Not one curse word was uttered. No gratuitous sex acts were simulated; nor was there violence by anyone of any sex or any race against anyone of any race or gender. Black folks were God-fearing, churchgoing Christians. African-American men cared for their families financially and lovingly, supporting their women who did likewise. Children were well behaved and obedient. And its movie rating is PG. It should have been G; this was the first time in decades of moviegoing that I saw a theatrical motion picture that overprotected the young from age-inappropriate material.

Thus, when my family of three saw “Hidden Figures” on its Pittsburgh debut at The Waterfront, so did only five others during our showtime. Even though the prospect of viewing an early-1960s-era flick, presented in the style of the Eisenhower/​Kennedy age of filmmaking, left local audiences underwhelmed, the theater is still screening it. Perhaps the owner predicts a stampede should “Hidden Figures” win the Best Picture Oscar, for which, among other Academy Awards, it has been nominated.

It should win. It is the best — and most unlikely — movie I have seen this year or, for that matter, in any year! Its premise was too novel to be made up; as it turns out, it wasn’t.

Based on the book by Margo Lee Shetterly, the real-life story tracks the lives of three young mathematically gifted black women forging ambitious careers as “colored computers” — colored being another name for Negro and computer being human rather than machine — during the last gasps of Jim Crow segregation at NASA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Research Laboratory in Hampton, Va. But, there was drama ... somewhat, because we knew how the broader story ended; their task was to calculate the quantitative aspects crucial to sending astronaut John Glenn safely into space and back to earth’s water in the space race against the Soviet Union. Of course, they succeeded, as I (and the whole world) knew they would.

The edge-of-my-seat thrills came from watching how they would do it, overcoming racism and sexism in a Southern town, their own anxieties and the general challenges that attend being “firsts.” Subsequently, my mind raced to thoughts of two Pittsburgh “hidden figures,” one long deceased, the other an actual contemporary of our movie heroines who has touches of their story in hers. Previously, I had published accounts of aspects of the lives of these Pittsburghers in my role as the University of Pittsburgh’s chief communications officer. Now, in this Black History Month, I reflect on their astonishing black histories.

More than 100 years ago, Jean Hamilton was the first African-American woman to enroll at Pitt. She majored in physics long before STEM was a concept. She earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics at Pitt in 1910, becoming Pitt’s fist black female graduate. After marrying Raymond Walls, she returned to Pitt and, in 1938, became the first African-American woman to receive a Pitt Ph.D. Jean Hamilton Walls died in 1979.

Very much alive is my friend Elayne Arrington, who graduated first in her class from Homestead High School (Steel Valley today) in 1957. A black girl from West Mifflin, she was pre-empted from delivering the valedictory speech by the white male class president, a Homestead resident. She informed me that she knew not whether race, sex, or neighborhood chauvinism was at hand.

More heartache: She reports that her virtually perfect mathematics SAT score — 797 out of 800 — earned her an invitation to receive a Pitt honors scholarship. Interested in mechanical engineering since childhood as well as in making defensive bombs to protect America and stop wars, she was informed by Pitt that it recommended her to receive the Mesta Machine Co. scholarship for employees’ top performing children to study mechanical engineering at Pitt Swanson engineering. She was denied, but not because of her race.

The university informed her of the Mesta belief that “girls don’t finish” in mechanical (or any other?) engineering. Sad, but neither bowed nor broken, she was fully funded with her National Merit scholarship added to her Pitt scholarship. When she encountered the young man at Pitt declaring his Mesta scholar status, she admitted to me recently, “He stole my scholarship” was her unspoken thought. She and everyone else there also encountered Sputnik her freshman year. The race to space was on.

And she did “finish,” graduating in 1961, the first black woman to graduate from Pitt Swanson engineering and as a member of the engineering honorary Pi Tau Sigma. Ms. Arrington became an aerospace engineer at Wright-Patterson in Ohio, where all the talk was space and getting there: rockets, astronauts, cosmonauts and Alan Shepard.

She never heard of human computers, let alone colored ones. Yet, those women colored computers in Virginia were calculating how to get the nation to its destiny in the space race by sending John Glenn into orbit and back, and into history.

Elayne Arrington wanted go into orbit also, but she felt more “girls don’t finish” mentality would obstruct, so she quickly dropped it. Years later, as a college teacher, she had an application to be the first teacher to join a space mission, but thought it would not win, since she was not a public school teacher. She did not submit it. When the winner, New Hampshire public high school teacher Christa McAuliffe and the entire crew died in the tragic 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle O-ring debacle, she thought, “That could have been me.”

Elayne Arrington was teaching college because she became a scholar in 1974, among the first couple dozen black women in the nation to earn a Ph.D. in math, writing her algebraic dissertation on finite solvable groups. As a full-time faculty member, she taught at Pitt from that year until her 2012 retirement, focusing as course leader on business calculus. Yet, once an aeronautical engineer, she was still an engineer.

Asked how she felt about her first profession evolving into metaphor for brainy problem solving, as in “This ain’t rocket science, folks.” She replied. “Sometimes you need rocket science.”

Robert Hill is a Pittsburgh-based communications consultant.

First Published: February 9, 2017, 5:00 a.m.