Dorothy McFadden Hoover, Yerger High Graduate, Posthumous Inductee to the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame
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Hope native and 1934 Yerger High Graduate Dorothy McFadden Hoover was inducted posthumously into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame Thursday at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock. Her honor was accepted by her niece Ozaree Twillie and Grand-Nephew Derrick Pickett.
Mrs. Hoover was a graduate of Yerger High in Hope in 1934. She graduated when she was 15, then attended Arkansas A.M. & N. (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff). She graduated with a B.S. in Math and then began teaching public school in Newport. Mrs. Hoover worked her way east to Atlanta University and earned a Masters Degree in Math. She started working at Langley Labs, NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics…later NASA). She moved to Ames Laboratory where she became an Aeronautical Research Scientist and was distinguished by her design for “thin sweptback tapered wings” for jets.
Hoover became the first woman to be awarded a Master’s Degree in Physics from the University of Arkansas where she went in 1952. She was studied towards a doctorate in Math from the University of Michigan and after working for the National Weather Service finished her career with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She passed away in 2000 at the age of 82 in Washington D.C.
Details of her life attracted attention after the book and movie “Hidden Figures” came out and focused on some groundbreaking African-American women who worked in the early space program.
Ozaree Twillie and Margaret Moss
Dr. Jerrilyn Jones and Joe Purvis
Dorothy McFadden Hoover’s niece JoAnna Pickett and her granddaughter Gabrille Pickett
Eddra Phillips, Ellen Turner, Margaret Moss
Richard Sallee, Willie Gammon, Cynthia Gammon, Ellen Turner, Ozaree Twillie, Janice Russell, Rosalyn Twillie, Dr. Twyla Twillie, and Abrose Gammon