Peggy Upham was born in January 1924 in Dallas, Texas. She remembers the Great Depression. Her family did alright. They did not know they were poor. Her parents were adamant about getting their children educated. Her father was an accountant and her mother was a homemaker who wanted to go to college. Upham had part-time jobs here and there. In high school, she did land measurements from aerial photos. She started college in September 1941. She heard about Pearl Harbor [Annotator's Note: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941] over the radio. She enrolled at Arkansas State Teacher's College in Conway, Arkansas, which is now part of the University of Arkansas. She took math and science. Curtiss-Wright [Annotator's Note: Curtiss-Wright Airplane Division, Curtiss-Wright Corporation] came along in her third semester. She did not go back after World War 2. The dean of the school called one day and informed her that they were coming to interview. The dean picked her. She interviewed and she was accepted into the program. She has always been interested in what makes airplanes fly. Her younger brother and she built model planes through the years. He became an aerospace engineer. She then went to Purdue [Annotator's Note: Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana] in February 1943.

Peggy Upham was in an accelerated program [Annotator's Note: in the Curtiss-Wright Engineering Cadettes at Purdue University in Indiana] that needed women to take the place of the engineers who were leaving Columbus [Annotator's Note: airplane manufacturing plant, Ohio]. There were not many women who could be in that department. She went into the mechanical drawing part which she enjoyed. The technical courses had to do with aeronautical engineering; mass, size, and mechanics. They had a shop. They learned the mechanics of building airplanes. It was 44 weeks long, a good eight hours a day. Then they had to study. She was very sincere in her studies. They even had classes on Saturday. She could not get through calculus even though she loved math. She feels the instructors had a lot of patience. They had never had women in their classes. She felt they were excellent. They did have supervised study twice a week. It was all women at Purdue. [Annotator's Note: A person off-camera interjects occasionally.] They had social activities and that was the limit of her association with people outside of class. Most of them completed the coursework. They had been specially selected and were doing whatever they could to help the war effort. It ended when the war did in 1945. Purdue had ended in 1943. She went home and then went to Columbus.

Peggy Upham went to work at the Columbus Plant of Curtiss-Wright [Annotator's Note: Curtiss-Wright Airplane Division of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation aircraft manufacturing plantin Columbus, Ohio]. She was assigned to engineering drafting. She did changes to the working plans for the planes. Later she was put in charge of checking other's work in a quality control manner. She was called back [Annotator's Note: after the war] to archive the plans. She worked on the Helldiver [Annotator's Note: Curtiss SB2C Helldiver dive bomber]. It was not designed to go on and off a carrier [Annotator's Note: aircraft carrier]. The pilots kept saying it was too bulky. Part of her work was on the tail hook assembly. They were having problems with it not catching the cable on the decks. The pilots hated that plane. Her work was all on the drafting board. She was not the master mind, she ensured the engineer's changes were made correctly. [Annotator's Note: Off-camera, a person describes the problems with it.] That was what she focused on. They were eight or ten in her department. There were more in aeronautical drafting. The plant was huge. She did not get to roam around. They would work on Saturdays at times. It was intense work but they were treated well. Looking back, she thinks it well organized in a hurry. They had good living quarters. She doubts the pay was equivalent to male's. She had no problems with her male supervisors. She worked there all of 1944 and well into 1945.

After the war ended, Peggy Upham went back home [Annotator's Note: to Dallas, Texas]. There was no money for her to go to college so she found a job as a map draftsman in Dallas. She went into the exploration part of the petroleum industry as there was no place for women in the aeronautical engineering industry. She stopped to raise a child and then spent another 35 years in the petroleum industry. She used geometry and algebra all the way through this job. Her schooling at Purdue [Annotator's Note: Purdue University, Indiana] took her into a good living at her own business. It was enjoyable to work with geologists, physicists, and land people. She closed her business in 2002 because she did not want to sit in front of a computer all day long. She feels she was a trailblazer to help bring women into the workforce. She volunteers at a flight museum in Dallas and tries hard to educate women in aeronautics. Upham thinks that for her generation, they learned that you do something. She feels the war brought us closer as a nation that we needed then and probably need now. The war saved our nation. She thinks it is great that the people of her generation's experience and knowledge will help our future generations. They should not forget what was done for this nation. Curtiss-Wright [Annotator's Note: Curtiss-Wright Airplane Division, Curtiss-Wright Corporation] was great for her education and she became acquainted with people she is still associated with.