San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday, April 9, 1953
Virginia Deal is Artist, Scientist, and Homemaker All
Wrapped Up In One
By Dolores Waldorf
Cal-Bulletin Women’s Club Editor
Virginia Z. Deal is a soft spoken young woman with a
lifelong habit of asking why. Curiosity and a refusal to accept the
traditional, even in the realm of chemistry, are habits she has no intention of
changing. Why should she?
Why has made a research chemist of her, resulted in papers
and achievements which have caused the Desk and Derrick Club of Los Angeles to
nominate her for the May international petroleum exposition award in Oklahoma
City of “oil Woman of the Year”. Why has has resulted in her marriage to her
chemistry instructor at Duke University, North Carolina.
Since Virginia Z. Deal has been employed as a chemist at
Shell Development Company, Emeryville, for nearly 10 years (ever since her
graduation at Duke), and she is not a member of the Desk and Derrick Club, the
Los Angeles girls must consider her outstanding. Desk and Derrick clubs are for
women in the oil industry.
Virginia Z. Deal is a very versatile young woman. Actually a
scholar who can work on such problems as ferreting out the destructive nitrogen
and sulphur in oil, she is also a artist.
She
has shared in the production of a technical paper on “The Determination of
Basic Nitrogen in Oils” and she has whipped up safety posters, bond posters,
farewell cards for retiring employees and a manual on how to make reports.
She has been a member of a team designing a commercial
exhibit with mobiles nad dramatic visual arguments for such prosaic products as
insecticides and fertilizers.
A young woman with an enviable complexion and bright, candid
eyes, Virginia Deal is pretty, even with her hair drawn back in a severe part
and wound in a braided bun. Somehow, it is not hard to see her as both an
artist and an scientist.
She explains it all
this way: “I always liked to sketch, especially in pen and ink. I might have
taken up art, but I liked science. And I became more interested in chemistry
when my instructor became interested in me. He said it was because I was the
only student who ever asked
questions. My notebooks were filled with whys and question marks.
Instructors and students aren’t supposed to fall in love, but we did, ethics or
not.
We were married right after I graduated. But
Carl had not yet finished his graduate studies, so when Shell Development
wanted to hire both of us, I came on ahead to California. During the war they
relaxed their rule against hiring married couples. There are five couples left
here.
“We hope they leave it that way. I like working
in the same office with my husband. We console each other over our knotty
problems in our work but seldom help each other. Usually we are too busy at
home.
There’s never any friction when one or the
other has to work late. In fact, I have to do a lot of that. we understand each
others problems in a way couples who don’t share the same work never could.”
The Deals now live in a new house on a knoll in
Orinda. He has built fences, bricked about the house, installed a sprinkler
system and built furniture. They are trying to work out a planting that will
preserve the view but protect the place from the wind.
Daughter of a nurseryman and a florist in upper
New York State, Mrs. Deal still marvels at the geraniums and fuchsias which
seemed to grow wild when she arrived here. She is happy that camelias and
fuchsias do well in Orinda, expects to have a garden chiefly of native shrubs
and flowers.
Until the Deals bought their new home they
shared in the housework. They had a nice elastic routine that spared each one
from too many stints at the dish pan. But Mrs. Deal thinks the automated dishwasher
her husband gave her one birthday was as much a boon to him as it was to her.
The Deal livestock consists of seven cats (six
Burmese, including four kittens
and a Manx cat). Mrs. Deal says Burmese cats have much sweeter voices than
Siamese. In fact she is sure she understands every inflection in their voices.
“I know it sounds as if I were talking about a
child, but you can almost know what they are saying.”
A charter member of the new Conta Costa chapter
of Phi Mu Fraternity “alums,” Mrs. deal manages to turn out her share of bean
bags and toys for hospitalized children, current projects of the group.
VIRGINIA DEAL
Her “Why?” led to a College Romance
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