Man's World? Not to These Women!
July 1967 Radio-Electronics

July 1967 Radio-Electronics [Table of Contents] Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles from Radio-Electronics, published 1930-1988. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.

In this 1967 Radio-Electronics magazine article, Sally O. Smyth highlights pioneering women in electronics, challenging the male-dominated industry stereotype. Muriel Burke and Kathi Kramer, sisters running a successful TV repair shop for a decade, emphasize problem-solving and customer trust. Cecilia Jacobs, a financial consultant turned electronics firm owner, showcases innovation in military and security tech. Vicki Labes, trained by her husband, co-manages an audio-visual business and produces films. Self-taught technician Mrs. William Nolan transitioned from fixing a tape recorder to technical writing. Francis Brooks, an RCA Institutes graduate, designs circuit boards while pursuing an engineering degree. These women - artists, bookkeepers, and homemakers turned technicians - prove skill isn’t gendered. Their stories reflect a shift toward meritocracy in electronics, fueled by curiosity and defiance of societal limits. The article underscores that women's contributions are vital to the field's evolution.

Man's World? Not to These Women!

If you think electronics technicians and engineers are all male, you've got another think coming

By Sally O. Smyth

Have you met an electronic woman lately?

She's quite a handful of talent. With a wave of her hand near what looks like a small antenna protruding from a rat maze, she can play music of the twanging, haunting musical-saw variety. Even better, she can tell you the name of the instrument without stuttering - it's a transistorized theremin.

If you'll allow it, she will cook your dinner with radio waves, perhaps while writing a poem with your favorite computer. All her appliances are repaired at home and occasionally modified for extra comfort. Should she have children, she'll amuse them with schematics and old radios in preference to tinker toys. Her motto, after apologies for what happened when she tried to fix the stereo, is: "I'll never regret what I've done as much as what I've not done!"

Like most talented people, she is a rare specimen and tracking her down in the yellow pages probably isn't feasible. Women who run their own businesses don't usually advertise the fact. When word spreads about a woman in the repair business, for instance, the number of "just looking" customers increases.

Anyway, since I was seeking women who were so far into the "man's" world that they insisted upon running their own businesses, I first went to the Small Business Administration and a very helpful Mr. Casey. He told me, "I've been in this business 3 years, covering a 24-county area and a population of 14 million people, and I've heard of only two ladies running their own repair shop. They're somewhere out on Long Island. That's Mrs. Burke and Miss Kramer, and I don't know if they're still there."

These "electronic" women were there, which placed them among that select group of small businessmen who have survived longer than a year in business. Most fail within the first year. These two women have maintained their shop for 10 years. They are certainly not fly-by-night operators, but are honest-to-goodness women-who-made-the-grade.

How?

With a soft voice, Muriel Burke explained: "I love puzzles; if I see a puzzle, I do it. Every day some new kind of servicing puzzle comes in here and we have to solve it. We might almost be doctors, the way we check to see how the different systems are working, before we diagnose. Of course, our diagnoses are proved right or wrong immediately."

Muriel's partner (and sister) , Kathi Kramer, added, "And I'm here because I love the challenge!" Still smiling, she aimed her soldering gun into the mess of wires at the back of a cluttered-looking TV.

Kathi keeps the books for the shop and evidently knows well on which side the profit is kept. Before she had any formal training in electronics, she had for 10 years been bookkeeper for a small radio concern. A typically female curiosity led her into the working-an-electronics end of it.

"So, you both are doing the kind of work you like best - and managing the business end as well!" At $6 a house call, they are meeting the competition of three other stores, one a cut-rate service center. Impressive!

"Well, we know what we're doing," Muriel put in. "And, when you do a good job, people are glad to return - we've built our customer list from nobody to 900 since we started." Both she and Kathi approve of licensing, since they feel it would definitely enhance the general reputation of radio-TV technicians.

I wondered how they had started to build that reputation, 10 years ago. Kathi laughed. "We just hung out our sign and people started dropping in off the turnpike."

"Never advertised?"

"Never. The first publicity we received as women in the business came about entirely by accident. Some man telephoned, doing an article on the repair-shop business. When he found there was no 'man of the shop,' he rushed out to get an interview with us."

[That was 4 years ago, and that man was one of R-E's writers. The article can be found in the August 1963 issue of Radio-Electronics. -Editor]

As I went about snapping shots of the girls' shop and office, they revealed more details. Muriel, working on a color TV, brought out a little invention of her own, two convergence rods that enable her to reach the knobs of the convergence board from in front of the set while she maintains a straight line of vision.

Seeing how interested I was in the ways she applies her electronic knowledge, Muriel dusted off a flat metal chassis that contained the rat maze and antenna. It turned out to be a home-made theremin. She declined a workshop display of her talent, but mentioned that she often accompanied her son when he played the organ or piano.

