[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I would say we were aware. Because you could see the press articles, and you’d see people running around with funny crash helmets. But we knew the capability of the spacecraft, and we knew that the ability to really influence was pretty small. Having done the studies of the teleoperator retrieval system earlier, from my recollection we had picked orbits to actually do a controlled reentry. Skylab picked one of those orbits to come in on. The orbit that at the endgame she was aimed for was pretty much straight down the center of the Atlantic Ocean. There were uncertainty bounds on that, on the “if she comes in early” kind of bounds; it was still over the continental U.S. and Canada. Tumbling the spacecraft was meant to shift the midpoint a little bit into the South Atlantic so that you didn’t have the inhabited northeast United States and Canada under the track.\n\n But the orbit, as it became clear a few days out, it would have been hard to really pick a better orbit that covered that much ocean and that little inhabited ground. As it turned out, the best I can recall from those days is that the spacecraft actually held together longer than the engineering projections. That’s why some of the components did land in Australia, out in the relative Outback.

[Assistant] It was expected by the time it got over eastern U.S. to start coming apart, and it didn’t.

[User] Yes, it was expected to come apart and it hung together a little bit longer than the engineering analyses said.

[Assistant] Was there a little breath holding?

[User] I would say it was mission-focused. We knew the tools that we had, the capability. Skylab didn’t have a big propulsion system. It had small attitude control thrusters, and it had big gyroscopes. It really wasn’t meant for boosting and reboosting, so you had the limitations of what the spacecraft had. Like I said, the idea of tumbling it was just to make a more predictable reentry.

[Assistant] I was reading about debris pattern calculations that had been made. Who was doing those calculations for you?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, it was expected to come apart and it hung together a little bit longer than the engineering analyses said.

[Assistant] Was there a little breath holding?

[User] I would say it was mission-focused. We knew the tools that we had, the capability. Skylab didn’t have a big propulsion system. It had small attitude control thrusters, and it had big gyroscopes. It really wasn’t meant for boosting and reboosting, so you had the limitations of what the spacecraft had. Like I said, the idea of tumbling it was just to make a more predictable reentry.

[Assistant] I was reading about debris pattern calculations that had been made. Who was doing those calculations for you?

[User] We had the small flight ops team. We also had support from engineering and from the old Mission Planning and Analysis Division that was doing a lot of that trajectory analysis and debris planning.\n\n Skylab was actually a project of the [NASA] Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama], so we had an engineering support team from Marshall that was with us most all the time, operating out of the HOSC [Huntsville Operations Support Center] like they have done for years in support of missions. They were not full-time support until the end, but we all had counterparts at Marshall that we could deal with in terms of how the systems functioned and what was going on. The collective team of the JSC engineering and MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis Division] folks and the Marshall folks were the ones that were doing that offline analysis of how the spacecraft was going to break apart.

[Assistant] Also, before it actually came in, at one point there was another Russian rocket that was coming in and NASA had a chance to practice following that.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I would say it was mission-focused. We knew the tools that we had, the capability. Skylab didn’t have a big propulsion system. It had small attitude control thrusters, and it had big gyroscopes. It really wasn’t meant for boosting and reboosting, so you had the limitations of what the spacecraft had. Like I said, the idea of tumbling it was just to make a more predictable reentry.

[Assistant] I was reading about debris pattern calculations that had been made. Who was doing those calculations for you?

[User] We had the small flight ops team. We also had support from engineering and from the old Mission Planning and Analysis Division that was doing a lot of that trajectory analysis and debris planning.\n\n Skylab was actually a project of the [NASA] Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama], so we had an engineering support team from Marshall that was with us most all the time, operating out of the HOSC [Huntsville Operations Support Center] like they have done for years in support of missions. They were not full-time support until the end, but we all had counterparts at Marshall that we could deal with in terms of how the systems functioned and what was going on. The collective team of the JSC engineering and MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis Division] folks and the Marshall folks were the ones that were doing that offline analysis of how the spacecraft was going to break apart.

[Assistant] Also, before it actually came in, at one point there was another Russian rocket that was coming in and NASA had a chance to practice following that.

[User] It was more NASA and the Air Force being able to exercise the tracking systems and match that to the projections of what they thought was going to happen.

[Assistant] It was just a little chance to make sure what they thought was going to happen really happened?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] We had the small flight ops team. We also had support from engineering and from the old Mission Planning and Analysis Division that was doing a lot of that trajectory analysis and debris planning.\n\n Skylab was actually a project of the [NASA] Marshall Space Flight Center [Huntsville, Alabama], so we had an engineering support team from Marshall that was with us most all the time, operating out of the HOSC [Huntsville Operations Support Center] like they have done for years in support of missions. They were not full-time support until the end, but we all had counterparts at Marshall that we could deal with in terms of how the systems functioned and what was going on. The collective team of the JSC engineering and MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis Division] folks and the Marshall folks were the ones that were doing that offline analysis of how the spacecraft was going to break apart.

[Assistant] Also, before it actually came in, at one point there was another Russian rocket that was coming in and NASA had a chance to practice following that.

[User] It was more NASA and the Air Force being able to exercise the tracking systems and match that to the projections of what they thought was going to happen.

[Assistant] It was just a little chance to make sure what they thought was going to happen really happened?

[User] Yes, because the Kosmos satellite took a lot of people by surprise when it landed in Canada. I think then they had an opportunity, where they had a little more knowledge of the system, and they would be able to actually track and see. But we had a lot of interest. The last few days all the media was actually set up in one of the old flight control rooms tracking things. They had a camera in our little control room where they would watch us.

[Assistant] Did they have interaction at all with your room?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was more NASA and the Air Force being able to exercise the tracking systems and match that to the projections of what they thought was going to happen.

[Assistant] It was just a little chance to make sure what they thought was going to happen really happened?

[User] Yes, because the Kosmos satellite took a lot of people by surprise when it landed in Canada. I think then they had an opportunity, where they had a little more knowledge of the system, and they would be able to actually track and see. But we had a lot of interest. The last few days all the media was actually set up in one of the old flight control rooms tracking things. They had a camera in our little control room where they would watch us.

[Assistant] Did they have interaction at all with your room?

[User] Not much, no. Every once in a while one of us would get asked to go down and answer a question or drag a model. I think I took a model down to Jules Bergman [broadcast science journalist] somewhere in that process, but we were not offered up as media subjects very much.

[Assistant] It’s probably a good thing.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, because the Kosmos satellite took a lot of people by surprise when it landed in Canada. I think then they had an opportunity, where they had a little more knowledge of the system, and they would be able to actually track and see. But we had a lot of interest. The last few days all the media was actually set up in one of the old flight control rooms tracking things. They had a camera in our little control room where they would watch us.

[Assistant] Did they have interaction at all with your room?

[User] Not much, no. Every once in a while one of us would get asked to go down and answer a question or drag a model. I think I took a model down to Jules Bergman [broadcast science journalist] somewhere in that process, but we were not offered up as media subjects very much.

[Assistant] It’s probably a good thing.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Talk about when it did come in and the tumble started, and you saw that it was actually going to hit, because it didn’t break up on time, and parts of it ended up in Australia. How soon after it actually happened did you know or hear about those sightings in Australia and where it had hit exactly?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] We did have a splatdown party. We actually had one of the co-ops [cooperative education students] that was supporting us at the time—Lou Pare was very artistic. He had actually designed a splatdown T-shirt. I think I probably have one. I doubt that I fit it anymore.\n\n In a throwback to the Apollo days where the teams always had splashdown parties, we decided we would just coin ours a splatdown party. It was most of the team ending up at Jim Saultz’s house with a pool, and that was how we all just brought it to closure. Most of the folks had worked—I think a nine-month tour was not unusual. A few folks had been over there the whole reactivation time, which was closer to two years.

[Assistant] I have a news article where Australia fined NASA for littering, as a joke of course.

[User] Yes, and the [U.S.] Space & Rocket Center over at Marshall does have some of the components that they brought back that I got to see several years later.

[Assistant] That’s quite a thing, for someone that had just graduated college, and then to have someone like Chris Kraft tell you to go ahead and send it. That’s quite a jump.

[User] It was a big jump. My whole mindset was that of the small town kid. To all of a sudden be in these meetings with Chris Kraft and Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz and George [W. S.] Abbey, it’s hard to describe. If you haven’t studied the history and don’t know who all these people are, that that’s who you’re dealing with on a regular basis was kind of amazing.

[Assistant] Yes, I would say so, definitely amazing. Talk about what you did after that.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. Charlie got to fly more than most NASA astronauts. Yes, and that’s because a lot of folks saw huge promise on what the CFES [Continuous Flow Electrophoresis System] experiment was going to do potentially for big pharma [pharmaceutical] industry.

[Assistant] Were there any other missions during that time that you can think of?

[User] Like I said, there were so many unique things. Every one of the repair or retrieval missions was very unique in and of itself.

