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- DANSVILLE - Virginia Zerfass Deal passed away. She lived from Sept. 1922 - Aug. 19, 2014.
The Zerfass family landed in Pennsylvania in 1730. Traveling by covered wagon, they settled in Dansville, NY in 1830. Virginia lived on the family farm there with her mother Francis, Father Milton and sister Jackie.
Interested in science, music and doing pen and ink sketches, her parents bought her a chemistry set and a $3 microscope. After a few unplanned explosions, Virginia's experiments moved to the basement of their home on Zerfass Road.
She graduated from High School in 1939. Her last summer there was spent working in a hospital assisting with autopsies and other laboratory work.
She was accepted at Duke University with the help of a government loan for science students. While there she held a part-time job involving an analytical study for fluorine on an NDRC project. She was an Art Editor of the "Archive"
(a Duke literary magazine), president of the Pegram Chemistry Club, Staff Artist for the Zoology Dept. and was also a member of Phi Mu.
At Duke, she met her future husband, Carl Deal, who was a North Carolinian in chemistry graduate school. She was the only one in his Quant and Qual class who asked questions, he said. Married later in Duke Chapel, they both accepted jobs with Shell Development Co., the research labs for Shell Oil in the San Francisco Bay area.
The U.S. was in WWII. When Virginia went to CA to work, Carl was still in graduate school at Duke. The personnel manager of Shell, Elizabeth Ainsworth, met Ginny at the Train on Oakland. Mrs. Ainsworth became a long-time friend and was also the sister of John Steinbeck.
While at Shell, the P-Chemistry Department was making penicillin in "The High Lab" (a multi-story room for very tall distillation columns). The first thing Virginia worked on was the first pilot plant development for mass penicillin production.
Virginia was featured in the "Women at Work" section of the Petroleum Engineer Magazine in 1954. She was a California nominee for "Oil Woman of the Year" (Desk & Derick Club) and she was the first woman to give a paper before the API (American Petroleum Institute) in the West - and only the second in all of API history. The Deals would picnic in the Berkeley Hills with George Pimentel and his wife in the '40's. Carl knew Robert Oppenheimer, and was friends with Dave Packard, before his name became forever hitched to Bill Hewlett. Ansel Adams was among their acquaintances.
Virginia's career in science came at an extraordinary time in history. The post-war years carried the momentum of war-driven efforts toward peace-time objectives. The SF Bay area was the western crucible for science, with U.C. Berkley, Stanford, the Lawrence labs and a host of emerging industries. The atmosphere was positive and ambitious, and R&D efforts looked forward beyond the horizon.
Her interest in science began with a chemistry set, a microscope, and some unplanned explosions. She pursued this interest through college and launched into her career as a woman by filling the void of absent soldiers. Her first project was the penicillin pilot plant in support of those very soldiers, some of who later worked under her at Shell. Today there aren't those barriers to "women in science" which Ginny broke through long ago.
She retired in San Marcos, Tx in 1992. Virginia is survived by her daughter Julia; sons Carl, Milton and Nicholas; grandchildren Milton, Daniel, Marcus, Scottie, Haley and Parker. She was a very cool mom.
Virginia will be buried with her husband Carl in the family plot in the hillside forests of Dansville, N.Y. (GCE, August 28, 2014, pA7)
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1922 - 2014 (91 years)
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