By Gretchen Wing

Kids, listen up. You know when your math teacher tells you these equations will really help you one day? She’s not lying. Look where math took Carl Bender: to the moon.

Okay, maybe not Carl himself. But Carl’s math got the Apollo 8 astronauts around the moon and safely home. And throughout Carl’s career, math provided his own exciting yet secure trajectory.

Growing up in Grandview, Wash., Carl knew he “wanted to get away from the desert, and the cowboy music…it just wasn’t me.”

The oldest of five, he entered WSU in 1955 planning to become an architect. But during his interview, the dean showed him an impressive display of balsa-wood models. “He said, ‘This project is from last year’s graduating class, 25 of ‘em. And we can’t find a job for any one of those 25.’”

The dean recommended civil engineering, where the jobs were, and Carl took his advice.

But halfway through his college years, Carl’s parents split, leaving his mother struggling to support five kids. Engineering majors had to take a summer Survey School, and Carl needed to make money, not spend more. So he switched to math teaching.

“That didn’t work too well,” he admits with a smile; “I had to drop out after my junior year.”

His math skills landed Carl a job with Boeing, but leaving school made him vulnerable to the draft. So in 1957, off he shipped for Korea.

Here again, math gave Carl a leg up. As the only infantryman in his group who knew trigonometry, Carl became a specialist, computing the direction of fire. This entailed promotion to sergeant, with accompanying improvements in pay and privileges.

Finishing his two-year stint, Carl returned to the Bay Area, where his father was living, and completed his degree at San Jose State. He immediately found a job with NASA’s Ames Research Center, which was looking for – what else? – a math specialist, and worked there for the next five years.

Math was not responsible for Carl’s meeting Mary Anne Nall at a swimming pool in Mazatlan. That luck was due to Mary Anne’s father, who had packed his family into the car and driven all the way from Alabama. After a year of long-distance relationship, the couple got married and settled in California, where Mary Anne looked for a teaching job.

Because no one was hiring, they moved back to Alabama. Carl began working for Computer Science Corporation in Huntsville, and Mary Anne taught Junior High. Although she describes Huntsville as “not like the rest of the south,” it was the mid-sixties, and she taught on the front lines of school integration.

Carl had his own front line to contend with: the space race. In 1968, NASA was preparing Apollo 8 for the first moon shot. Carl’s team had to compute the spacecraft’s figure-eight trajectory, but, Carl laughs, NASA’s clerks “were using those big ol’ computers to compute the payroll all day, so we were doing our engineering work all night.” Carl and Mary Anne went weeks without seeing each other, communicating solely via notes.

Carl’s team did their work well, however. Computer Science Corporation offered one set of data, while the Apollo 8 computer and Houston offered two others. “They would look at the [vectors], and pick the two that were closest.” Listening in to the astronauts, Carl heard Frank Borman say, from space, “‘Send us up the Huntsville numbers.’ Boy,” says Carl, “that was kind of exciting!”

After three years, the Benders moved to D.C. where Carl worked at the Goddard Space Center. The focus was unmanned missions, but no less vital in the Cold War. “Those were heady days,” Carl says.

The Apollo program ended in the mid-70s, so Carl came back to Boeing, and the Benders settled in Kent. 15 years ensued, during which Carl entered politics, working on a state Senate campaign, and helping to challenge the mid-90s Newt Gingrich wave.

In 1995 Carl retired and the couple moved to Lopez, but Carl expanded his political involvement, representing the San Juans at the state Democratic Convention. Then, as a member of the Humphrey Head Owners Association, he took classes to become certified in water distribution, and has run the HHOA water system for ten years.

Keeping that math focus, Carl also tutored middle and high schoolers. One girl used to say about Carl, “‘My wizard here just taught me…’”

Mary Anne’s work at the Senior Center drew “wizard” Carl onto the Advisory Board for the Northwest Regional Council on Aging. He now attends monthly meetings of the Governor’s State Council in Sea-Tac, working to expand senior programs. His civic involvement doesn’t leave much spare time, but Carl does enjoy the quieter pursuits of oil-painting and woodworking. After all, even left-brained wizards need to exercise that right brain now and then.