[Assistant] What about the Spacelab mission?

[User] Spacelab I did not do much with. That really had been a whole different set of people. That was a huge involvement with Marshall the first couple Spacelab flights. Even though Marshall staffed the Payload Ops Center, they came here at JSC and used a room in the MCC [Mission Control Center] to staff that function. Ultimately we moved it to Huntsville in what’s for ISS [International Space Station] now the POIC [Payload Operations Integration Center].\n\n The missions I worked really were the PAM missions and the repair and the retrieval missions.

[Assistant] What about the DoD [Department of Defense] flights?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Like I said, there were so many unique things. Every one of the repair or retrieval missions was very unique in and of itself.

[Assistant] What about the Spacelab mission?

[User] Spacelab I did not do much with. That really had been a whole different set of people. That was a huge involvement with Marshall the first couple Spacelab flights. Even though Marshall staffed the Payload Ops Center, they came here at JSC and used a room in the MCC [Mission Control Center] to staff that function. Ultimately we moved it to Huntsville in what’s for ISS [International Space Station] now the POIC [Payload Operations Integration Center].\n\n The missions I worked really were the PAM missions and the repair and the retrieval missions.

[Assistant] What about the DoD [Department of Defense] flights?

[User] DoD I did not work either. At the time I didn’t have the higher clearance. We all had fundamentally a secret clearance, but that team you had to have the top secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] kind of clearances, so I did not work those missions.

[Assistant] You said that you had moved to section head. Was that the Commercial Payload Section?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Spacelab I did not do much with. That really had been a whole different set of people. That was a huge involvement with Marshall the first couple Spacelab flights. Even though Marshall staffed the Payload Ops Center, they came here at JSC and used a room in the MCC [Mission Control Center] to staff that function. Ultimately we moved it to Huntsville in what’s for ISS [International Space Station] now the POIC [Payload Operations Integration Center].\n\n The missions I worked really were the PAM missions and the repair and the retrieval missions.

[Assistant] What about the DoD [Department of Defense] flights?

[User] DoD I did not work either. At the time I didn’t have the higher clearance. We all had fundamentally a secret clearance, but that team you had to have the top secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] kind of clearances, so I did not work those missions.

[Assistant] You said that you had moved to section head. Was that the Commercial Payload Section?

[User] Yes, it was the Commercial Payload Section. After Challenger they decided that they weren’t going to fly commercial payloads, so it would not make sense for me to be head of a Commercial Payload Section anymore.

[Assistant] As you mentioned, working up towards that there were those payload specialists like the senators, and then Bill Nelson flew the one right before Challenger. Over this time, especially with the PAMs and doing sims, how closely did you work with the astronauts?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] DoD I did not work either. At the time I didn’t have the higher clearance. We all had fundamentally a secret clearance, but that team you had to have the top secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] kind of clearances, so I did not work those missions.

[Assistant] You said that you had moved to section head. Was that the Commercial Payload Section?

[User] Yes, it was the Commercial Payload Section. After Challenger they decided that they weren’t going to fly commercial payloads, so it would not make sense for me to be head of a Commercial Payload Section anymore.

[Assistant] As you mentioned, working up towards that there were those payload specialists like the senators, and then Bill Nelson flew the one right before Challenger. Over this time, especially with the PAMs and doing sims, how closely did you work with the astronauts?

[User] Very, very closely. Because it was so new I probably spent more time working directly with the early crews than I might otherwise, because the training group was still getting up to speed on some of the payload training stuff. We were probably just a little bit ahead of that team, although they became a stronger and stronger piece as we got further along.\n\n All of the early crews—Bill [William B.] Lenoir and Joe [Joseph P.] Allen were the principal crew that I worked with on STS-5. John [M.] Fabian and Sally [K. Ride] on STS-7. Dale [A.] Gardner on STS-8. Then I had Vance [D. Brand] again as a commander on 41B, and for the PAM business that was [Bob] Stewart and [Ronald E.] McNair focused on the PAM stuff. Bruce [McCandless] was all focused on the MMU.\n\n Through my mission control time, through 61C, I spent a lot of time with the crews, whether as part of their training process or mission execution.—I usually did the beginning PAM familiarization training for all of the crews. Then ultimately over time somebody forced me to write it all down.

[Assistant] I was going to ask about that, as far as writing all those instructions or those procedures.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, there was history. But it also made me realize that I’m one of the older guys now.

[Assistant] Yes, it’s always a shock, isn’t it?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Did some of those guys that had been through the Apollo 1 accident help after Challenger, as far as helping to guide you through that process that things are going to change, things are going to happen?

[User] I think they tried to message that, guys like Gene. If you think back then, Chris [Kraft] had retired. He was working at Rockwell [International Corp.]. A lot of the management had changed, but Gene was still there. I think even Glynn had left. I’m trying to remember now all the management changes. But they tried to message that.\n\n The challenge was you were in a terribly uncertain political environment. You had an Acting Administrator because [NASA Administrator] Mr. [James M. “Jim”] Beggs was off fighting legal issues. You had Bill [William R.] Graham, then quickly after that they had brought Jesse [W.] Moore in to fill a role. You saw a lot of instability, from my view. I saw a lot of instability in Headquarters, whereas what I had seen in the past was not really that at all.\n\n While these folks tried to message that, I think they didn’t really know what political environment they were in either. It really was more about “Those of us that are working on understanding the failure are doing that, those of us that are working on modifying the vehicle are doing that. Those of you that aren’t as involved, we have other things for you to do.” But you really had gone from going crazy flying flights at a pretty high flight rate to having a lot more idle time.

[Assistant] When you were assigned—or suggested that you work with Space Station, that was still here at JSC at that time.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Did some of those guys that had been through the Apollo 1 accident help after Challenger, as far as helping to guide you through that process that things are going to change, things are going to happen?

[User] I think they tried to message that, guys like Gene. If you think back then, Chris [Kraft] had retired. He was working at Rockwell [International Corp.]. A lot of the management had changed, but Gene was still there. I think even Glynn had left. I’m trying to remember now all the management changes. But they tried to message that.\n\n The challenge was you were in a terribly uncertain political environment. You had an Acting Administrator because [NASA Administrator] Mr. [James M. “Jim”] Beggs was off fighting legal issues. You had Bill [William R.] Graham, then quickly after that they had brought Jesse [W.] Moore in to fill a role. You saw a lot of instability, from my view. I saw a lot of instability in Headquarters, whereas what I had seen in the past was not really that at all.\n\n While these folks tried to message that, I think they didn’t really know what political environment they were in either. It really was more about “Those of us that are working on understanding the failure are doing that, those of us that are working on modifying the vehicle are doing that. Those of you that aren’t as involved, we have other things for you to do.” But you really had gone from going crazy flying flights at a pretty high flight rate to having a lot more idle time.

[Assistant] When you were assigned—or suggested that you work with Space Station, that was still here at JSC at that time.

[User] That was still here at JSC, yes.

[Assistant] When did that move to Reston [Virginia]?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Only because you guys make me busy. I’m happy to be here.

[Assistant] How did you learn that NASA was hiring a new class of scientist-astronauts, Dr. Allen?

[User] I had been a graduate student at Yale University [New Haven, Connecticut]. I was close to finishing a Ph.D. It was 1966; there [were] some small news articles about NASA having selected a few individuals [to be astronauts] who were not test pilots, but rather were scientists. I was intrigued by that, not because I was interested, but just as kind of a curious thing. In my recollection of it then, the middle 1960s were troubled times, but maybe one possible bright spot was this Apollo Program. It was clearly dangerous, it was adventuresome, and if it worked, humankind would actually set foot on another planet. And to me, that was most interesting.

[Assistant] Were there any potential advantages or drawbacks that you considered when you were applying for the program?

[User] Jennifer, I maybe should be embarrassed to tell you [this]. I saw some kind of a notice on a graduate school bulletin board that anyone interested [in NASA] should write. I was not interested in becoming an astronaut, but I was [very curious about] the process that they were going to use [to select these people]. So I wrote out of a curiosity, not out of an interest in the job. I was quite keen on the adventure of people going into space, and it was great fun to watch on TV, but I had no real intent or even [hope] of doing that. Like were I to buy a lottery ticket today, I would not expect to win the lottery.

[Assistant] You were actually planning on becoming an academic?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I had been a graduate student at Yale University [New Haven, Connecticut]. I was close to finishing a Ph.D. It was 1966; there [were] some small news articles about NASA having selected a few individuals [to be astronauts] who were not test pilots, but rather were scientists. I was intrigued by that, not because I was interested, but just as kind of a curious thing. In my recollection of it then, the middle 1960s were troubled times, but maybe one possible bright spot was this Apollo Program. It was clearly dangerous, it was adventuresome, and if it worked, humankind would actually set foot on another planet. And to me, that was most interesting.

[Assistant] Were there any potential advantages or drawbacks that you considered when you were applying for the program?

