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reason why you don’t succeed.’” Clay took that advice to heart, and after graduating from Douglass High School in 1946, he won a scholarship to St. Louis University. He was among the first African Ameri- cans ever to be admitted to the school, where he majored in mathematics and graduated in 1951. He dreamed of finding a technology job, and while he was granted interviews because his resume gave no indica- tion that he was black, as soon as hiring managers met him in person, he was summarily dismissed. As he has recalled, he was told at one company that there were no positions for “professional negroes.” Clay instead found work as a schoolteacher, but, undaunted, he continued to look for other opportunities. Finally, in 1956, Clay found work with the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation (later known as McDonnell Douglas), programming the company’s cutting-edge IBM and Bur- roughs computers. (Because universities didn’t yet offer degrees in computer science, large corporations looked for mathematics majors to take on programming tasks.) In 1958, he was hired by the Lawrence Radiation Lab- oratory (now known as the Lawrence Livermore National Lab) to write software that modeled how particles of radia- tion might spread through the atmosphere after an atomic bomb was dropped. By 1962, Clay was working as a soft- ware engineer for the Control Data Corporation, a large mainframe computer manufacturer, where he developed soft- ware languages like Fortran .

Roy Clay, Sr.

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