Ray, Dixy Lee

(b. 3 September 1914 in Tacoma, Washington; d. 2 January 1994 in Fox Island, Washington), governor of Washington State, chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, scientist, and author.

Ray was the second of five girls born to Alvis Marion Ray, a printer, and Frances Adams Ray, a homemaker. She was christened Margaret and was known as Dick (short for “that little Dickens”) because she was a mischievous child. She did not like her original name and at age sixteen legally renamed herself Dixy Lee after a favorite region and the Civil War general Robert E. Lee, a distant relative.

When she was twelve, Ray climbed Mount Rainier, Washington’s highest peak, becoming the youngest girl to climb the mountain. She graduated from Mills College in 1937 with a B.A. in zoology and earned an M.A. degree a year later. She worked as a janitor to pay her way through school. From 1938 to 1942 Ray was a teacher in Oakland public schools in California. She then did graduate work at Stanford University as a John Switzer fellow in 1942 and 1943 and as a Van Sicklen fellow from 1943 to 1945. She received her doctorate in zoology from Stanford in 1945.

Prior to beginning public service, Ray was an associate professor of zoology at the University of Washington from 1945 to 1972. She was also the director of the Pacific Science Center in Seattle from 1963 to 1972. The center was dedicated to improving the public understanding of science and actively developed exhibits, displays, demonstrations, and participation programs in many fields of science.

While at the University of Washington, Ray held many other scientific positions. From 1945 to 1960 she served as a member of the executive committee of the Friday Harbor Laboratories. She wrote the book Marine Boring and Fouling Organisms in 1959. From 1960 to 1962 she was a special consultant to the National Science Foundation in biological oceanography. Ray also was the chief scientist and visiting professor on the research ship Te Vega, sponsored by Stanford University, which explored the Indian Ocean in 1964. Ray received the William Clapp Award in marine biology in 1959 and in 1963 was elected a member of the Danish Royal Society for Natural History. She was named Seattle Maritime Man of the Year in 1966.

Appointed a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) by President Richard M. Nixon in 1972, Ray in 1973 became that agency’s first female director, only the third woman in history to head an independent regulatory agency. She was a strong advocate of nuclear power and aggressively moved to improve safety features for reactors. At one point in a television interview, she said that a 1965 AEC study on the consequences of a major nuclear power plant disaster included “speculative figures.” Of its findings, which included estimates of 45,000 deaths, several hundred thousand injuries, and $17 billion worth of property damage resulting from such an incident, Ray stated that the figures were arrived at “if you imagine the worst possible kind of thing, that you don’t have any safety backup …that there isn’t any pressure vessel around the reactor, that there isn’t any containment, that there isn’t any building, and all these kinds of things.” In 1974 she was charged by Ann Roosevelt of Friends of the Earth with making misleading statements regarding the study.

When the AEC was phased out and replaced with the Energy Research and Development Agency and the Nuclear Safety and Licensing Commission, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975 appointed Ray an assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs. She complained that Kissinger gave her the cold shoulder, and in 1976 she returned to her home state to run for governor in the Democratic primary. In the primary she defeated Seattle mayor Wes Uhlman, and in the general election she defeated Representative John Spell-man, an official in Seattle’s King County. Elected to a four-year term, she thus became one of two women governors in the country (Ella Grasso of Connecticut was the other). However, her resource management policies put her at odds with the state’s farmers, fishermen, and environmentalists, and she lost in the 1980 primary elections.

Known for her autocratic style, Ray insisted on loyalty at every level. She was five feet, four inches tall, weighed 165 pounds, and had amber eyes. She wore her hair closely cropped and favored tailored clothes. While in Washington, D.C., she lived in a custom-built, self-propelled motor home, and she took her two dogs to work with her. Ray never married.

In 1990 Ray and Louis Guzzo wrote Trashing the Planet, and in 1993 they collaborated on Environmental Overfill: Whatever Happened to Common Sense. The books concerned environmental stewardship, pollution, and the scientific and political realities of environmental issues. After her retirement from public life, Ray farmed on sixty-five acres of Washington’s Fox Island, where she died of bronchitis. She is buried in Fox Island Cemetery.

Ray was a leading environmental policymaker who sought a balance between preservation of natural resources on the one hand and meeting the material needs of a modern population on the other. In her books and in her public life, she presented a conceptual framework radically different from that of mainstream environmentalists, who in her view tended to approach the natural world not from the intellectual perspective of scientists but with the sentimentality of romantics. Ray, by contrast, was a hard-edged thinker whose work presented a new and challenging contribution to the continuing debates over environmental issues.

Louis R. Guzzo wrote a biography of Ray, Is It True What They Say About Dixie? (1980). Assessments of Ray’s work and career can be found in Iris Noble, Contemporary Women Scientists of America (1979), and Esther Stineman, American Political Women: Contemporary and Historical Profiles (1980). Profiles include “Dixy Rocks the Northwest,” Time (12 Dec. 1977), and “Can Dixy Rise Again?” Newsweek (14 July 1980). Obituaries are in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (both 3 Jan. 1994).

Martin Jay Stahl