Bring Your Daughter To Work Day
Six years running, the one Saturday a year the Enrichment Center is full of children, the commissary bakes, the President judges, and the gate ledger is allowed to be wrong on purpose. This year’s fair drew ninety-one entries and the judging took until dark.
I look forward to this Saturday more than any day in the company’s year, and I want to explain why, because people assume it is sentiment. It is not sentiment. A child asks the question a grown man has trained himself not to ask, and every year at least one of them asks me something on the commissary floor that I take upstairs on Monday and fund.
This Year’s Prize-Winners
Sixth annual science fair, Sub-Level 1 commissary floor, April 1959
| Place | Entrant | Project | Judge’s note |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Margaret, age 11 | A Potato Battery That Runs A Bulb | The potato is still functioning. It has been on my desk since April. It is still functioning. |
| Second | Ruth, age 9 | Volcano (Baking Soda) | Erupted eleven times. Three were scheduled. |
| Third | Dolores, age 12 | Rocks Of The Upper Peninsula, Labelled | One rock is not from the Upper Peninsula. She knows which. She would not say. |
| Honourable | Joan, age 10 | How A Shower Curtain Works | Correct in every particular. I have hired her for 1966. |
| Honourable | Anne, age 8 | My Father’s Job | A drawing of the gate house. Mr. Pike is in it. Mr. Pike wept. |
| Honourable | Patricia, age 11 | Why Momentum Is Conserved | She derived it. On a card. With a crayon. |
| Not placed | Withheld | Withheld | See below. |
First prize is sixty dollars, cash, from the same tin as the volunteer programme, because the President holds that a child who has built a working thing has done an afternoon’s work.
Photograph Captions
The Art Department was reorganised into the Materials Department in the spring and did not come back, so there are no photographs of this year’s fair. The captions were written before the reorganisation and Personnel has asked that they be printed anyway, so that the day is on the record.
FIG. 1. The President, at the commissary door, eight o’clock. Eighty-eight children. He shook every hand and asked every name and has, Personnel is able to confirm, remembered all eighty-eight.
FIG. 2. The volcano, mid-eruption, unscheduled. Ruth, foreground, delighted. Materials, background, taking notes.
FIG. 3. Mr. Pike, at the gate house, with Anne’s drawing. The gate ledger, for the only day in the year, open on the counter with the up column deliberately left blank until the last child is out.
FIG. 4. The cake. Real. Chocolate. One candle. The commissary bakes one cake a year and this is the day, and it is the only cake this building has ever actually produced.
“You are here because we want the best, and one day you are going to be it, and I would like to be around to see that, and I intend to be.”
The Entry That Was Not Placed
Ninety-one entries. Ninety were judged, placed or not placed, and their titles are on the board in the commissary for anybody to read. One was withdrawn by its parent before judging, at the parent’s request, and I have agreed not to print the title, and I have read it twice, and I am going to say only that it was the best entry in the room and that the child was eight years old.
Eighty-eight this year. Sixty-four last year. I have kept the attendance sheet every year since the first and there is a name on last year’s that is not on this year’s and the father is still on the payroll and I have not asked him. — C.
Form ASI-504. The fair is open to the daughters of all personnel and, since 1957, to the daughters of volunteers who have completed an afternoon. The commissary’s standing cake order is described at Form ASI-307, and this is the one day in the year the commissary would like that sheet read.