During the 1950s, when computers were as big as a room, Jane Pejsa was an accomplished programmer and analyst. She was also an astute collector of interesting people with unbelievable lives that she'd spin into deeply researched books. And often, her life became intertwined with theirs.
"She considered writing an avocation; she did it strictly out of love," her daughter Ilse Gayl said. "She would ask questions, hook into people's life and become irremovable."
Pejsa died on April 1 near her son's home in Fairfax, Va. She was 89.
Pejsa was born in Minneapolis, graduated from West High School and was tops in her class at Carleton College with a degree in math and German. She was a programmer for Northwestern Bell, Univac and General Mills, where she helped program the company's first mainframe computer system.
In 1950 she met Franz J.F. Gayl, a German paratrooper/POW and then an architecture student at the University of Minnesota. Working together, nights and weekends, Pejsa and Gayl used reclaimed materials to build a house on an improbably steep slope in Minneapolis. They had two children, Ilse and Franz Gayl.
Their second house was no less interesting. Gayl hungered for wilderness, but Pejsa was committed to the city. The compromise was an island in Lake Minnetonka, where the family spent many weekends sailing. Gayl designed a house and Pejsa mapped the island and named it Mahpiyata in honor of a Lakota princess.
As Pejsa raised her children, she worked part time for her father, Walter Hauser, a lawyer who was an honorary German consul who helped Jews reclaim stolen property from the German government. She translated an advanced mathematics book from German to English, was appointed to the Minnesota Governor's Indian Rights Commission and was an active member of the League of Women Voters.
The couple divorced in 1968. Briefly, Pejsa worked as an editor at a local press and then for more than a decade as a systems analyst at Honeywell, where she worked on software for the space shuttle and met her second husband, Arthur J. Pejsa, an aerospace physicist who died in 2014.
