As a young girl, Natalie Carbone Mangini liked building sparklers and bombs and burned a hole in her family’s kitchen floor.

“My mother got me … a chemistry set and I started doing it,” she said. “It those days, chemistry sets were a lot different than they are now.”

At age 93, the Crabtree woman still has the small booklet of chemistry experiments she used as a child. Turns out, it was the spark for her trailblazing career.

Mangini is being featured on Pennsylvania Cable News PCN Profiles at 9 p.m. Sunday. She detailed her life, career as a scientist at Westinghouse and decades of work at the family restaurant during an interview for the program. Mangini was employed only about 10 years at Westinghouse but made a massive impact in the nuclear field and on generations of budding female scientists.

In 1938, her parents started the landmark Italian restaurant Carbone’s in Crabtree. Mangini took on small jobs at age 10 to help out. One of them was scooping tomato paste out of cans.

“We all did something, we all worked,” said Mangini, who had a younger brother and sister. “I never stopped working there until we closed the restaurant.”

She graduated from Seton Hill College in 1949 with a degree in chemistry and afterwards got a job with Westinghouse. She soon grew bored with the work, and jumped at the opportunity to move to the company’s Bettis Atomic Power Division.

She became the first female scientist there.

Mangini got involved with radiochemistry work and used techniques to solve problems in different departments at the facility. She had a hand in developing nuclear procedures on the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, and creating safety procedures for the nuclear reactor at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the first peacetime use of atomic power.

It started operating in 1957, the same year Mangini married husband Vince.

Mangini had the respect of her male colleagues and said she didn’t think about being the only woman at work. The accomplishments were gratifying to her and the lab coat she wore every day sits in a frame at home.

“There’s enough room for everybody and everybody can do something,” she said.

Starting a family a few years later eventually led her to end her employment with Westinghouse, she said. But her second career — working at Carbone’s in Crabtree — awaited.

Mangini worked as a waitress and hostess at the restaurant while having four children and helping her husband with another family business, Crabtree Oil Co. But she never let go of science.

“We always had fun experiments that we were doing,” said daughter Natalie Stefanick of Hempfield. “It’s amazing and even today … she’s just a very modest person.”

Daughter Melissa Orlosky of North Huntingdon remembered a time when her mother came to her sixth grade classroom to talk about her work as a scientist. It was a surprise to Orlosky who thought she was going to hear all about the family restaurant.

“You didn’t brag about it, it’s just you lived your life,” she said.

Carbone’s closed in 2018 in the small village which sits along Route 119 near the boundaries of Hempfield, Salem and Unity townships. Mangini worked there until the end, estimating that they had served more than 2 million customers. Her son, Vince Mangini of Crabtree, was president of the business.

Orlosky and Stefanick said her mother has always had a thirst for knowledge. Their sister Vanessa Hooper of Philadelphia nominated Mangini, who has six grandchildren, for the PCN show.

The family is planning a small party at home on Sunday to watch the episode.

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