Sally Ride never cared much for the fame that came with being the first American woman in space.

She loved that it gave her a platform for encouraging children, especially girls, to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.

But she hated the celebrity of it, the strangers stopping her to take a picture, the media swirling around for tidbits of her personal life.

So what would the La Jolla physicist, who died in 2012, have thought of the proposal to put a statue of her in the U.S. Capitol Building, alongside the likes of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower and Hellen Keller?

She would have been honored, according to those who knew her. And also embarrassed by the attention.

“Sally is someone who did things because she wanted to do them, not for any awards or statues,” said Tam O’Shaughnessy, her partner of 27 years.

The proposed monument of Ride would join the National Statuary Hall Collection, which includes bronze or marble likenesses – at 7 to 8 feet tall, literally larger than life – of two people from each of the nation’s 50 states.

“Sally Ride,” said state Sen. Ricardo Lara, who introduced the statue proposal, “is a modern depiction of the American dream.”

California is represented now by a statue of former governor and President Ronald Reagan and one of Father Junipero Serra, the 18th Century Franciscan priest who founded the missions. Ride would replace Serra under a proposal now pending in the state legislature.

That has sparked criticism from those who believe Serra’s role in the early development of California is too important to be pushed aside. Catholics are upset that the proposal has arisen months before Pope Francis is scheduled to visit the U.S. and canonize Serra.

Narrowly passed by the state Senate in April, the statue swap is awaiting action in the Assembly. A hearing could be scheduled as early as this week, according to Jesse Melgar, Lara’s communications director.

Lost in much of the controversy has been Sally Ride the person, a scientist who set her sights on the stars but wanted nothing to do with stardom, a public figure so private she kept her sexual orientation a secret to all but her closest friends until after she died.

A legacy of fun

Last Tuesday would have been Ride’s 64th birthday, an occasion marked by one of the Internet’s coolest honors: A Google doodle.

The millions of people using the search engine’s home page that day saw five animations of Ride’s life. One showed her operating the robotic arm she helped develop for space missions. Another showed her in the Challenger capsule, weightless. One showed her talking to kids in a school auditorium.

O’Shaughnessy, who worked with the Google team for several months, telling them stories about Ride, said one of the things she liked about the doodles was how fun they were. Fun is a word Ride’s friends use often in describing her.

“I think that’s a big part of her legacy,” said Lynn Sherr, author of “Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space,” a biography published last year. “She worked her tail off, she was really smart, but she enjoyed what she was doing.”

Ride was born in the San Fernando Valley to parents who told their daughters they could grow up to be anything they wanted, a rare philosophy in the 1950s. What Ride wanted, early on, was tennis. She was good enough to drop out of Swarthmore College briefly and pursue a pro career, but not that good, she realized after a few months.

She switched to Stanford, got bachelor’s degrees in physics and English, and was nearing completion of her doctorate in astrophysics in 1977 when she saw a notice in the school newspaper. NASA was looking for women to join the space shuttle program. She was selected over thousands of other applicants.

On June 18, 1983, when she rocketed skyward on Challenger – at age 32, the youngest American in space – it seemed as if the whole nation was watching. Radio stations coast to coast played “Mustang Sally.” Gloria Steinem, the noted feminist, said, “Millions of little girls are going to sit by their television sets and see they can be astronauts, heroes, explorers and scientists.”

Ride relished her time in space – “I’m sure it was the most fun I’ll ever have in my life,” she told reporters – and went on a second mission in 1984. She was scheduled for a third when the Challenger exploded in 1986. She was on the presidential commission that investigated the disaster, and on the one that probed the 2003 Columbia disintegration – the only person to serve on both panels.

After she left NASA, she joined the physics faculty at UC San Diego in 1989 and, with O’Shaughnessy, started Sally Ride Science in 2001. It provides festivals, classroom activities and other programs aimed at encouraging kids to explore careers in science and technology.

Here was one place Ride welcomed being famous. She wanted girls to dream big, and she was their role model. As she liked to say, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

Guarding her privacy

One of the things Ride probably would have noticed right away about the 100 statues from the various states in the U.S. Capitol Building is how few are of women. Nine at the moment, with a 10th, of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, coming soon from Kansas.

“She would be thrilled that there are more women now than ever, but she would ask, ‘Why isn’t it 50 percent?’ ” Sherr said.

The late Sally Ride, photographed in 2006. The late Sally Ride, photographed in 2006.

The statues date back to a law passed by Congress in 1864. They are supposed to be of deceased people who are “illustrious for their historic renown or for their distinguished civic or military services.”

Serra’s statue has been in the Capitol since 1931. When Lara, D-Bell Gardens, announced in February that he wanted to replace that monument with one of Ride, he said, “It’s about modernizing our heroes.”

Lara, who is openly gay, also pointed to Ride’s sexual orientation. Her statue would be the first of someone from the LGBT community. “Symbols are important, especially for those of us who have traditionally not seen ourselves in figures of influence or power,” he said.

But Ride is not someone who liked labels. Her friends said she didn’t want to be known as a “hero” or as “the gay astronaut.” Nor is she someone who spent much time thinking about her legacy, about whether she was “illustrious.”

“She really just lived in the present,” O’Shaughnessy said. “She didn’t think much about the past or the future.”