|
|
|
|
Dixy Lee Ray (September 3, 1914–January 2, 1994) was the seventeenth Governor of the U.S. State of Washington. She was Washington's first female governor. She was born Marguerite Ray in Tacoma to Frances Adams Ray and Alvis Marion Ray (a commercial printer). HistoryLink.org Marguerite was second in a family of five girls. At twelve, she changed her name to "Dixy Lee". She attended Tacoma's Stadium High School, graduated as valedictorian from Mills College in Oakland, California in 1937, and with a master's degree in 1938 with her thesis entitled "A Comparative Study of the Life Habits of Some Species of Burrowing Eumalacostraca". She earned her PhD from Stanford University in Palo Alto. Her doctoral dissertation was "The peripheral nervous system of lampanyctus leucopsarus," completed in 1945 at the Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove, California. reference Ray was a marine biologist and taught at the University of Washington from 1947 until 1972. In 1952 she received a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship grant for Biology Guggenheim reference. From 1963 until 1972, Dr. Ray became the director of Seattle's Pacific Science Center, guiding its future after the founding as part of the 1962 World's Fair. An advocate of nuclear power, she was appointed by Richard Nixon to chair the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1973 and was the only woman to serve as chair of the AEC. Nominally a Democrat, she won the governorship in Washington in 1976, but quickly astonished her supporters with her strongly conservative views. She lost in the 1980 Democratic primary election to then-State Senator Jim McDermott, who went on to lose in the general election to moderate Republican John D. Spellman. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) established an award in Dixy Lee Ray's honor for engineering contributions to the field of environmental protection in 1998. The award, which consists of a bronze medal with the governor's likeness and $1000 was first given to Clyde W. Frank in 1999 and has been made annually since. ASME reference She co-authored two books critical of the environmentalist movement with Lou Guzzo. Her papers are archived at the Hoover Institution and are catalogued online. Online Archive of California She was governor when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. References
External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
CommentsNo comments have been added. |
Switch Language
Popular PagesEmail this PageSyndicate
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