[User] Jennifer, I maybe should be embarrassed to tell you [this]. I saw some kind of a notice on a graduate school bulletin board that anyone interested [in NASA] should write. I was not interested in becoming an astronaut, but I was [very curious about] the process that they were going to use [to select these people]. So I wrote out of a curiosity, not out of an interest in the job. I was quite keen on the adventure of people going into space, and it was great fun to watch on TV, but I had no real intent or even [hope] of doing that. Like were I to buy a lottery ticket today, I would not expect to win the lottery.

[Assistant] You were actually planning on becoming an academic?

[User] I was on a very good track to go on as a junior faculty member at a university and become a teacher of physics. I liked physics.

[Assistant] Tell us about the application and the interview process.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] [At the] graduation ceremony there at the flight wing, and I was given all the awards and then the top trophy [by the wing commander], and I took it home to my wife. I said, “Bonnie, I came home with a trophy.”\n\n She said, “Well, it’s about time. You don’t even have a bowling trophy.” [Laughter] So, her making that equivalent of a bowling trophy sort of put me back in the right place again. But I was a good pilot. I was a very good pilot.

[Assistant] How useful do you think that experience was for either the Apollo Program or any of the other programs that you worked on for NASA?

[User] Probably not at all. [Laughs] But that’s unfair, because to be qualified in an airplane does give you a way to think about things that’s extremely disciplined. [Later], when you get in a spacecraft, that’s important, and you take that disciplined way [with you]. That’s good. ...\n\n Secondly, a spacecraft flies totally [differently] from an airplane. But [airplane experience] does make you very familiar with the way you use checklists and be doubly cautious here and very careful there. I think it’s particularly useful to somebody, to say, a scientist, particularly an experimentalist, who just says, “Well, what the hell. Why don’t we try this?” That’s not the approach you want to take to a spacecraft. You do not want to try any experiment. You want to only do it according to the cookbook, exactly as people know it will work and respond. There’s no place for imagination or invention in a spaceship. So I think [flying] was a good fundamental background [training. Of course, today] there are many astronauts now [who] are not flight-qualified. …

[Assistant] Yes.

[User] So NASA realized it was kind of a thing of the past.

[Assistant] So after you came back from flight school, what did you do? What did you work on?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Keep going. Keep going, yes.

[Assistant] Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the field trips that you took for Apollo 15.

[User] Okay. I will refer you, by the way, to one of Tom Hanks’ shows, [From the Earth to the Moon]. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched those. But one of those, and I think it’s called [Galileo Was Right].

[Assistant] I think I know which one you’re referring to.

[User] It’s a very nice rendition, and it comes actually—those things are based on Andy [Andrew] Chaikin’s book, that I’m sure you guys know of, and it has to do with how the scientists and the teaching scientists started to become involved with the strange new class that were called astronauts. I saw that again recently, and I sat and watched it with Lee [Leon T.] Silver, who was one of the professors, who is a grand man. Is his name on here, by the way? He’s a character and a half. He is a teacher’s teacher. … Several persons [whom he instructed] got so hooked on the science that they still [follow] it as a hobby, and one of those is John [W.] Young. I don’t know if you’re aware of that. Here John Young’s a Navy test pilot, for goodness sakes. He’s a test pilot’s test pilot. He, John, knows as much about lunar geology as a hobby—as a hobby—as many college professors know about it as a profession, and it’s due in large part to the inspiration that Lee Silver brought to [us all].\n\n Now, your question, again, was what was my recollection of it?

[Assistant] Your recollections of the field trips for Apollo 15. Where did you go, what did you do?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t remember. Not very many people, because in those years you could get various things aboard the spacecraft. Later we no longer do, but the feather just went aboard. The hammer was already there.

[Assistant] Were you able to tell Ed [Edward I.] Fendell that the experiment might occur so that he could actually film the experiment?

[User] Oh yes. We were well aware if they had time when they were going to do it, yes. But they pretty much were filming everything. But Ed, indeed, was there and got it. I was thrilled.\n\n And I tell you, up until the time I saw it, you know, there’s all sorts of things that can happen here there’s not going to be good, including static electricity. What if when he lets go of the feather it doesn’t really leave his hand? Which I was quite worried about. I mean, it could just sort of sit on the tape and never let it go anyplace.

[Assistant] It all worked out, though.

[User] It worked out beautifully.

[Assistant] Did you propose any other experiments for the mission?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh yes. We were well aware if they had time when they were going to do it, yes. But they pretty much were filming everything. But Ed, indeed, was there and got it. I was thrilled.\n\n And I tell you, up until the time I saw it, you know, there’s all sorts of things that can happen here there’s not going to be good, including static electricity. What if when he lets go of the feather it doesn’t really leave his hand? Which I was quite worried about. I mean, it could just sort of sit on the tape and never let it go anyplace.

[Assistant] It all worked out, though.

[User] It worked out beautifully.

[Assistant] Did you propose any other experiments for the mission?

[User] Oh, Jennifer, golly. None that pop into my head. We were talking about various things all the time. There was a very long list of formally proposed experiments that were carried out, but I can’t claim to have contributed any of the original thinking to any of those, although how one got it implemented, we worked hard on implementation of the experiments.

[Assistant] Can you share with us the details of implementing an experiment?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Can you talk to us about that?

[User] Well, that’s always kind of a fun thing. First of all, it’s totally unofficial, and you just do it so you have [names] as you look at the maps and talk about this [crater and that feature]. The real crew members have no time to think about [such trivia], but you, as the support crew, can kind of arbitrarily do it. By then, we had some very good friends [who] were geologists, and we had terrific fun naming them. I still have lunar traverse maps that have those names still on there.

[Assistant] How did you select the names?

[User] Oh, just where my hobbies and interests were. I even kind of forget what they are right now, but there are some characters from science fiction, and a couple of names were names of music compositions done by my brother-in-law, David Darling, who was then and still is a professional musician. He has written music and gives it quite inventive names. I think Ghost Beads Crater is an example, because he wrote this very haunting piece called “Ghost Beads.” I forget what some of the other names were. Icarus is another crater. Well, that’s from, I guess, Icarus is a Greek God? Maybe Roman. No, I think it’s Greek, because Icarus was the one that invented wings from wax, then flew too close to the sun. But David had written a piece called “Icarus.” That actually was the name of an album at the time, his album.

[Assistant] I’d like to talk to you a little bit about your role as the lunar EVA CapCom.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Well, that’s always kind of a fun thing. First of all, it’s totally unofficial, and you just do it so you have [names] as you look at the maps and talk about this [crater and that feature]. The real crew members have no time to think about [such trivia], but you, as the support crew, can kind of arbitrarily do it. By then, we had some very good friends [who] were geologists, and we had terrific fun naming them. I still have lunar traverse maps that have those names still on there.

[Assistant] How did you select the names?

[User] Oh, just where my hobbies and interests were. I even kind of forget what they are right now, but there are some characters from science fiction, and a couple of names were names of music compositions done by my brother-in-law, David Darling, who was then and still is a professional musician. He has written music and gives it quite inventive names. I think Ghost Beads Crater is an example, because he wrote this very haunting piece called “Ghost Beads.” I forget what some of the other names were. Icarus is another crater. Well, that’s from, I guess, Icarus is a Greek God? Maybe Roman. No, I think it’s Greek, because Icarus was the one that invented wings from wax, then flew too close to the sun. But David had written a piece called “Icarus.” That actually was the name of an album at the time, his album.

[Assistant] I’d like to talk to you a little bit about your role as the lunar EVA CapCom.

[User] Okay.

[Assistant] There were a couple of exciting moments when you were working that shift, in particular when they found the Genesis Rock.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, just where my hobbies and interests were. I even kind of forget what they are right now, but there are some characters from science fiction, and a couple of names were names of music compositions done by my brother-in-law, David Darling, who was then and still is a professional musician. He has written music and gives it quite inventive names. I think Ghost Beads Crater is an example, because he wrote this very haunting piece called “Ghost Beads.” I forget what some of the other names were. Icarus is another crater. Well, that’s from, I guess, Icarus is a Greek God? Maybe Roman. No, I think it’s Greek, because Icarus was the one that invented wings from wax, then flew too close to the sun. But David had written a piece called “Icarus.” That actually was the name of an album at the time, his album.

[Assistant] I’d like to talk to you a little bit about your role as the lunar EVA CapCom.

[User] Okay.

[Assistant] There were a couple of exciting moments when you were working that shift, in particular when they found the Genesis Rock.

[User] Right.

[Assistant] Could you talk to us about what the mood was like at the MOCR [Mission Operations Control Room] at that time?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Okay.

[Assistant] There were a couple of exciting moments when you were working that shift, in particular when they found the Genesis Rock.

[User] Right.

[Assistant] Could you talk to us about what the mood was like at the MOCR [Mission Operations Control Room] at that time?

