Ray, Dixy Lee (1914–1994)

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Ray, Dixy Lee (1914–1994)

American scientist who was head of the Atomic Energy Commission and later governor of Washington. Born Margaret Ray in Tacoma, Washington, on September 3, 1914; died on Fox Island, Washington, on January 2, 1994; graduated from Mills College with a degree in zoology, 1937, M.A., 1938; Stanford University, Ph.D., 1945; never married; no children.

Dixy Lee Ray was born on September 3, 1914, in Tacoma, Washington. Although she was

christened "Margaret" and given the nickname "Dick" (short for "that little Dickens"), Ray chose her own name, "Dixy Lee," as a homage to her favorite region and Civil War general. At the age of 12, her independent, can-do attitude began to emerge when she climbed Mount Rainier and thus became the youngest girl to scale Washington's highest mountain. She attended Mills College in California on a full scholarship, studying zoology while also working various jobs on campus, including waiting tables, managing the school theater, and cleaning laboratories, to earn money for living expenses. After completing her undergraduate work in 1937, she earned a master's degree the following year.

After teaching in public schools in Oakland, California, in 1942 Ray entered Stanford University. Three years later, having earned a Ph.D. in biology, she became an instructor in zoology at the University of Washington, where she would remain for 25 years. Ray became an assistant professor in 1947, and an associate professor ten years later. She often traveled internationally to conduct her research, which focused primarily on certain marine crustaceans, especially Limnoria, and organisms that attack submerged wood and damage piers, boats, drydocks and wharves. She published a number of papers in various journals, and in 1959 edited Marine Boring and Fouling Organisms. The year prior to that, she had produced "Animals of the Seashore," a 15-part series of half-hour television shows about various marine animals that was aimed at a general audience. The meticulously executed series proved popular and was lauded by Ray's fellow scientists, and went on to become something of a staple in schools and on educational television. As noted in Famous American Women, Ray was a "leading advocate of ecological research as a prerequisite to understanding the dangers inherent in the unregulated growth of such technologies as chemical manufacturing, energy production, and waste disposal." Long before the rise of the environmental movement, Ray was vocal about the contamination of oceans by radioactive materials and dangerous pesticides. "The balance of nature, of living things, is rapidly being altered," she warned. "And we must stop the destruction of species that comes about when we change the environment by our technological advances without knowing the consequences of our interference with nature."

Ray's experience from 1960 to 1962 as a special consultant in biological oceanography to the National Science Foundation led to her appointment as the director of the newly established Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington, in 1963. With her guidance, the center achieved national prominence for its work in encouraging a better understanding of science by the general public. After serving as a member of the President's Task Force on Oceanography in 1969, Ray was nominated for a seat on the Atomic Energy Commission by President Richard M. Nixon in 1972. She resigned from the University of Washington and the Science Center after her appointment to the government was confirmed by the Senate. She was the first woman to undertake a full term on the commission. A year later, she became chair of the commission, a post that brought her arguably more power than that held by any other woman in the federal government. (She continued to live in a motor home, as she had since her arrival in D.C., bemusing much of the political establishment.) Ray worked to improve opportunities for minority job applicants in the field, and championed broader research into the safety of nuclear reactors. Many environmentalists criticized her blunt defense of the nuclear industry and she, in turn, opposed environmental alarmists. After the Atomic Energy Commission was reorganized in 1974, she became assistant secretary for oceans and international environmental scientific affairs at the Department of State.

Ray resigned from this job in 1975 in order to campaign as the Democratic candidate for the governorship of her home state. Despite the burgeoning women's movement, not many women ran for statewide office at that time (only Ella Grasso of Connecticut had been elected without benefit of a husband who had been governor), and Ray, an "apolitical college professor," was considered a long shot at winning, particularly in a Republican-dominated state. Nonetheless, she was elected by a healthy margin. In 1977, at age 62, she was sworn in as the state's first woman governor.

Ray courted controversy from the very beginning of her four years in office, when she fired almost everyone in the administration who had worked for the previous governor, Dan Evans. Her response to the public clamor was: "No one owns a job. From now on, we'll send them a Kleenex at the time they're fired." Her term rarely went smoothly after that, and her battles with reporters became a hallmark of her administration. Some observers cited her unwillingness to compromise as the primary reason behind her defeat in the Democratic primary to Jim McDermott while seeking re-election. Never one to be idle, she picked up where she had left off in her research and writing, co-authoring the books Trashing the Planet (1990) and Environmental Overkill (1993) with journalist and longtime friend Lou Guzzo. Ray remained opinionated to the end despite suffering from a severe bronchial condition in the last months of her life, offering public commentary on nuclear issues only days before she died at her home on Fox Island on January 2, 1994, at the age of 79.