Kathryn.
Copyright © 2023 by Richard Maurer