Strangely enough, neither Mrs. Burke nor Miss Kramer began her life with a silver transistor in her mouth; both came to electronics by roundabout ways. Kathi started as a bookkeeper. Muriel began as an artist; some exquisite pastels and an occasional oil adorn the walls of their white frame house in Woodbury, Long Island.

During the war Muriel's artistic ability was put to use drafting architectural plans for the Government. One day she visited the electronics section, and found her interest jumping to electronics drafting. She joined the department, and so it went until she drafted the sign outside her own shop: Burke's TV Service.

Another woman started her career in electronics and engineering purposefully. Cecilia Jacobs had a rough time of it in contrast to Mrs. Burke and Miss Kramer, who rather wandered into it from other fields. Despite years of part-time practical experience obtained while studying engineering and metallurgy at Brooklyn College, Miss Jacobs found it difficult for her "delicate, feminine and therefore-prone-to-fainting-or-hysterics" self to find a full-time position in either of those fields.

As it happened, at every job Miss Jacobs chose, men were preferred at that time. She stepped into each as the first woman. The struggle, ironically, wasn't only against an inhospitable men's world. When she landed a job as junior engineer with Vought-Sikorsky, her mother stepped into the picture with, "You're too young to go away to Connecticut alone."

"Too young, too delicate, and probably dumb," went the refrain. Twenty or so years ago, women hadn't been "proved particularly suited to scientific and mathematical work ... " as they now have, according to one representative of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Rather, a woman's touch on complicated machinery in those days was worse than dropping it.

By the time industry recognized that feminine intuition was good for more than discovering the presence of a man, Miss Jacobs had found another route to electronics.

"Put me in the accounting department, hmmm?" she might have said to herself. "We'll see; there's more than one way to skin a cat!"

So, Miss Jacobs set her womanly talents to working around and through those closed doors. She eventually joined an electronics company as financial consultant and shareholder, after years spent learning finance. Now she is seeking to enlarge her small communications electronics firm, J. H. Bunnell & Co., in Brooklyn, N.Y.

"You wouldn't know of a nice little electronics firm ... lasers, maybe ... that we might buy or merge with ... ?" she twinkled at me. I had to shake my head.

Miss Jacobs took me on a tour of her factory, quite a treat. Tables of instruments filled a large warehouse-like room. As we walked through, Miss Jacobs described some of J. H. Bunnell's products: switching racks for RCA; military intercoms; magnetic-tape winders; electronic tuning forks; the Cunningham tube, for which Bunnell at one time was sole distributor; also a facsimile machine for Western Union, and what seemed like hundreds of other items. Furthermore, Bunnell & Co. has designed a Telefax machine for Western Union, and once for a radio station.

Obviously at ease with her products, Miss Jacobs opened a brown metal cylinder to show me the delicate sensory equipment inside. Used in Vietnam, these cylinders are buried around a military camp to register and communicate the location and power of enemy guns booming "in the distance."

A danger nearer to home - burglary - finds a Bunnell device combating it, this time with a special "pen register." The pen register is an automatic burglar-alarm system that is wired to central police stations. An automatic dialing system checks each establishment to be watched, through a guard's call-ins at regular intervals. If a call-in is missed, immediate attention is directed to that location. One other use for this device is to record all numbers dialed from a particular phone. It thereby has detected many phone-cranks.

"Just checking this machine in the workshop takes two hours," Miss Jacobs commented, again showing her thorough knowledge of operations at Bunnell. She greeted the workmen by name and introduced me to those whose careful skills produce some of the most delicate equipment.

Bunnell & Co. was one of the first companies to enter data processing, Miss Jacobs told me, speaking enthusi-astically about the communications in-dustry as a whole.

"Soon, there's going to be no distinguishing between the computer fields and communications ... everything done with a computer will have to be transmitted somewhere." She smiled, tapping out a quick Morse code on one of her telegraph keys, another company product.

Miss Jacobs added, "Computers and all other electronic equipment simply provide another medium through which man's creativity is expressed. In themselves, computers are not creative but repetitive; they mass-produce men's (and women's) ideas ... "

Certainly, with more machines to accept ideas, there's more room for a woman's creative contribution, and apparently computers aren't so discriminating against women.

A woman's intuition and intelligence in electronics can be as effective as a man's. The fourth woman-in-electronics proved it during the war, testing transmitters.

Mrs. George Labes gained entrance to that most forbidden lair, a man's workshop, when she allowed her husband-to-be to court her with electrical know-how.

"The more I learned, the prouder he became of me and the more interested I became in him," she told me, reminiscing. Mr. Labes took such pride in Vicki that he enrolled her at the ITT-Federal school in Harrison, N. J., while he went away to war. Her training was so thorough that she bypassed some classes and went to work for the principal of the school in his repair shop.

People came in to see if it was true that a girl could really repair radios and other such electrified items. The fire chief put her to the test when he brought in an old Philco "Cathedral" radio with all its condensers in one can. His laconic complaint was, "It's fading." Vicki discovered the faulty condenser and won the day and the fire chief's confidence.

