Gladys Kathleen Parkin
American
Gladys Kathleen Parkin (September 27, 1900 – August 3, 1990) was one of the earliest and youngest women to obtain a first-class government-issued radio license.
Career
Parkin was born in Bolinas, California, at the Flagstaff Hotel owned by her parents, John Parkin and Hannah Marie Bennett Parkin. The family relocated to San Rafael, California before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed the property.
Parkin became interested in wireless telegraphy at age 5, and operated an amateur wireless station in her home in San Rafael for six years with her brother, John Parkin. Theirs was one of the first wireless stations in California.
On April 13, 1916, while a fifteen-year-old high school student at the Dominican College in San Rafael, she obtained a first-class commercial radio operator's license from the United States Government with the call sign 6SO. The license entitled her to operate any grade of wireless station and to secure employment on vessels. She was the youngest successful female applicant for a radio license ever examined by the Government at that time.
Prior to receiving her professional license, she held an amateur radio license for six years. She applied for the government license on a whim, just to see whether she could pass or not, and passed the examination with a high score. She was the third woman to successfully pass the examination for a first-class radio license, and the first woman in California.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gladys Kathleen Parkin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.