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Two graduates recall when they were the only female math undergrads at CU Boulder

For Ann Lowdermilk and Marlene Pratto, talent in mathematics always felt like the most normal thing in the world. But many of their male classmates and math professors at the University of Colorado Boulder in the late 1950s and early ‘60s weren’t quite sure what to make of the aliens in their midst.

“Marlene and I were the only two ‘skirts’ in Hellems Hall,” recalls Lowdermilk (Math’60), of Denver. “We usually sat together, and they didn’t know what to do with two women; they didn’t even know what to do with one woman!”

But there were professors who not only welcomed the two young women, but encouraged them, including the late Arne Magnus, who created an independent study program for them, and Robert McKelvey. Magness eventually became chair of mathematics at Colorado State University and McKelvey finished his career at the University of Montana.

“We had all men in our classes,” says Pratto (Math’60), who has lived in Greensboro, North Carolina since 1969. “A lot of them were older than we were, returning veterans. I think they mostly ignored us. We didn’t study with them.”

At the top of the page: Hellems Hall was home to the Department of Mathematics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Above: Marlene Pratto (left) was one of only two female math undergrads at CU Boulder during her time as a student.

Lowdermilk does recall at least one time when she stirred the attention of a male classmate: when she returned for her senior year wearing an engagement ring.

“The young man sitting behind me said something and I said, ‘Yes, I’m engaged,’” she recalls. After a brief pause, he sighed and said, ‘To think I had just about screwed up enough courage to ask you to coffee…’”

But both Pratto and Lowdermilk were used to being fish out of water at a time when far fewer women went to college and those who did typically went into nursing, education or home economics.

Even in high school, they were the odd women out. But if anything, being in the minority gave them more, not less, confidence.

Attending Smiley Junior High School and Denver East High School, Lowdermilk was smart enough to earn full-ride scholarships to both Colorado College (CC) and CU Boulder. The CC offer came in first, and she accepted. But she believed CU Boulder’s Department of Math was better, and she was never in doubt when its offer came in.

“I ditched the CC scholarship and took the one at CU. My advisor said I should not do that, and I said, ‘Just watch me,’” she says. “When you were a woman in an all-male area, you had to learn to simply stand up for yourself. You couldn’t just fade back in the corner.”

Pratto credits a seventh-grade teacher in Pueblo, Miss Seacat, for sparking her interest in math and science. 

“She was a little person, but she made science so dynamic and so interesting. I just loved it,” she says.

She was soon besting the boys in math competitions. She was thrilled when her high-school math teacher John Armstrong (a CU Boulder alumnus) convinced the powers that be to provide “math analysis”—analogous to calculus—in time for her to take the course her senior year.

When the time came to go to college, she had no option to go out of state or attend a private school, so she faced a choice between CU Boulder, Colorado State University and the Colorado School of Mines.

“When (a Mines representative) came to Pueblo Central (High School), he said you’ll double our enrollment of women if you come. That didn’t sound too good,” Pratto recalls. “I’d been to CU for Engineering Days and as part of the all-state orchestra, and I liked it.”

Like Lowdermilk, she received a scholarship to attend CU Boulder in mathematics.

The two women met the summer before their freshman year while taking placement exams and remained friends throughout their CU Boulder careers and beyond.

Lowdermilk worked full adult shifts in payload control during the summer for United Airlines, where her father worked. After graduating from CU Boulder, she went to work in the operations department of Martin Marietta in Denver.

“My last day was May 6, 1961, the day Alan Shepard went up into space and came down 15 minutes later,” she says. “I would have stayed longer, but as women did at that time, I married and followed my husband, who was a highway contractor. If my husband had not traveled all over the western states, I would have gone on to get advanced degrees.”

After that, she moved to Colorado’s Western Slope, and later rural Utah, to raise a family while her husband helped build I-70.  

“I was a real city girl living with a two-year-old and a baby in a town with 300 registered Mormon souls in Emory, Utah, and the surrounding area,” she says. “I learned how to can, bake bread, quilt, all things I’d never have any association with before. But that’s what women did down there.”

Pratto worked as a summer trainee in mathematics at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute for Science and Technology) from her sophomore year on and accepted a full-time position upon graduation. As in school and college, she had few women colleagues.

“One day I was handed a book and told, ‘Tomorrow we’ll program the computer.’ I said, ‘What’s a computer? What’s a program?’” she says. “The next day I sat down with the guy I was working with and wrote a program, and that’s how we learned.”

In 1969, her husband took a faculty position at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and she decided to retire from programming.

“That lasted until about December, when I thought, ‘This is Dullsville, U.S.A.’ … I called the local technical college”—and historically Black university—“North Carolina A&T, which had the largest Black engineering school in the country.”

Asked if she could teach Fortran to engineering faculty, she said yes and began teaching part-time. Eventually, the mother of young children began working from home on programming projects from her dining room table, creating the school’s computer registration system, among other things.

Both long retired, the two friends remain bullish on women and girls studying and entering STEM fields.

“Math is one of the best degrees you can get. It sets you up to do a whole bunch of things. You learn to think at least somewhat logically and can solve problems,” Pratto says. “I can’t think of a better major, then or now.”