Episode 6. Ms. Linda Phoenix: Overcoming Gravity. “Linda Phoenix Teamer was 19 years old in 1970, the year after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. One of Teamer’s wistful teenage dreams as a student at Joseph S. Clark High School in New Orleans was to become NASA’s first African American female astronaut, but first she had to come to grips with the mysterious forces of social gravity, something not even Sir Isaac Newton was capable of plotting. In New Orleans, the business world into which Teamer wanted to plant her flag was, “about as white as Armstrong’s flight suit.” (Excerpt from Peter Finney Jr’s article in the Clarion Herald, Falling Asleep to The Clickety-Clack of Success). Ms. Teamer never became an astronaut, but she used her training at the Adult Education Center to land a job working for the President of Shell Oil, and then went on to become one of the first African American flight attendants at Delta Airlines.
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