[User] Again, you never quite would know what you had, but just based on—now, conversation, that’s all we could communicate with them, and a little bit of TV, there was an excitement about that, and again, it is interestingly documented, with some poetic license, in the movie, in the Tom Hanks production. [The rock] was physically very large. Most of the samples were small. They were just stones that came back, physically about like this [gestures], which got loaded aboard and brought back [for detailed study. But the Genesis rock was] a conglomerate. I’m not sure what it was made up of, but a lot of basic information came out of that rock. The fact that it was different and physically large and had what seemed to be quite unusual characteristics was exciting to us. There are some photographs in the NASA archives that show Dave Scott and me looking at the rock in the Lunar Curatorial Facility afterwards, all wearing our white clean-room caps and so on. …

[Assistant] Tell us how you were able to balance the needs of the scientists during this mission versus the needs of the flight controllers and the reality of the time constraints for the astronauts.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It’s a pleasure.

[Assistant] We’d like to start by asking you if you would share with us a little bit about your background and how you became part of the NACA.

[User] My college training involved the University of Washington in Seattle, and that was electrical engineering. After that, I took a master’s at UC [University of California] Berkeley in electrical engineering. That was 1948, I got out. They were hiring at Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California]—Ames was the only place hiring engineers, and so, that’s where I ended up. I was there two years.

[Assistant] What did you want to do with your electrical engineering degree? Why did you choose to go into that field?

[User] I wanted to learn technical things. I wanted to have a good, steady job. That’s primary.

[Assistant] You started, you said, at Ames in 1948. Tell us what you did on your first job and your first task when you were out there.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My college training involved the University of Washington in Seattle, and that was electrical engineering. After that, I took a master’s at UC [University of California] Berkeley in electrical engineering. That was 1948, I got out. They were hiring at Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California]—Ames was the only place hiring engineers, and so, that’s where I ended up. I was there two years.

[Assistant] What did you want to do with your electrical engineering degree? Why did you choose to go into that field?

[User] I wanted to learn technical things. I wanted to have a good, steady job. That’s primary.

[Assistant] You started, you said, at Ames in 1948. Tell us what you did on your first job and your first task when you were out there.

[User] My first job that I recall was Ames had a project where they were hauling a so-called spaceship, but it was just a dummy, up and then letting it drop. I was an instrumentation engineer, so I designed an accelerometer to measure when it hit the ground, what the deceleration was like. It was a little instrument that would make that measurement.

[Assistant] Who were you working with at that time? Do you remember who your boss was?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I wanted to learn technical things. I wanted to have a good, steady job. That’s primary.

[Assistant] You started, you said, at Ames in 1948. Tell us what you did on your first job and your first task when you were out there.

[User] My first job that I recall was Ames had a project where they were hauling a so-called spaceship, but it was just a dummy, up and then letting it drop. I was an instrumentation engineer, so I designed an accelerometer to measure when it hit the ground, what the deceleration was like. It was a little instrument that would make that measurement.

[Assistant] Who were you working with at that time? Do you remember who your boss was?

[User] Sure. His name was Taft Wrathall, and I worked with Rudy Schubert [phonetic], and Howard [W.] Kirschbaum was the head of the group; it was instrumentation. Taft was the assistant.

[Assistant] In ’48, Ames was still pretty new at that time. I think in 1940, I believe, was when it opened up.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] My first job that I recall was Ames had a project where they were hauling a so-called spaceship, but it was just a dummy, up and then letting it drop. I was an instrumentation engineer, so I designed an accelerometer to measure when it hit the ground, what the deceleration was like. It was a little instrument that would make that measurement.

[Assistant] Who were you working with at that time? Do you remember who your boss was?

[User] Sure. His name was Taft Wrathall, and I worked with Rudy Schubert [phonetic], and Howard [W.] Kirschbaum was the head of the group; it was instrumentation. Taft was the assistant.

[Assistant] In ’48, Ames was still pretty new at that time. I think in 1940, I believe, was when it opened up.

[User] It was an established facility, and they had wind tunnels. You’d get awakened in the middle of the night by this blast because they took so much power that you couldn’t run them during the day—they had to run them at night. You’d hear, out of the clear sky, “Whoo...” That was the 40 x 80 Wind Tunnel, which is the big one. It’s still around, I’m sure.

[Assistant] Did you live close by?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Sure. His name was Taft Wrathall, and I worked with Rudy Schubert [phonetic], and Howard [W.] Kirschbaum was the head of the group; it was instrumentation. Taft was the assistant.

[Assistant] In ’48, Ames was still pretty new at that time. I think in 1940, I believe, was when it opened up.

[User] It was an established facility, and they had wind tunnels. You’d get awakened in the middle of the night by this blast because they took so much power that you couldn’t run them during the day—they had to run them at night. You’d hear, out of the clear sky, “Whoo...” That was the 40 x 80 Wind Tunnel, which is the big one. It’s still around, I’m sure.

[Assistant] Did you live close by?

[User] Yes. I was just married at that point, and so we lived not far away.

[Assistant] Did they have housing for you out at the laboratory, or did you live outside the gate, out that way?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was an established facility, and they had wind tunnels. You’d get awakened in the middle of the night by this blast because they took so much power that you couldn’t run them during the day—they had to run them at night. You’d hear, out of the clear sky, “Whoo...” That was the 40 x 80 Wind Tunnel, which is the big one. It’s still around, I’m sure.

[Assistant] Did you live close by?

[User] Yes. I was just married at that point, and so we lived not far away.

[Assistant] Did they have housing for you out at the laboratory, or did you live outside the gate, out that way?

[User] Right.

[Assistant] How long were you in the instrumentation division?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. I was just married at that point, and so we lived not far away.

[Assistant] Did they have housing for you out at the laboratory, or did you live outside the gate, out that way?

[User] Right.

[Assistant] How long were you in the instrumentation division?

[User] All the time I was there, and that was two years.

[Assistant] Can you tell me a little more about you said you had the spaceship, but not really a spaceship?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Right.

[Assistant] How long were you in the instrumentation division?

[User] All the time I was there, and that was two years.

[Assistant] Can you tell me a little more about you said you had the spaceship, but not really a spaceship?

[User] That was a small project. My other project, which I had probably for about a year, involved an analog computer. In those days, there were propeller-driven aircraft, and ice would build up on the propeller. They had heaters, so they had to measure what the most efficient cycles of heating were to get the ice to melt off of the airplane propellers. That had commercial applications. When I said it was a computer, analog computer, they called it the glass monster. It was on big sheets of clear plastic, and we had all the electric circuitry, you drilled holes in it and the circuitry was all laid out so you could see it. That was a sizable project.

[Assistant] Did you only use one type of propeller, or did you have different ones that you used?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] All the time I was there, and that was two years.

[Assistant] Can you tell me a little more about you said you had the spaceship, but not really a spaceship?

[User] That was a small project. My other project, which I had probably for about a year, involved an analog computer. In those days, there were propeller-driven aircraft, and ice would build up on the propeller. They had heaters, so they had to measure what the most efficient cycles of heating were to get the ice to melt off of the airplane propellers. That had commercial applications. When I said it was a computer, analog computer, they called it the glass monster. It was on big sheets of clear plastic, and we had all the electric circuitry, you drilled holes in it and the circuitry was all laid out so you could see it. That was a sizable project.

[Assistant] Did you only use one type of propeller, or did you have different ones that you used?

[User] No, it was a generic propeller, I think you might say. We were under contract to the flight research group, and they were the ones that wanted this information, so they had us do this job.

[Assistant] Were you working a lot at night?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That was a small project. My other project, which I had probably for about a year, involved an analog computer. In those days, there were propeller-driven aircraft, and ice would build up on the propeller. They had heaters, so they had to measure what the most efficient cycles of heating were to get the ice to melt off of the airplane propellers. That had commercial applications. When I said it was a computer, analog computer, they called it the glass monster. It was on big sheets of clear plastic, and we had all the electric circuitry, you drilled holes in it and the circuitry was all laid out so you could see it. That was a sizable project.

[Assistant] Did you only use one type of propeller, or did you have different ones that you used?

[User] No, it was a generic propeller, I think you might say. We were under contract to the flight research group, and they were the ones that wanted this information, so they had us do this job.

[Assistant] Were you working a lot at night?

[User] No.

[Assistant] You had the day shift, pretty much, as a junior engineer?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, it was a generic propeller, I think you might say. We were under contract to the flight research group, and they were the ones that wanted this information, so they had us do this job.

[Assistant] Were you working a lot at night?

[User] No.

[Assistant] You had the day shift, pretty much, as a junior engineer?

[User] I never worked at night.

[Assistant] That was a good thing.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No.

[Assistant] You had the day shift, pretty much, as a junior engineer?

[User] I never worked at night.

[Assistant] That was a good thing.

[User] Right. I had a roommate who was in the 40 x 80, and he did some night work.

[Assistant] Why did the project take you a year? Why did it take so long? Did you finish the project before you left?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I never worked at night.

[Assistant] That was a good thing.

