
Bertha Ryan ’50: From Emmanuel College to NASA
Bertha Ryan ’50—who attended her 65th reunion at Emmanuel this summer—reflects on a career that began at Emmanuel, continued to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for graduate work and then took her to California, where she went to work for NASA and the aerospace industry. It was a time of seemingly unlimited possibility. America at war was settling into a peacetime economy. Factories that had boomed with wartime munitions turned back to producing consumer goods and building airplanes that…