In this age of specialization there are few Renaissance men or women-people knowledgeable in the arts, the sciences, business and history able to discuss them all with equal ease. Helga Ertas and her husband, Ano, are exceptions. If you get into a conversation with them, there`s no telling what topics you might touch on or where you`ll wind up.
A recent free-wheeling, two-hour conversation with them in their Wheaton home was encyclopedic. It included talk on the Hubble space telescope and Rene Descarte`s 1640 solution, philosophy, the homeless, Diogenes` equation for submersion and how that led to the eventual invention of submarines, the arts, economics, religion, marriage, family history and the current state of computers.
”Sometimes we sit down and discuss,” said Ano. ”We will pick a topic, an idea. It could be a theological question or a question about economics. Last night we had guests stay with us, two students from Japan. We had a two- hour dialogue, and the girls said, `This is much better than a movie.”`
”They were fascinated,” said Helga. ”They originally planned on going to the movies but then decided that talking with us was more fun.”
Helga`s life has all the elements of a dramatic movie: her childhood, in which she and her family escaped from the invading Soviet army; growing up in a family with a father who`s a rocket scientist; and a struggle as a woman working in a man`s world and in a ”man`s career,” becoming a computer pioneer despite discouragement. Helga sees no conflict in the fact that not only is she a scientist married to an artist but she is heavily involved in the arts as well.
”Sometimes it boggles my mind: How do a scientist and an artist live in the same household,” her husband said.
”And when it does occur, it`s usually the reverse,” Helga added. ”The husband is usually the scientist, and the wife the artist. In the `60s, when I was going to school, I majored in economics and mathematics. I even attended Marburg Universitat, one of the oldest schools of economics in Europe. But whenever I spoke of studying economics, even members of the academic arena would `correct` me and say, `You mean home economics.`
”In the `60s, sciences were not really open to women. I remember wanting to be an engineer and trying to further my goals in engineering. My father sat down and had a long talk with me, saying, `Engineering is not for a woman. It`s very demanding, and it`s just not really an open field for growth. You can`t progress in it.` He told me I`d be better off in a theoretical field. So I went into economics and sort of by the back door had to proceed into getting into the sciences, which is really my first love.”
In contrast, Helga`s brother, Wolfgang, was encouraged to go into the sciences. He became a Ph.D. chemist and has written scientific papers on the existence of water on the moon.
”As it was, I was the only woman in my economics department,” said Helga. ”Women were educated, that was fine, but certainly you wouldn`t want to go into a career. And the sciences have never really been perceived as a glamorous field. It just wasn`t something that women went into. But I think it was through my father`s influence that I pursued the sciences.”
Helga`s father, Georg Buergel, is a famous German rocket scientist who worked with Werner von Braun. During World War II, the Allies helped Buergel and his family escape from Soviet-controlled Germany. Helga was not quite 2 years old at the time.
”The Russians would take people in the middle of the night, just take them away,” she said. ”Rumor had it they went to Siberia. We wanted to take the opportunity to leave.” In order not to raise suspicion, the family had to meet individually at the train station at a prearranged time. They could bring very little with them; even a suitcase might arouse suspicion. Neither could they say goodbye to neighbors or family.
”The British were very clever, I think,” she said, recalling their flight. ”They put us into the train and then filled the car with British soldiers, so when we came to any kind of a checkpoint, they wouldn`t be able to observe that there were a couple of people not in uniform. They just packed the soldiers in with us as tight as they could to discourage any Russian patrols from entering the train car.”
The family lived in West Berlin for a number of years, and then, when Helga`s father had the opportunity to work on projects for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, they moved to New York City in the early `50s.
Although her father has long since retired, the U.S. government still contacts him from time to time when they need help in solving a problem.
”In our household, everything was absolutely fixable,” Helga recalled.
”Anything that broke, my father just took it apart, tweaked it here and there, tightened a couple of screws, and it was fixed. An artist would probably give something a couple of kicks; a scientist will take it apart, meticulously, open up all the screws and levers and whatever, and fix the pieces. That`s a very secure way of living; it just appealed to me.
”My interest in science has to do with my personality, too. Scientists have a different personality; they like to dig into things and find out why and how. I observe Ano`s personality. He likes to analyze things from a philosophical standpoint, whereas I like to get into machinery or whatever and figure out why it works, how it works and what it does.”
Certainly, growing up in a family with a famous rocket scientist as a father strongly influenced her. Ano described her father as ”a real scientist, like the kind you see in the movies, with white hair and all.”
”Let me give you an example of the family,” Ano said. ”One Christmas, Helga`s father gave her brother a Christmas gift, the blueprints for a plane. And I`m sitting there thinking this is not real. People buy ties, shirts, socks for presents. And Wolfgang builds the plane and flies it to South America. This is the type of gift the family gives. So I`m sitting there as an artist, looking at these people. I`m thinking what am I going to get? Plans for a new painting?”
Ano and Helga laughed. ”Paint-by-number,” she teased, then explained that her brother loves aviation; he has his own airport and rebuilds antique planes.
