From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dixy Lee Ray (September 3, 1914–January 2,
1994) was the 17th 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).[1]
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.[2]
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.[3]
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.
A Democrat, she won the governorship in Washington in 1976, but
quickly astonished her supporters with her strongly conservative
views. She was governor when Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. 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.[4]
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.[5]
The quality of scholarship used for her first book
"Environmental Overkill" has been called into question. A detailed
critical analysis of the chapters on ozone depletion was published
in a report by R. Parsons of the University of Colorado.[6]
References
- Ware, Susan; Lorraine Braukman,
Stacy Braukman (2004). Notable American Women: A Biographical
Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA:
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University Press.
pp. 538–539. ISBN
067401488X.
- Grinstein, Louise S; Carol A.
Biermann, Rose K. Rose (1997). Women in the Biological
Sciences: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook. Greenwood Publishing
Group,. pp. 424–432. ISBN
0313291802.
- Ray, Dixy Lee; Louis R. Guzzo
(1994). Environmental Overkill. New York: Harper
Perennial. pp. 260 pages. ISBN
0060975989.
- Ray, Dixy Lee; Louis R. Guzzo
(1992). Trashing the Planet: How Science Can Help Us Deal With
Acid Rain, Depletion of the Ozone, and Nuclear Waste (Among Other
Things). New York: Harper Perennial. pp. 206 pages. ISBN
0060974907.
- Ray, Dixy Lee (1973). The
Nation's Energy Future: A Report to Richard M. Nixon, President of
the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission (for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print.
Off.). pp. 175 pages. ISBN
predates.
- Ray, Dixy Lee (1959). Marine
Boring and Fouling Organisms. Seattle WA: University of
Washington Press. ISBN
predates.
- Ray, Dixy Lee
(1950), "The peripheral nervous system of lampanyctus leucopsarus",
Journal of Morphology (Wiley Interscience)
87 (1): 61–178, ISBN
predates
- Ray, Dixy Lee (1945). The
peripheral nervous system of lampanyctus leucopsarus. Pacific
Grove, CA: Hopkins Marine Station. pp. 360 pages. ISBN predates (Note
reference above).
- Ray, Dixy Lee (1938). A
Comparative Study of the Life Habits of Some Species of Burrowing
Eumalacostraca. Oakland CA: Mills College. pp. 24 pages.
ISBN
predates.
External
links
Template:Persondata Micheal Jackson
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
