Adler Planetarium

This guide to the Adler Planetarium centers on Maude Bennot, who joined as an assistant to founding director Philip Fox in 1929, mastered the German-built Zeiss projector still installed in the dome, and effectively ran the institution through the Great Depression and into a world war. You'll hear how the Park District withheld her the title and pay a male director had received, and what her male colleagues said about a woman running an observatory. The guide follows her eight years at the helm up to a single word a typewriter clattered out beside her name in 1945. Stand under the dome and the sky show above still traces back to her years there.