”Helga`s father loves American cars,” Ano continued. ”Here`s a man who could`ve owned a Mercedes, but what does he buy? A Buick. So I`m in the garage, and I see the car, and I say to Helga the tires look strange. What is this? And Helga says to me, `Oh, my father designed this tire. When you push the button, it becomes a winter tire, for when it snows.”
Helga nodded her head in agreement as though it`s the most natural thing in the world. ”The chains would come out, and you could drive on ice,” she explained.
”My dad has many patents and was always working on something,” she said. ”He designed an engine, which a friend of ours built a computer model of. It`s an external combustion engine, which uses heat to drive it. Also, during the war, my father invented a way to twist wire very carefully. They didn`t have elastic. All the men`s shirts had sleeves the same length, so to pull the sleeves up, they used to use rubber bands so the sleeves wouldn`t hang over the hands. And they used my dad`s wire bands; in Japan, they still use them.”
With a family like this, it`s understandable that Helga would also be attracted to science. Although she graduated from college with an economics degree and worked for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in in tax assessment, Helga still felt drawn to computers. So she went to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and received a graduate degree in computer science. ”It was one of the few schools teaching it,” she said. ”In those days, back in the `60s, schools didn`t even have computer sciences; they didn`t have a department for it or teach it at all.”
Helga worked for Amoco for 13 years, in system analysis and design. She then moved on to McDonald`s Corporation, where she developed a system for international sales tracking. When she finished that project, she moved to AT& T, where she now works as a staff manager in high performance systems product management. She assists the department in determing customer`s needs and suggests new hardware and software for computers that AT&T is designing.
”I`m delighted to work for AT&T,” Helga said. ”I`ve found it to be a very open environment, very conducive for women. It`s very challenging work, and it has an international flavor.”
”Helga brings to this organization a knowledge of customer environments that are using the old technologies, plus she understands the new
technologies, which we`re trying to introduce,” said district manager Shirley Szachnit, Helga`s immediate supervisor. ”Because of her unique background, she has an understanding of how the two environments work together and how we can merge them. She understands the business problems that customers are trying to solve. She`s extremely knowledgeable in technology and in customer environments, what they need and what they`re asking for.
”She`s one of my best,” says Szachnit. ”I love working with her. She`s a very gentle person, extremely considerate of others. She`s a somewhat quiet individual, but I think that`s because she`s so thoughtful. She does a lot of good analysis and puts a lot of thought into the problems she tackles.”
Helga believes her diverse interests help make her a better scientist.
”That`s one of the things that`s very much lacking in our scientific community,” she said. ”People attack things from one angle, rather than going globally and pulling ideas from various subjects. Having this exposure to art and also having a background in business and economics really promotes my abilities to work in the sciences.”
”I once heard a mathematician lecturing,” said Ano, ”and he said:
`Good mathematicians are not ones that go from A to B to C to D. Good mathematicians go from A to B to F.` They don`t go linearly. That requires knowing how to look at life prismatically. It`s second-order thinking process if you jump a few steps and not think in a linear fashion. Helga is not a linear scientist, and I think that makes her special.”
Helga has seen enormous changes in the more than 20 years she`s worked in the computer sciences. ”The first computers we used were huge, yet they could do much less than the little computers we have now on our desks. You had this flurry of people around to look after it, to work with this huge computer that did so little. And the amount of work you could do on it took a long time; to access the systems, you had to do very complicated programming. You had to give it all kinds of strange codes, whereas today, you can give a couple of little sentences, and the computer is able to understand it and figure out what`s going on and what to do,” she said.
Not only have computers changed but the field itself has become more open to women. ”It has been more than 20 years since I started out,” said Helga, ”and I`d say that in the last 10 years, the field is progressively becoming more populated by women. There are probably more women in the marketing end, but in the technical end, they`re coming. Slowly. Women are getting more involved. Technical fields have never been real glamorous, and unless you have a love for the field, you probably don`t enter it.”
Helga and her husband are also heavily involved in the arts and are committed to promoting them in Du Page County. ”We`re trying to bring the arts out here,” saids Helga. ”It`s very hard. I think in the north community of Chicago, you find the arts are much more flourishing: Ravinia and lots of successful art shows. But in Du Page County, that`s really been left behind. Now that the county has become so developed and the population has progressed and increased, I think you could bring culture to Du Page County and be successful.”
To help reach this goal, Ano is attempting to create an atelier in Du Page. ”It`s basically a Greek tradition,” he explained. ”An atelier is simply a space where an artist can work. It is a space where things can happen, art for all the people: music, literature, sculpture, painting. People internationally known in their field coming in for a weekend.”
Helga and Ano are members of Chicago`s Wedgewood Society and the local Cultural Guild.
”I`ve known Helga for about seven years; I met her through the Cultural Guild,” said Du Page artist Lisa Gengler. ”We both came from Germany, and our families have similar backgrounds. We became friends. She`s just real friend material. My mother once said that a true woman friend is better than any psychiatrist.
”She thinks deeper, yet she has an impish sense about her. Helga has a wisdom that goes with her humor and intelligence. She is a very, very well-rounded person with an unending curiosity. It`s wonderful to be around someone who lives with so much color and expresses herself in so many forms.”