[User] Right. I had a roommate who was in the 40 x 80, and he did some night work.

[Assistant] Why did the project take you a year? Why did it take so long? Did you finish the project before you left?

[User] You had to build the system and then, I don’t think anything had been done like this before, and we’d get requests for data, data on certain tests, from flight research, and then give them the data.

[Assistant] Was it a constant project every day that you worked on, or did you help design it as well?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Right. I had a roommate who was in the 40 x 80, and he did some night work.

[Assistant] Why did the project take you a year? Why did it take so long? Did you finish the project before you left?

[User] You had to build the system and then, I don’t think anything had been done like this before, and we’d get requests for data, data on certain tests, from flight research, and then give them the data.

[Assistant] Was it a constant project every day that you worked on, or did you help design it as well?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Where were you housed? What area at the Center? Were you near the big wind tunnels?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] You had to build the system and then, I don’t think anything had been done like this before, and we’d get requests for data, data on certain tests, from flight research, and then give them the data.

[Assistant] Was it a constant project every day that you worked on, or did you help design it as well?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Where were you housed? What area at the Center? Were you near the big wind tunnels?

[User] No. That’s a long time ago—I couldn’t tell you the layout. We were closer to the entrance than the 40 x 80. Most of the wind tunnels were towards the rear, and the engineering stuff was closer to the entrance.

[Assistant] Were there new people coming in those two years that you were there? Were there lots of new people?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Where were you housed? What area at the Center? Were you near the big wind tunnels?

[User] No. That’s a long time ago—I couldn’t tell you the layout. We were closer to the entrance than the 40 x 80. Most of the wind tunnels were towards the rear, and the engineering stuff was closer to the entrance.

[Assistant] Were there new people coming in those two years that you were there? Were there lots of new people?

[User] Not too many. Maybe four or five new engineers, something like that.

[Assistant] I guess it’s good that you got hired when you did. Did they start slacking off, some?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No. That’s a long time ago—I couldn’t tell you the layout. We were closer to the entrance than the 40 x 80. Most of the wind tunnels were towards the rear, and the engineering stuff was closer to the entrance.

[Assistant] Were there new people coming in those two years that you were there? Were there lots of new people?

[User] Not too many. Maybe four or five new engineers, something like that.

[Assistant] I guess it’s good that you got hired when you did. Did they start slacking off, some?

[User] This is before there was an electronics area around here, and so there really weren’t any other people hiring electrical engineers. Yes, it was good that I got in there because that’s about all.

[Assistant] You said you left—why did you decide to leave NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Not too many. Maybe four or five new engineers, something like that.

[Assistant] I guess it’s good that you got hired when you did. Did they start slacking off, some?

[User] This is before there was an electronics area around here, and so there really weren’t any other people hiring electrical engineers. Yes, it was good that I got in there because that’s about all.

[Assistant] You said you left—why did you decide to leave NACA?

[User] The field that I was in was servomechanisms. I had studied that in school. There was a fellow who was pretty prominent in the field, who worked for Sperry Gyroscope in New York. You’re young, you can move around, so I took a job with him.

[Assistant] You went from one coast to the other, didn’t you?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] This is before there was an electronics area around here, and so there really weren’t any other people hiring electrical engineers. Yes, it was good that I got in there because that’s about all.

[Assistant] You said you left—why did you decide to leave NACA?

[User] The field that I was in was servomechanisms. I had studied that in school. There was a fellow who was pretty prominent in the field, who worked for Sperry Gyroscope in New York. You’re young, you can move around, so I took a job with him.

[Assistant] You went from one coast to the other, didn’t you?

[User] Right. I’d never been east, and Carole [Stone] had been to New York, and she liked the east, and so it just sounded like something to do.

[Assistant] What part of New York was it in?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] The field that I was in was servomechanisms. I had studied that in school. There was a fellow who was pretty prominent in the field, who worked for Sperry Gyroscope in New York. You’re young, you can move around, so I took a job with him.

[Assistant] You went from one coast to the other, didn’t you?

[User] Right. I’d never been east, and Carole [Stone] had been to New York, and she liked the east, and so it just sounded like something to do.

[Assistant] What part of New York was it in?

[User] On Long Island.

[Assistant] Right in the heart, okay. How long were you with Sperry?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Right. I’d never been east, and Carole [Stone] had been to New York, and she liked the east, and so it just sounded like something to do.

[Assistant] What part of New York was it in?

[User] On Long Island.

[Assistant] Right in the heart, okay. How long were you with Sperry?

[User] Two more years—well, no, four more years, but two years—I didn’t like New York. I couldn’t stand it. Sperry had a facility in Point Mugu—Point Mugu in Southern California, at Oxnard—they had Oxnard Air Force Base. I had been working on a missile program at Sperry in New York, and so, when I went west, I took the prototypes. They sent them out there, and then I was able to work on it out there. I got back to the West Coast. We lived for two years in Oxnard, then I took another job. Then, I went into sales and I was in electronic sales for several years. The electronics industry was growing at this time, and it was just springing up. Hewlett-Packard was the big one.

[Assistant] This is in the mid-1950s or late ‘50s, about that time period?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] On Long Island.

[Assistant] Right in the heart, okay. How long were you with Sperry?

[User] Two more years—well, no, four more years, but two years—I didn’t like New York. I couldn’t stand it. Sperry had a facility in Point Mugu—Point Mugu in Southern California, at Oxnard—they had Oxnard Air Force Base. I had been working on a missile program at Sperry in New York, and so, when I went west, I took the prototypes. They sent them out there, and then I was able to work on it out there. I got back to the West Coast. We lived for two years in Oxnard, then I took another job. Then, I went into sales and I was in electronic sales for several years. The electronics industry was growing at this time, and it was just springing up. Hewlett-Packard was the big one.

[Assistant] This is in the mid-1950s or late ‘50s, about that time period?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] You were still in the Palo Alto area, give or take? Or further south?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Two more years—well, no, four more years, but two years—I didn’t like New York. I couldn’t stand it. Sperry had a facility in Point Mugu—Point Mugu in Southern California, at Oxnard—they had Oxnard Air Force Base. I had been working on a missile program at Sperry in New York, and so, when I went west, I took the prototypes. They sent them out there, and then I was able to work on it out there. I got back to the West Coast. We lived for two years in Oxnard, then I took another job. Then, I went into sales and I was in electronic sales for several years. The electronics industry was growing at this time, and it was just springing up. Hewlett-Packard was the big one.

[Assistant] This is in the mid-1950s or late ‘50s, about that time period?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] You were still in the Palo Alto area, give or take? Or further south?

[User] After a couple of years, I took a job in selling. We were living in Los Angeles. I took another job, after two years, and we moved to Northern California. I was selling around the area, these were electronic things, and then I eventually started my own business and had that for about 30 years, my own selling business, manufacturer’s rep [representative], selling electronic items. Then, I retired.

[Assistant] That’s a lot of miles.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] You were still in the Palo Alto area, give or take? Or further south?

[User] After a couple of years, I took a job in selling. We were living in Los Angeles. I took another job, after two years, and we moved to Northern California. I was selling around the area, these were electronic things, and then I eventually started my own business and had that for about 30 years, my own selling business, manufacturer’s rep [representative], selling electronic items. Then, I retired.

[Assistant] That’s a lot of miles.

[User] Right, but it was fun.

[Assistant] Did you end up selling products to Ames or the contractors?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] After a couple of years, I took a job in selling. We were living in Los Angeles. I took another job, after two years, and we moved to Northern California. I was selling around the area, these were electronic things, and then I eventually started my own business and had that for about 30 years, my own selling business, manufacturer’s rep [representative], selling electronic items. Then, I retired.

[Assistant] That’s a lot of miles.

[User] Right, but it was fun.

[Assistant] Did you end up selling products to Ames or the contractors?

[User] No. Most of the products I was handling were in the microwave field. “Microwave” being not commercial, but mostly communications stuff.

[Assistant] Kind of like the telecommunications?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Right, but it was fun.

[Assistant] Did you end up selling products to Ames or the contractors?

[User] No. Most of the products I was handling were in the microwave field. “Microwave” being not commercial, but mostly communications stuff.

[Assistant] Kind of like the telecommunications?

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] That makes sense, all right. Do you have other memories or associations, working with the Ames group? I notice you have some clippings, there. Are there some things that you wanted to share with us?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No. Most of the products I was handling were in the microwave field. “Microwave” being not commercial, but mostly communications stuff.

[Assistant] Kind of like the telecommunications?

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] That makes sense, all right. Do you have other memories or associations, working with the Ames group? I notice you have some clippings, there. Are there some things that you wanted to share with us?

[User] I just clipped this article, it happened to be in the paper. I don’t think there was any questions that I had, but if you just want to know some recollections of things from Ames?

[Assistant] Sure, I’d love to.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] That makes sense, all right. Do you have other memories or associations, working with the Ames group? I notice you have some clippings, there. Are there some things that you wanted to share with us?

