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Shortly before World War II, a daughter was born to Zenon and Olga Pelensky, then residents of Lviv. They named her Martha, and like most parents, had great hopes for her future. Social and political conditions in Ukraine were not conducive to the realization of these hopes, and like many of their compatriots, the Pelenskys emigrated to Germany, were caught up in the horrors of the war years, and joined the ranks of displaced persons that filled the postwar camps and faced an uncertain future. For Martha Pelensky, childhood was a succession of d.p. camps which she recalls stoically and unemo tionally. Her memories of post-camp life are less sanguine. Her early experiences in a German Catholic gymnasium in Bad Reichenhall and Munich were marked by the difficulties faced by any non-German speaking child in a country filled with people who are preterna- turally xenophobic and to whom all auslanders were an unwelcome and unpleasant reminder of their defeat in the war. As a Ukrainian child, she was doubly stigma tized as an auslander and an untermensch. She spoke no German and was further hampered by the universal difficulties caused by the onset of puberty. By the time she entered secondary school in Munich, she had learned German and had overcome the traumas of becoming a teenager, but there was little to be done about German attitude. Like many Ukrainians displaced by the war and the post-war upheavals, Martha and her mother decided to start over elsewhere. In 1957, they emigrated to the United States. Martha had already learned a little English, was young and healthy and ambitious, and found that New York City had opportunities that could be grasped and molded to fit her own agenda. For as a young girl, Mar tha had decided that she would become a chemist. And in America, such things were possible if one was willing to work to make them possible. Her first job, as a steno grapher on Wall Street, made it possible for Martha Pelensky to enroll in night school at the Brooklyn Poly technic Institute. As a woman enrolled in chemistry classes, she was an oddity. Transferring to engineering was even more odd, for even in America, engineering was a man’s world, a man’s field. Undaunted and unconvinced by comments that she would be better off in a “women’s profession”, she persevered. While a stu dent, she began working for Chemico, doing ’’grunt work” in instrumentation automation, technical work which she now describes as slave labor that was better than typing. She refers to this period in her life as the “ Babylonian captivity” — no life, just work and study and study and work. After eight years of night school, she obtained a B.S. in Chemical Engineering. At Che mico, she advanced from Engineering Aide to Assistant Instrument Engineer to Instrument Engineer. She was assigned to a supervisory position and assumed more and more responsibility until her qualifications and experience outpaced the company’s potential to fulfill her professional goals. While her work at Chemico was her foot in the door to a career in chemical engineering, the door was fully opened when she answered an advertisement placed by Mobil Oil and was hired as the first woman engineer at Mobil’s Research and Development Corporation. To supplement and enhance her B.S. in Chemical Engi neering, Martha Pelensky also enrolled in graduate courses in chemical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering, and obtained the New York Professional Engineering License. Her education and professional experience eventually led to a position as Process Engi neer for Mobil, a position she held until 1993. Ms. Pelensky describes her career as a Petroleum Engineer as “everything from nuts and bolts to theory to design”. She has been involved in every aspect of the building and function of refinery units, has written operation manuals, supervised construction crews, conducted and superivsed environmental and efficiency studies, designed and redesigned refining units and associated major equipment. An organized and method ical individual, Ms. Pelensky presented this writer with a detail and interesting list of professional accomplish ments that she considers the highlights of her career as a process engineer. Ms. Pelensky developed an interest in computers in the early days of computer technology, the days of big main frame computers and computer cards. Prior to 1975, information which calculated material and heat balance(s) of hydrogen reforming plants was the pro vince of these big main frame computers. Between 1975-78, Ms. Pelensky translated this information into a program for hand held calculators which were at that time a brand new and revolutionary aspect of computer technology. She subsequently translated this informa tion into BASIC to be run on the the new Texas Instru ments PC (personal computer). She has since designed similar programs and adapted them to other p.c. sys tems as these have become more high tech. While many of her contemporaries struggle to achieve computer literacy, Ms. Pelensky has mastered several computer languages and has a strong interest in acquiring addi tional computer skills and keeping up with innovations in the field. Petroleum refinery reactors are complex vessels with a complex system of control valves that must be opened and closed in a particular sequence to be safely operated. Early in her career with Mobil, Ms. Pelensky designed a state of the art logic valve switching inter lock system for safe operation of seventy-seven valves in a Cyclic Reformer. Her safe and effecient system was put into use in refineries in Ferndale, Washington and Wichita, Kansas. In the mid seventies, the Mobil subsidiary in Austra lia was sending its employees to work in U.S. Mobil refineries, and in a reciprocal arrangement, Martha Pelensky was selected for a two-year refinery assign 16 ’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ", СІЧЕНЬ 1996 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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