Early Life and Education
Elizabeth Roemer was born in Oakland, California on September 4, 1929 to Elsie Barlow and Richard Quirin Roemer. Her mother was a schoolteacher in Massachusetts and her father was a marine engineer from Wisconsin. Elizabeth's parents moved to Southern California after they married in 1917 and settled in Alameda approximately six months after her birth. The photograph to the left is of Elizabeth's house in Alameda, taken by her father in 1939. In March of 1931, Elizabeth's younger sister Alice was born. According to Alice's daughter and Elizabeth's niece, Carole, the two sisters were nicknamed "Mickey" and "Patsy," respectively, throughout childhood. The photo on the left shows Elizabeth and her family on Christmas in 1946. She is seated on the right with Alice and their parents are behind them. Alice did not keep her nickname "Mickey," but many of Elizabeth Roemer's close friends referred to her as "Pat" throughout her adult life.
Elizabeth's interest in astronomy emerged at a young age. In an oral history conducted in 1989, she recalled that there was a teaching shortage during the second world war that resulted in a decline of the quality of education across the nation. As a freshman in high school, she detected that some of the information she was being taught in the classroom was not entirely accurate. Though she did not know what the right answers were, Elizabeth became determined to find them:
"It came about when I was a freshman in high school during the years of the Second World War, when many people were teaching on emergency credentials and were not properly qualified teachers. A general science teacher made a number of statements that had astronomical implications. One involved a map of the tilt of the Earth’s axis and how the seasons came about, and one involved the statement that Polaris was the largest star. I can’t tell how, but even at that stage I knew enough to know that what we were being told was not so. But I didn’t know what the right answers were. I was encouraged that if I didn’t find things in books- you don’t find what is the largest star- then to look elsewhere. I was in touch with one of the teaching assistants in the Astronomy Department at Berkeley who helped me get information, and that led to interest in other aspects of astronomy."
In 1946, Elizabeth was a winner of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Her project began in 1939, when at the age of ten she began observing sunspots. As a teenager, she also counted sunspots for the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at Chabot Observatory. A photo of Elizabeth at Chabot Observatory is featured at the bottom of the page. She observed during every season at all hours of the day and night. Her Mars observations were conducted in the winter months at 3 a.m. To the right, the cover of her science project is featured alongside a page that depicts the night sky during different seasons. Below them are illustrations of Mars that Elizabeth made.
Included in her project was an 11-year study and drawings of the Sun-Spot Cycle. She also observed and drew the cloud belts on Jupiter. With the 3-inch refractor, Elizabeth observed and recorded her findings of first and second magnitude stars, planets, star clusters, nebulae, and double stars.
Elizabeth graduated as the valedictorian of her high school class in 1946. Her senior yearbook picture is displayed to the left. As the list of her clubs and extracurriculars suggests, Elizabeth was very involved in several academic organizations at school, which is a trait that carried on to her professional career for decades.