[User] I just clipped this article, it happened to be in the paper. I don’t think there was any questions that I had, but if you just want to know some recollections of things from Ames?

[Assistant] Sure, I’d love to.

[User] Mountain View and Palo Alto were little towns, small towns, and we’d go out and have lunch in those little towns. There was a large Hispanic population. We had a lot of Mexican food. You’ve got give me a little time to think about it.\n\n Some of the people that I worked with started their own companies. Harold Harrison started an electronics company and it became quite large, about 500 people. We stayed friends. John Dimeff was a physicist. Harry [J.] DeVoto was the artist, all the drawings and that sort of thing, but he also was a great artist.

[Assistant] Did you work with Harry on any of the designs for anything that you worked on?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I just clipped this article, it happened to be in the paper. I don’t think there was any questions that I had, but if you just want to know some recollections of things from Ames?

[Assistant] Sure, I’d love to.

[User] Mountain View and Palo Alto were little towns, small towns, and we’d go out and have lunch in those little towns. There was a large Hispanic population. We had a lot of Mexican food. You’ve got give me a little time to think about it.\n\n Some of the people that I worked with started their own companies. Harold Harrison started an electronics company and it became quite large, about 500 people. We stayed friends. John Dimeff was a physicist. Harry [J.] DeVoto was the artist, all the drawings and that sort of thing, but he also was a great artist.

[Assistant] Did you work with Harry on any of the designs for anything that you worked on?

[User] I don’t think so.

[Assistant] You were telling me about Jack [John V.] Foster. You said he was associated with something in space?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Mountain View and Palo Alto were little towns, small towns, and we’d go out and have lunch in those little towns. There was a large Hispanic population. We had a lot of Mexican food. You’ve got give me a little time to think about it.\n\n Some of the people that I worked with started their own companies. Harold Harrison started an electronics company and it became quite large, about 500 people. We stayed friends. John Dimeff was a physicist. Harry [J.] DeVoto was the artist, all the drawings and that sort of thing, but he also was a great artist.

[Assistant] Did you work with Harry on any of the designs for anything that you worked on?

[User] I don’t think so.

[Assistant] You were telling me about Jack [John V.] Foster. You said he was associated with something in space?

[User] He had a project, it was a spaceship that went out from the Earth and it just kept going and going and going, and 15-20 years later, it was still sending back signals [Pioneer Project]. They have it back in the space museum back in Washington, DC. It was an amazing program. It didn’t get much publicity, but here it was, after 30 years in one direction, sending signals back. That’s pretty amazing.

[Assistant] Now, so many of us think that’s a common thing, but it certainly wasn’t common back when you were out there.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t think so.

[Assistant] You were telling me about Jack [John V.] Foster. You said he was associated with something in space?

[User] He had a project, it was a spaceship that went out from the Earth and it just kept going and going and going, and 15-20 years later, it was still sending back signals [Pioneer Project]. They have it back in the space museum back in Washington, DC. It was an amazing program. It didn’t get much publicity, but here it was, after 30 years in one direction, sending signals back. That’s pretty amazing.

[Assistant] Now, so many of us think that’s a common thing, but it certainly wasn’t common back when you were out there.

[User] No.

[Assistant] You were telling me about Palo Alto and Mountain View when they were a small town. Was it a good place to live? Mountain View?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] He had a project, it was a spaceship that went out from the Earth and it just kept going and going and going, and 15-20 years later, it was still sending back signals [Pioneer Project]. They have it back in the space museum back in Washington, DC. It was an amazing program. It didn’t get much publicity, but here it was, after 30 years in one direction, sending signals back. That’s pretty amazing.

[Assistant] Now, so many of us think that’s a common thing, but it certainly wasn’t common back when you were out there.

[User] No.

[Assistant] You were telling me about Palo Alto and Mountain View when they were a small town. Was it a good place to live? Mountain View?

[User] Absolutely.

[Assistant] It’s changed a lot, since you first lived in Mountain View?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No.

[Assistant] You were telling me about Palo Alto and Mountain View when they were a small town. Was it a good place to live? Mountain View?

[User] Absolutely.

[Assistant] It’s changed a lot, since you first lived in Mountain View?

[User] Sure. Lots of people, now. There weren’t many. There was maybe two or three restaurants in Mountain View, and now there’s probably 50. Palo Alto’s the same way. There just weren’t people.

[Assistant] When you came from University of Washington down here, did you stay in a house, like a rooming, board house?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Absolutely.

[Assistant] It’s changed a lot, since you first lived in Mountain View?

[User] Sure. Lots of people, now. There weren’t many. There was maybe two or three restaurants in Mountain View, and now there’s probably 50. Palo Alto’s the same way. There just weren’t people.

[Assistant] When you came from University of Washington down here, did you stay in a house, like a rooming, board house?

[User] I roomed with another fellow and we had a room in somebody’s home, yes. His name was Merritt Oldacre [phonetic], and he was in the 40 x 80 Wind Tunnel.

[Assistant] He’s the one that had to work at night, you were telling me.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Sure. Lots of people, now. There weren’t many. There was maybe two or three restaurants in Mountain View, and now there’s probably 50. Palo Alto’s the same way. There just weren’t people.

[Assistant] When you came from University of Washington down here, did you stay in a house, like a rooming, board house?

[User] I roomed with another fellow and we had a room in somebody’s home, yes. His name was Merritt Oldacre [phonetic], and he was in the 40 x 80 Wind Tunnel.

[Assistant] He’s the one that had to work at night, you were telling me.

[User] He had some. When we both applied for work, we met each other, and we said, “What about getting a room together,” and we did, a couple of years.

[Assistant] Did you ride a bicycle to work or did one of you have a car? Do you remember how you got to work?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I roomed with another fellow and we had a room in somebody’s home, yes. His name was Merritt Oldacre [phonetic], and he was in the 40 x 80 Wind Tunnel.

[Assistant] He’s the one that had to work at night, you were telling me.

[User] He had some. When we both applied for work, we met each other, and we said, “What about getting a room together,” and we did, a couple of years.

[Assistant] Did you ride a bicycle to work or did one of you have a car? Do you remember how you got to work?

[User] We probably had a ride pool.

[Assistant] That would be good—that’s a pretty long walk.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] He had some. When we both applied for work, we met each other, and we said, “What about getting a room together,” and we did, a couple of years.

[Assistant] Did you ride a bicycle to work or did one of you have a car? Do you remember how you got to work?

[User] We probably had a ride pool.

[Assistant] That would be good—that’s a pretty long walk.

[User] Yes, I think that’s what we had. I wish I had more to tell you, but as you get older, your memory fades.

[Assistant] Sure, and so much was changing, then. Was that considered a new field of what you were working on when you came to work at Ames as an electrical engineer? You mentioned you were working with the glass monster. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] We probably had a ride pool.

[Assistant] That would be good—that’s a pretty long walk.

[User] Yes, I think that’s what we had. I wish I had more to tell you, but as you get older, your memory fades.

[Assistant] Sure, and so much was changing, then. Was that considered a new field of what you were working on when you came to work at Ames as an electrical engineer? You mentioned you were working with the glass monster. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

[User] There weren’t any computers, per se. Nothing. This was just a machine that would sort of simulate what you were trying to get information on. You built a machine that simulated it, and it’d give you the answers.

[Assistant] Had you worked with any type of those computers at the university, or was this the first one that you had worked with?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, I think that’s what we had. I wish I had more to tell you, but as you get older, your memory fades.

[Assistant] Sure, and so much was changing, then. Was that considered a new field of what you were working on when you came to work at Ames as an electrical engineer? You mentioned you were working with the glass monster. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

[User] There weren’t any computers, per se. Nothing. This was just a machine that would sort of simulate what you were trying to get information on. You built a machine that simulated it, and it’d give you the answers.

[Assistant] Had you worked with any type of those computers at the university, or was this the first one that you had worked with?

[User] No, I didn’t work on any university.

[Assistant]
It was new for you, that’s good. Did you have something you want to ask? I think Sandra has a question for you.

Did they provide any training classes for you when you first got here that you remember?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] There weren’t any computers, per se. Nothing. This was just a machine that would sort of simulate what you were trying to get information on. You built a machine that simulated it, and it’d give you the answers.

[Assistant] Had you worked with any type of those computers at the university, or was this the first one that you had worked with?

[User] No, I didn’t work on any university.

[Assistant]
It was new for you, that’s good. Did you have something you want to ask? I think Sandra has a question for you.

Did they provide any training classes for you when you first got here that you remember?

[User] No, no training classes.

[Assistant] You don’t remember going to any kind of formalized training, and was the idea that you were learning from the men above you, and they served as your mentors as you learned to do these different projects?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I didn’t work on any university.

[Assistant]
It was new for you, that’s good. Did you have something you want to ask? I think Sandra has a question for you.

Did they provide any training classes for you when you first got here that you remember?

