In the September, 2023 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, I was lucky enough to have my article about the history of MAS published. It was my biographical profile of the extraordinary Paula Birner Carey, a co-founder of MAS. The full text of the article is reproduced below.
Almost Forgotten
A little-known past member enriches the history of Madison’s local astronomy club.
by John Rummel
MY ASTRONOMY CLUB, the Madison Astronomical Society, got its start in the 1930s. As with most such clubs in those days, it was a man’s world. But as I researched its beginnings, one woman stood out in the crowd of men.
Paula Birner, an elementary school teacher, was new to Madison in the fall of 1934. A year before the club’s birth, she had appeared on local radio stations doing a program called “Watchers of the Sky.” Birner went on to be a key member as our club organized the following year, and she was omnipresent in it for the next 14 years. In an age when a woman’s role in clubs like ours was largely that of spouse to their husbands — the members — Birner was giving talks and, later in the 1930s, authoring a series of columns for the Wisconsin State Journal on astronomy and practical observing.
Birner was married in the mid-1940s but soon widowed. She left Madison and continued her teaching career in Racine, Wisconsin, now under her married name, Paula Birner Carey. Her life was busy: Carey was active in the teacher’s union and the PTA, and she anchored various writing workshops and classes.
But her love of astronomy beckoned. In the fall of 1956, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Racine Journal Times appealing to others who shared her passion for astronomy. “Somewhere in Racine, or thereabouts, there must be kindred souls,” she wrote. “Wish they would communicate with me. We could form a club and have some fun!”
STELLAR ACHIEVER Paula Birner Carey was a founding member of two Wisconsin astronomy clubs — one in Madison, the other in Racine. She appears here in the mid-1940s.
Carey’s letter worked. Within months a Racine astronomy club was formed, and she would later serve on its board. In 1963, the club built a formidable observatory — the Modine-Benstead Observatory — and in May 1964 Sky & Telescope published an article highlighting the achievement. Its author, of course, was Paula Birner Carey.
Her technical know-how shines through in the article. “As a Newtonian of short focal length (80 inches),” she wrote about the observatory’s convertible 16-inch reflector, “it is suitable for deep-sky viewing and photography; as a Cassegrain (320 inches), it can be used for lunar and planetary studies.”
I never got to meet her — she died in 1993 — but I relate to her attachment to the hobby. I imagine her playing up astronomy with her students but longing for a group of adults to share her interest in the stars. She wanted to recapture the community she’d found in Madison around observing the heavens, and she succeeded brilliantly, helping to found not just one but two vibrant astronomy clubs in Wisconsin.
Carey never remarried after her husband died in 1948, and she had no children. Details of her life and love of the hobby were hard to come by. Sometime after her retirement from teaching in Racine in the late 1960s or early 1970s, she returned to Madison. She must have lived out her retirement in the city where she first helped organize an astronomy club four decades before. She rejoined our Madison club and attended meetings, and she continued to serve on the board of the Astronomical League. She would have been in her 70s by then.
I questioned older members of our Madison club, trying to find anyone who recognized the name or met the person. Only one or two recalled her. They remembered her attending meetings — the nice gray-haired woman sitting in the back. One of them recalls her speaking of the Racine club. But I bet nobody at the time suspected that this kind older lady sitting among them was a founder of their club.
Carey’s last recorded activity in the Madison club was a donation she made in her mid-80s to our new observatory. To the end, she thought of the club — her club — and wanted to see it grow.
JOHN RUMMEL is a Madison, Wisconsin-based amateur astronomer, retired school psychologist, and current historian for the Madison Astronomical Society.
Published in the September, 2023 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, page 84 (Focal Point column).
Back to More MAS History.