1940s
Bea McPherson, BA ’43, Hartville, OH, is featured in a new temporary traveling exhibit, Military Mapping Maidens, on display at the MAPS Air Museum in Green, Ohio, from May 7 through Oct. 5, 2022. The exhibit, created by the Arizona-based firm Museum Pros, tells the story of 224 young college women recruited by the Army Map Service in 1943 to research and draw maps by hand for the Allied effort in World War II.
McPherson was studying at Kent State to become an elementary education teacher when her geography professor, Edna Eisen, advised her to take a 60-hour Military Mapmaking course devised for the government by noted cartographer Edith Putnam Parker. After successfully completing the course, McPherson and fellow students journeyed by train to Virginia, where they commuted from Civil Service housing to work for the Army Map Service—now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency—based in Springfield, Virginia.
McPherson, who celebrated her 100th birthday on Dec. 14, 2021, was the subject of a profile about her military mapping efforts in the winter 2018 issue of Kent State Magazine.