[User] No, no training classes.

[Assistant] You don’t remember going to any kind of formalized training, and was the idea that you were learning from the men above you, and they served as your mentors as you learned to do these different projects?

[User] No, I didn’t report to somebody who I learned things from. They just more or less doled out jobs, and we did what we could. It was a new field.

[Assistant] You mentioned the servomechanisms. A couple of other people have mentioned them, but do you want to explain what that is?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, no training classes.

[Assistant] You don’t remember going to any kind of formalized training, and was the idea that you were learning from the men above you, and they served as your mentors as you learned to do these different projects?

[User] No, I didn’t report to somebody who I learned things from. They just more or less doled out jobs, and we did what we could. It was a new field.

[Assistant] You mentioned the servomechanisms. A couple of other people have mentioned them, but do you want to explain what that is?

[User] Say you’ve got your arm, and you put things on your arm that make it so much stronger, a super arm. This would be you move your fingers and you’re moving very hard things to move. When you put a little pressure on something, it makes the machinery so that you can move something that’s very heavy. It tracks where you want to move it. It lightens your job, so you have to have sensors, measuring things, and then amplifiers telling—just putting out your arm like this, if you had a monstrously heavy arm and you could hardly support it, you would have a sensor telling you, you wanted to move but you couldn’t move it, so that sensor had to go into an amplifier, something with a big electric motor being run from the amplifier. If you moved it just a little ways, the motor would move exactly the same amount. Then, if you moved it a lot, the motor would move a lot. You could move something very heavy, very precisely.

[Assistant] I know they were working on that at NACA—did you have any involvement with the servomechanisms when you were with NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I didn’t report to somebody who I learned things from. They just more or less doled out jobs, and we did what we could. It was a new field.

[Assistant] You mentioned the servomechanisms. A couple of other people have mentioned them, but do you want to explain what that is?

[User] Say you’ve got your arm, and you put things on your arm that make it so much stronger, a super arm. This would be you move your fingers and you’re moving very hard things to move. When you put a little pressure on something, it makes the machinery so that you can move something that’s very heavy. It tracks where you want to move it. It lightens your job, so you have to have sensors, measuring things, and then amplifiers telling—just putting out your arm like this, if you had a monstrously heavy arm and you could hardly support it, you would have a sensor telling you, you wanted to move but you couldn’t move it, so that sensor had to go into an amplifier, something with a big electric motor being run from the amplifier. If you moved it just a little ways, the motor would move exactly the same amount. Then, if you moved it a lot, the motor would move a lot. You could move something very heavy, very precisely.

[Assistant] I know they were working on that at NACA—did you have any involvement with the servomechanisms when you were with NACA?

[User] I did some work in school on them, and so, that was the field I generally had interest in. As I say, when I went to Sperry, they had this missile program, but it used a lot of these principles of servos.

[Assistant] Were you aware of what they were doing at NACA with the servos?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Say you’ve got your arm, and you put things on your arm that make it so much stronger, a super arm. This would be you move your fingers and you’re moving very hard things to move. When you put a little pressure on something, it makes the machinery so that you can move something that’s very heavy. It tracks where you want to move it. It lightens your job, so you have to have sensors, measuring things, and then amplifiers telling—just putting out your arm like this, if you had a monstrously heavy arm and you could hardly support it, you would have a sensor telling you, you wanted to move but you couldn’t move it, so that sensor had to go into an amplifier, something with a big electric motor being run from the amplifier. If you moved it just a little ways, the motor would move exactly the same amount. Then, if you moved it a lot, the motor would move a lot. You could move something very heavy, very precisely.

[Assistant] I know they were working on that at NACA—did you have any involvement with the servomechanisms when you were with NACA?

[User] I did some work in school on them, and so, that was the field I generally had interest in. As I say, when I went to Sperry, they had this missile program, but it used a lot of these principles of servos.

[Assistant] Were you aware of what they were doing at NACA with the servos?

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] You wanted to move on from NACA at that point, okay.\n\n They were having inspections, I think, every three years at the different Centers. They would go from Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and Ames and Lewis [Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, now Glenn Research Center]. Do you remember any of those, like, in those couple of years you were there?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I did some work in school on them, and so, that was the field I generally had interest in. As I say, when I went to Sperry, they had this missile program, but it used a lot of these principles of servos.

[Assistant] Were you aware of what they were doing at NACA with the servos?

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] You wanted to move on from NACA at that point, okay.\n\n They were having inspections, I think, every three years at the different Centers. They would go from Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and Ames and Lewis [Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, now Glenn Research Center]. Do you remember any of those, like, in those couple of years you were there?

[User] What do you mean by an inspection?

[Assistant] Where people from the other Centers would come in and then everybody would present papers on what they were working on. Do you have any recollections of that happening?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] You wanted to move on from NACA at that point, okay.\n\n They were having inspections, I think, every three years at the different Centers. They would go from Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and Ames and Lewis [Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, now Glenn Research Center]. Do you remember any of those, like, in those couple of years you were there?

[User] What do you mean by an inspection?

[Assistant] Where people from the other Centers would come in and then everybody would present papers on what they were working on. Do you have any recollections of that happening?

[User] I don’t think they did any of that when I was there. I don’t recall it at all.

[Assistant] What about social activities onsite? Any athletic groups?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] What do you mean by an inspection?

[Assistant] Where people from the other Centers would come in and then everybody would present papers on what they were working on. Do you have any recollections of that happening?

[User] I don’t think they did any of that when I was there. I don’t recall it at all.

[Assistant] What about social activities onsite? Any athletic groups?

[User] On our own, if we had a ball team or played something like that. I don’t remember any ball teams.

[Assistant] How did you and your wife meet?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t think they did any of that when I was there. I don’t recall it at all.

[Assistant] What about social activities onsite? Any athletic groups?

[User] On our own, if we had a ball team or played something like that. I don’t remember any ball teams.

[Assistant] How did you and your wife meet?

[User]
We met on a blind date. She was with somebody else and I was with somebody else. Are you listening? <SPEAKER>C. Stone</SPEAKER>\n\n Yes.

Am I telling it right? <SPEAKER>C. Stone</SPEAKER>\n\n Yes.

Then our first three dates were on skis. We both liked to ski, and we did a lot of that during our married life, too, skiing. I don’t know—we hit it off.

[Assistant] I guess so, you’ve been together for how long?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] On our own, if we had a ball team or played something like that. I don’t remember any ball teams.

[Assistant] How did you and your wife meet?

[User]
We met on a blind date. She was with somebody else and I was with somebody else. Are you listening? <SPEAKER>C. Stone</SPEAKER>\n\n Yes.

Am I telling it right? <SPEAKER>C. Stone</SPEAKER>\n\n Yes.

Then our first three dates were on skis. We both liked to ski, and we did a lot of that during our married life, too, skiing. I don’t know—we hit it off.

[Assistant] I guess so, you’ve been together for how long?

[User] Almost 64 [years].

[Assistant] Long time. Lot of places.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User]
We met on a blind date. She was with somebody else and I was with somebody else. Are you listening? <SPEAKER>C. Stone</SPEAKER>\n\n Yes.

Am I telling it right? <SPEAKER>C. Stone</SPEAKER>\n\n Yes.

Then our first three dates were on skis. We both liked to ski, and we did a lot of that during our married life, too, skiing. I don’t know—we hit it off.

[Assistant] I guess so, you’ve been together for how long?

[User] Almost 64 [years].

[Assistant] Long time. Lot of places.

[User] Seems like only yesterday.

[Assistant]
I’m glad to hear that.

Were you involved at all in writing any reports on what you were working on? The NACA had the technical memorandums and the technical reports?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Almost 64 [years].

[Assistant] Long time. Lot of places.

[User] Seems like only yesterday.

[Assistant]
I’m glad to hear that.

Were you involved at all in writing any reports on what you were working on? The NACA had the technical memorandums and the technical reports?

[User] Yes, we had to write reports to the people, the flight research group that we were working for. The fellow’s name that I reported to, his name was—he had a strange name. His first name was Carr and his last name was Neel [Carr B. Neel].

[Assistant] Yes, we heard someone mention him today.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Seems like only yesterday.

[Assistant]
I’m glad to hear that.

Were you involved at all in writing any reports on what you were working on? The NACA had the technical memorandums and the technical reports?

[User] Yes, we had to write reports to the people, the flight research group that we were working for. The fellow’s name that I reported to, his name was—he had a strange name. His first name was Carr and his last name was Neel [Carr B. Neel].

[Assistant] Yes, we heard someone mention him today.

[User] Is he still around, do you think?

[Assistant]
Don’t think so.

I don’t think so.

What were the results? Did you get to finish that project before you left, the de-icing project you were working on?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, we had to write reports to the people, the flight research group that we were working for. The fellow’s name that I reported to, his name was—he had a strange name. His first name was Carr and his last name was Neel [Carr B. Neel].

