App tells stories of 'Top Secret Rosies'

Twin sisters Doris and Shirley Blumberg were top students at Philadelphia High School for Girls. They were especially sharp with numbers, joining an after-school club devoted to math games and puzzles.

So the 17-year-olds were perplexed when they were summoned to the principal's office one day in May 1942.

Math, it turned out, was the reason. The principal told them that the Army was recruiting numerically minded young women for a high-stakes task: to calculate ballistics trajectories during World War II.

The stories of the sisters and several of their colleagues are featured in The Computer Wore Heels, a new "book app" created for the iPad by Temple University filmmaker LeAnn Erickson. The multimedia work is a suspenseful, novelistic treatment, designed to appeal to a young audience with text, photos, video, and audio.

Borrowing from the better-known "Rosie the Riveter" icon, Erickson calls these female math whizzes "Top Secret Rosies." She estimates that the twin sisters were among 80 to 100 such women who worked at the University of Pennsylvania until the war's end, performing detailed calculations to guide artillery shells and aerial bombardment.

Erickson also included the Blumbergs in a 2010 documentary on the same subject, but she worried that the story was not reaching young girls, particularly those who might be inspired to pursue careers in math and science. So she created the 100-page app, aimed at students in upper elementary grades and junior high - the age at which interest in math and science sometimes wanes.

"I thought, maybe if we hit them with these role models then, they might stick with it," she said.

An audience will get a taste of both versions of the story Tuesday night at PFS Theater at the Roxy, the Philadelphia Film Society's home in Rittenhouse Square. The hour-long documentary, Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II, is part of the monthly Filmadelphia film series.

A question-and-answer session will follow, during which Erickson plans to demonstrate the book app on a projection screen. The event is free, but all seats were booked as of Monday.

Those with an iPad can download the app at home for $2.99.

It has recordings of such pivotal wartime moments as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "date which will live in infamy" speech in response to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Lighter touches include a clip of swing music.

Readers also can zoom in on historic documents and newspaper clips, including an ad in the Evening Bulletin for "Women Learn Welding."

The top-secret Rosies crunched numbers in two shifts at Penn, working six days a week, for just under $2,000 a year. Their results were formatted into firing tables that were sent to the front, so soldiers could look up wind speeds, air density, and other environmental conditions before aiming their artillery shells.

William F. Atwater, a retired military historian featured in Erickson's documentary, said the female "computers" were invaluable, if largely unsung.

The former manager of a museum at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, Atwater says in the film that the women performed "absolutely vital work."

"Without their contribution to the war effort," he says, "we would have lost World War II."

Some of the women also went on to serve as the first programmers for Penn's ENIAC, regarded as the first electronic computer.

Erickson, 56, a professor of film and video production at Temple, learned of the story when filming the twin sisters for another documentary. In that 2005 film, Neighbor Ladies, she told how they worked as real estate agents to help integrate West Mount Airy.

Shirley Blumberg Melvin died in 2009. Doris Blumberg Polsky still lives in West Mount Airy but is in declining health and could not comment for this article, said her daughter Joan Vidal. In the documentary, Melvin said they knew the task was important. "We were sending our troops over there to risk their lives," she said. "We had to help out on this end."

For years, Vidal said, her mother and aunt rarely spoke of their wartime work, perhaps because they had mixed feelings.

"We didn't know the details until the movie," Vidal said. "We were thrilled that the story could be told."

Now, in more ways than one.

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