📍White Sulphur Springs, WV 24986, USA
1918 – 1928“I was born Creola Katherine Coleman in August 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the youngest of four children. Our town sat in the Allegheny Mountains, in Greenbrier County, and its life revolved around the Greenbrier, a grand resort hotel. My father, Joshua, farmed, cut timber, worked as a handyman and later worked at the Greenbrier. He had little formal schooling, but he was wonderful with numbers and could figure out how much lumber was in a tree just by looking at it. My mother, Joylette, had been a schoolteacher, and she made sure we loved learning. I counted everything: the steps to the church, the dishes, the stars. I was so eager to go to school that I followed my older brother there, and I skipped ahead several grades. But in our county, Black children could not go to public school beyond the eighth grade. So my parents made a great sacrifice. Every autumn, my mother took us to live in a rented house in Institute, more than a hundred miles away, so we could attend the high school on the campus of West Virginia State College, while my father stayed behind and worked to pay for it. In the summers we came home to White Sulphur Springs. I began high school at ten and college at fifteen, and graduated with degrees in mathematics and French. In 1953 I joined the computing team at Langley in Virginia, and my calculations helped send John Glenn into orbit and Apollo 11 to the Moon. I never forgot that my parents gave up so much for our education.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today