When her husband returned from service, the two of them started the first of several repair shops. The present one is an audio-visual service shop in Ridgefield Park, N.J.

A glamorous facet of the Labes' audio-visual business is their penchant for movie-making. They make movies for themselves and for industrial advertising accounts. One technique of theirs is to tape-record the sound and then put the magnetic strip on the film. The result is fun and profit and a companionship in work that few couples share. Their films range from industrial shorts such as one about drop forging for Merrill Bros., a firm on Long Island, to advertisements used in home shows or industrial conventions.

Their favorite, however, was made during one of their creative moments. It is their first and best-loved film, a ghost story called "Never Again." Starting out to entertain the children and indulging the ham in themselves, Mr. and Mrs. Labes produced an honest-to-goodness modern ghost story. The film shows a wife going away and leaving her bottle-prone husband alone with a warning not to imbibe. He begins to sip, but feels so guilty that he begins to hallucinate. Glasses move through the air, his bottle escapes his grasp, and suddenly he sees a ghost. The "ghost" is actually his wife who has returned, but the cure works and the bottle no longer tempts him.

Said Vicki of the movie, "That's when I first realized my role around here - I'm the silent partner." But, partner she is, and likes it. "The best way to keep young is to keep busy, and I'd rath-er be busy here in the shop than cleaning house."

Though most of their business comes from schools (70%, in fact), the Labes' tackle any project. George teaches Vicki the newer equipment, and they intersperse their movies with other work. One movie, about a do-it-yourself father as he systematically blows himself up, might deter amateur tinkerers before they start.

One amateur tinkerer who went on to become a "pro" - a woman, of course - is Mrs. William Nolan. Confronted with a broken tape recorder and the prospect of a $40 tab for its repair, Mrs. Nolan took matters and the recorder into her own hands.

With no prior knowledge of electronics, Mrs. Nolan picked up a self-instruction book and dug into the tape recorder. When she was through, having found that "a chain pulley had come off in the drive mechanism," she kept on reading electronic books until she came to ac circuitry and ran into a block.

Out of curiosity that reached beyond ac circuitry, Mrs. Nolan left her job and took a course in electronics at RCA Institutes. She was surprised to find herself the only girl in the school at the time. Her first course led her to sign up for engineering electronics, a 2-year college-level course.

Upon her graduation, the amazing Mrs. Nolan went right into technical writing for the RCA Home-Study School. She soon gave this up to work as a free lance, and joined a professor at RCA Institutes in writing Principles and Applications of Boolean Algebra, published by Hayden.

Mrs. Nolan jumped into the writing field with no previous training, with no college degree, but - from the sounds coming over the phone during our interview - with a house full of children. She works at home "with my shoes off and my feet up," and sounds deliciously content!

We asked RCA Institutes if it had any other recent women graduates, and thus became acquainted with Miss Francis Brooks of General Precision Labs In Pleasantville, N. Y.

Miss Brooks found out about RCA Institutes when she decided that her factory job, TV assembly and testing, no longer suited her. She took the electronics technology course.

At the GPL plant, Miss Brooks works on the electrical layouts for closed-circuit cameras. As she explained it to me very patiently over the phone:

"After the schematic has been drawn up by an engineer, it is put in the form of a printed-circuit board. From that, I fit the actual components into place on the plan, deciding the final placement of each part."

Miss Brooks' next goal is to earn her engineering degree in electronics. She is fortunate to work for a company that will reimburse a good part of her tuition.

Miss Brooks and Mrs. Nolan might be considered representative of women in a world where a knowledge of electronics is almost basic to feeling comfortable with the paraphernalia of their society - from tape recorders (which the youngest schoolchild listens to daily in language study) to automatically opening supermarket doors.

Even today's artists speak through an electronic medium, suggest its presence in their pictures of life. Balanchine's choreography spews human beings across a stage in the same precise formations in which a computer spews facts of human endeavor from its gaping steel and most inhuman jaw. The televisions and radios that the Mrs. Burkes and Miss Kramer's repair interconnect all corners of the nation, informing the individual of the rest of humanity, allowing him to relate himself to his society.

Testing instruments are similar across the country. They are highly objective, mathematically precise means for arriving at the truth, be it related to whether a man has been drinking while he is driving, or to what type of blood he has. Electronics suggests the more factual orientation of our society. Less is taken for granted. Men are judged by objective test scores; electronically compiled statistics dictate the nature of our conclusions.

Being a woman no longer automatically suggests weakness and lack of "that kind of interest." Thanks to computer-compiled "facts" there is less romanticizing about what ought to be and more dealing with what is. And there's one thing that is: Our society now has an electronic vitality, and if women want to enjoy a significant place in that society, their insight must extend to the electronics-of-it-all.