Secretaries in the 1960s had to have excellent spelling and grammar — there was no spell check and no delete button (though they did have white-out).
Secretaries like Jamye Flowers, who was hired right out of high school as a NASA secretary, ended up doing a lot of NASA's most important high-security note taking. Flowers said it wasn't uncommon to log extra-long days in the office during the Apollo era, starting at 7:30 in the morning and sticking around until 5 or 6 at night.
"Everyone worked those hours. We weren't the only ones," Flowers said during a NASA oral history project in 2008. "Everyone did. When the astronauts would be in the simulator from 8:00 in the morning 'til 5:00 in the afternoon, the time that they could get their work done, as far as what they needed to do at their desk, was after that. We all wanted to be available."
Others at a 2001 Houston Sixties Chicks reunion recalled that their own male bosses swore a lot, drank a lot of coffee, and smoked a lot of cigarettes.