Daniels, Barbara Jane, 2008 January 16

This is a Living History interview with Barbara Jane Daniels, class of 1966, conducted by Marilyn Somers on January 16, 2008 at her home in East Point, Georgia. The subject is the interviewee’s life, and experiences at Georgia Tech.

Ms. Daniels was born on November 9, 1922 in Decatur, Georgia. When she was five years old, her father left the family and they moved to East Point, Georgia with her grandmother. She attended Church Street School when she was six years old. After three years, Ms. Daniels transferred to Central Park School. She attended Russell High School before graduating at age sixteen. Ms. Daniels was awarded a scholarship from Agnes Scott College and became a commuter student in 1940. Ms. Daniels remembers Agnes Scott being a very beautiful and cultural campus. If there was a music program later in the evening, the college would set up a room that the commuters could stay in overnight so that they would not have to ride the streetcar back late at night. At the time, there were 500 young women enrolled at Agnes Scott. During World War II, a few of her friends joined the Women’s Army Corps. Around her graduation time, Ms. Daniels saw an ad placed by Tech seeking a graduate who majored in Physics or Mathematics; Ms. Daniels majored in both. She began working for the AE department at Tech in 1944. She was hired to gather calculations of airplane tests performed in the wind tunnel on campus. She worked closely with Walter Castles, Don Dutton, and John Harper. Ms. Daniels was hired with two other girls from Agnes Scott, but they left soon after they were hired. She attended many Tech football games with her mother and received an employee discount on the tickets. For a while she was able to sit in the temporary stands which were located right on the field at the fifty yard line. After seven years in the AE department, Ms. Daniels was transferred to the Engineering Experiment Station, where she performed similar calculations for the Physics department. She worked with one of the first computers on campus. Ms. Daniels was working on campus when the Winecoff Fire occurred and remembers all the traffic it caused. She became more active in her church and took singing lessons so that she could sing in the choir. In 1946, Ms. Daniels bought her first car. She did not know how to drive when she bought it, but her family taught her. Parking on campus was difficult because many people did not know how to parallel park properly. Ms. Daniels had a lot of respect for Tech students and decided to pursue a degree in Information Sciences. She was one of the first women to earn her Information Sciences degree. Ms. Daniels’ thesis topic was entitled A Computer Technique for the Recognition of Capital Letters and Numerals, where she wrote a computer program for the computer to recognize a variety of human handwriting samples. In 1976, Ms. Daniels retired from Tech after working for thirty years. In 1980, she started working for her church as a bookkeeper/treasurer. Ms. Daniels has written six books, including her thesis, and is also interested in singing, collecting, painting, and sewing. She remains very active in her church.