Yvonne Clark and Her Engineering Spark

November 1, 2024
A buoyant profile of Yvonne Clark (1929-2019), a lifelong tinkerer with a knack for making everything work better, from the family toaster to giant rockets. Dubbing his former college teacher's "remarkable spark for building and fixing things" a "superpower," Wells takes her through a series of hands-on projects--beginning with malfunctioning household appliances that she methodically disassembled and studied as a child to later work solving pesky design problems in both a new type of rifle and in NASA's humongous Saturn V rocket. The author also celebrates the stubborn determination that won Clark a post-World War II career in mechanical engineering and a university position despite the discrimination she encountered as a Black woman in a field dominated by white men. From overall-clad child to brisk, sensibly attired adult, her confidence and strength of character shine in Hodge's illustrations as she wields hand tools, pores over blueprints, marches into groups of stymied-looking male colleagues to explain her solutions, and climactically stands in quiet triumph with a racially diverse group of children to watch the successful 1967 test launch of the first unmanned Saturn V rocket. That same confidence radiates from the appended photos, which take her from teenager to octogenarian. Inspirational fare for aspiring engineers and scientists. (author's note, selected bibliography)(Picture-book biography. 7-9)

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January 1, 2025
Grades K-3 This picture-book biography introduces Yvonne Clark, an African American mechanical engineer. Clark was a young tinkerer in the 1930s who liked taking things apart and fixing up things that had broken down. The action begins with her trying over and over to repair her family's toaster and then moving on to other appliances--"Broken lamp? She screwed, rewired, and wrenched until . . .light! Wrecked radio? She twisted, switched, and hammered until . . . music!" and so on. Grown-up Clark and her engineering spark worked first at the Frankford Arsenal Gage Lab. After her male colleagues had given up, Yvonne determined why a new weapon kept jamming and came up with a working model. Then, when she joined NASA, she was the engineer who figured out how to eliminate confounding hot spots in the Saturn V rockets used for Apollo moon missions. Cheerful cartoon illustrations effectively convey Yvonne's curiosity; there are concluding notes and references. Written by one of her former students at Tennessee State, this is an inspiring tribute to a woman who knew herself and followed her dreams.

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