Leona Blackbird

If you can do a correlation coefficient, you can become a computer programmer like Leona Blackbird. Her road to computer programming began, naturally, with her birth, which was in New Orleans during the depression. Her mother was eight months pregnant with Leona when she graduated from medical school. She was from a working-class family and was determined to get an education because "no one could take that away from her."Her mother's emphasis on self-reliance has had a lasting effect on Leona.

Her parents moved to Iowa when Leona was two. Her mother had interned there and thought it would be a good place to go into practice. Her mother did pediatrics and her father was a general practitioner. Twelve years later they divorced, and Leona's mother took her and her younger brother and sister to South Carolina to enter a residency program in pediatrics. But she made only $100 per month during her residency and had to support not only her children but also her mother and aunt. Leona remembers eating a lot of flank steak, which was cheap then.

After high school, Leona went on to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Her mother paid her way as she went straight through, earning her degree in 1959 with two majors, in psychology and sociology. And then off to the Big Apple; what else for a bright young woman on the eve of the rebellious sixties. She refused to stay in the south with racial segregation in full swing.

She stayed in New York City for only five months, however, working for an advertising agency. She went to California to marry a man she had met in college and remained married to him for only two years--your basic "that was a stupid thing to do" marriage. She had gone to work as a data clerk for a meteorological company the week she arrived in California. Because she knew how to do correlation coefficients, she advanced rapidly to computer programming--learning it strictly through on-the-job training--and eventually to systems administration for computing. She met her second husband at the company. They had two children, a son who is a systems administrator for an on-line training company in Phoenix, and a daughter in Salt Lake City.

When the company moved to Utah in 1980 to lower its costs, both Leona and her husband moved with it. Her husband died of cancer in 1986. She stayed at the company until 1997 when five of the employees left to start a new company, Meteorological Solutions, Inc. Their customers are utility and other companies that create pollution. She develops meteorological parameters to help them meet their environmental obligations.

She met David at a bridge club and married him in 1990. She used to sew and still cooks, including some Cajun, Indian, and oriental foods. She is an avid reader. When her mother was still alive, they went together to China with a group of doctors and saw a birth under acupuncture. Since her mother's death, she has traveled with David to Spain, Australia, and Italy, and throughout the states.

Leona knew nothing of humanism when she married David. He belonged to Humanists of Utah and gave her a book by Corliss Lamont. She discovered that the book agreed almost exactly with her own thinking and immediately sent her check off to the American Humanist Association. The humanist emphasis on relying on human reason rather than supernatural powers was exactly what appealed to her, but she's had trouble convincing people that she could live a moral life without believing in God. All such people have to do is see how honestly she keeps the books as treasurer of Humanists of Utah to be convinced she can and does lead a moral life. And she develops colorful graphs to reflect revenues and expenses. It's unclear whether this has anything to do with correlation coefficients.

--Earl Wunderli