[Assistant] Yes, we heard someone mention him today.

[User] Is he still around, do you think?

[Assistant]
Don’t think so.

I don’t think so.

What were the results? Did you get to finish that project before you left, the de-icing project you were working on?

[User] No, I think it was just a continual thing. It was something you keep making measurements on, you build them equipment, then you keep checking it out. I didn’t work with the engineer, per se. I built the equipment to make his measurements, but he was working with the aircraft manufacturers about de-icing on the propellers, and I didn’t get in, in that part of it.

[Assistant] When you were in school, did you have projects where you had to build different types of tools? What did you learn out of school, or what did you take in school that helped you be ready to do that job?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Is he still around, do you think?

[Assistant]
Don’t think so.

I don’t think so.

What were the results? Did you get to finish that project before you left, the de-icing project you were working on?

[User] No, I think it was just a continual thing. It was something you keep making measurements on, you build them equipment, then you keep checking it out. I didn’t work with the engineer, per se. I built the equipment to make his measurements, but he was working with the aircraft manufacturers about de-icing on the propellers, and I didn’t get in, in that part of it.

[Assistant] When you were in school, did you have projects where you had to build different types of tools? What did you learn out of school, or what did you take in school that helped you be ready to do that job?

[User] Courses in servomechanisms.

[Assistant] Your master’s, you said, was in electrical engineering as well?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I think it was just a continual thing. It was something you keep making measurements on, you build them equipment, then you keep checking it out. I didn’t work with the engineer, per se. I built the equipment to make his measurements, but he was working with the aircraft manufacturers about de-icing on the propellers, and I didn’t get in, in that part of it.

[Assistant] When you were in school, did you have projects where you had to build different types of tools? What did you learn out of school, or what did you take in school that helped you be ready to do that job?

[User] Courses in servomechanisms.

[Assistant] Your master’s, you said, was in electrical engineering as well?

[User] Yes. Right, solid state, it was just coming into its own, in those days. In fact, the term “solid state” wasn’t even around.

[Assistant] You were in a very evolving field for many years. I guess your sales job was always trying to catch up or be up to date with the latest products?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Courses in servomechanisms.

[Assistant] Your master’s, you said, was in electrical engineering as well?

[User] Yes. Right, solid state, it was just coming into its own, in those days. In fact, the term “solid state” wasn’t even around.

[Assistant] You were in a very evolving field for many years. I guess your sales job was always trying to catch up or be up to date with the latest products?

[User] As a representative, you represent different companies. You have maybe 10 companies you represent and you go in and talk to somebody, and he could buy something from two or three of the companies. You work with him and get him in liaison with the company.

[Assistant] Did your background as an engineer come in handy in that job?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. Right, solid state, it was just coming into its own, in those days. In fact, the term “solid state” wasn’t even around.

[Assistant] You were in a very evolving field for many years. I guess your sales job was always trying to catch up or be up to date with the latest products?

[User] As a representative, you represent different companies. You have maybe 10 companies you represent and you go in and talk to somebody, and he could buy something from two or three of the companies. You work with him and get him in liaison with the company.

[Assistant] Did your background as an engineer come in handy in that job?

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] Why did you choose Palo Alto to come back to, to live?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] As a representative, you represent different companies. You have maybe 10 companies you represent and you go in and talk to somebody, and he could buy something from two or three of the companies. You work with him and get him in liaison with the company.

[Assistant] Did your background as an engineer come in handy in that job?

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] Why did you choose Palo Alto to come back to, to live?

[User] Good place to live.

[Assistant] It is nice.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] Why did you choose Palo Alto to come back to, to live?

[User] Good place to live.

[Assistant] It is nice.

[User] When we came back, Hewlett-Packard and such companies similar, there were many—Ampex—just a flock of them. It was just a good place for an engineer to be. Just as an aside, I actually started in school in the journalism school, and I was going to be a sportswriter. But, I was in the Naval ROTC and the captain said, “Maybe you better get a little more technical in your course,” so I started taking some electrical engineering courses. It’s a strange twist, but I had to do something.

[Assistant] Yes, but it worked out well. If you were good with words, and it helped you be good with sales, so that’s helpful. Speaking of the products that you represented, is there some that come to mind as being kind of more memorable than others?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Good place to live.

[Assistant] It is nice.

[User] When we came back, Hewlett-Packard and such companies similar, there were many—Ampex—just a flock of them. It was just a good place for an engineer to be. Just as an aside, I actually started in school in the journalism school, and I was going to be a sportswriter. But, I was in the Naval ROTC and the captain said, “Maybe you better get a little more technical in your course,” so I started taking some electrical engineering courses. It’s a strange twist, but I had to do something.

[Assistant] Yes, but it worked out well. If you were good with words, and it helped you be good with sales, so that’s helpful. Speaking of the products that you represented, is there some that come to mind as being kind of more memorable than others?

[User] Yes. One of the companies, AirTEC [phonetic], built some special amplifiers that were used in the first Moon shot. They were selling to somebody else, who was putting them in the equipment.

[Assistant] There’s always the discussion of how small, but how powerful the products were, and then, of course, how not powerful they are compared to what we have now. The transistors, and those types of products that were used for the Apollo Program and the space program.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] When we came back, Hewlett-Packard and such companies similar, there were many—Ampex—just a flock of them. It was just a good place for an engineer to be. Just as an aside, I actually started in school in the journalism school, and I was going to be a sportswriter. But, I was in the Naval ROTC and the captain said, “Maybe you better get a little more technical in your course,” so I started taking some electrical engineering courses. It’s a strange twist, but I had to do something.

[Assistant] Yes, but it worked out well. If you were good with words, and it helped you be good with sales, so that’s helpful. Speaking of the products that you represented, is there some that come to mind as being kind of more memorable than others?

[User] Yes. One of the companies, AirTEC [phonetic], built some special amplifiers that were used in the first Moon shot. They were selling to somebody else, who was putting them in the equipment.

[Assistant] There’s always the discussion of how small, but how powerful the products were, and then, of course, how not powerful they are compared to what we have now. The transistors, and those types of products that were used for the Apollo Program and the space program.

[User] I’ll tell you something interesting—I was working at Ames and I received in the mail from one of the big companies in the east, a little package. It said, “This is called a transistor. Would you try it out?” They gave it to me because I was one of the junior engineers. They gave it out to try it out, and I couldn’t get it to work. I never thought it had any future.

[Assistant] It did, didn’t it?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. One of the companies, AirTEC [phonetic], built some special amplifiers that were used in the first Moon shot. They were selling to somebody else, who was putting them in the equipment.

[Assistant] There’s always the discussion of how small, but how powerful the products were, and then, of course, how not powerful they are compared to what we have now. The transistors, and those types of products that were used for the Apollo Program and the space program.

[User] I’ll tell you something interesting—I was working at Ames and I received in the mail from one of the big companies in the east, a little package. It said, “This is called a transistor. Would you try it out?” They gave it to me because I was one of the junior engineers. They gave it out to try it out, and I couldn’t get it to work. I never thought it had any future.

[Assistant] It did, didn’t it?

[User] It sure did.

[Assistant] Do you remember other products? Did you represent Hewlett-Packard as well?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I’ll tell you something interesting—I was working at Ames and I received in the mail from one of the big companies in the east, a little package. It said, “This is called a transistor. Would you try it out?” They gave it to me because I was one of the junior engineers. They gave it out to try it out, and I couldn’t get it to work. I never thought it had any future.

[Assistant] It did, didn’t it?

[User] It sure did.

[Assistant] Do you remember other products? Did you represent Hewlett-Packard as well?

[User] No, I didn’t. I sold to them. They were one of our biggest customers, yes.

[Assistant] That’s a good one to have.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It sure did.

[Assistant] Do you remember other products? Did you represent Hewlett-Packard as well?

[User] No, I didn’t. I sold to them. They were one of our biggest customers, yes.

[Assistant] That’s a good one to have.

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] Do you remember when Sputnik [Russian satellite] happened in ’57? Just the feeling in how the U.S. was moving more towards rocket and spaceflight at that point? Did you ever think about coming back to someplace like Ames, or work for NASA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I didn’t. I sold to them. They were one of our biggest customers, yes.

[Assistant] That’s a good one to have.

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] Do you remember when Sputnik [Russian satellite] happened in ’57? Just the feeling in how the U.S. was moving more towards rocket and spaceflight at that point? Did you ever think about coming back to someplace like Ames, or work for NASA?

[User] No. I think at that point, I was in sales, and I didn’t want to go back into engineering because sales was very interesting and had a lot more future to it.

[Assistant] Met lots of people in your job, didn’t you?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] Do you remember when Sputnik [Russian satellite] happened in ’57? Just the feeling in how the U.S. was moving more towards rocket and spaceflight at that point? Did you ever think about coming back to someplace like Ames, or work for NASA?

[User] No. I think at that point, I was in sales, and I didn’t want to go back into engineering because sales was very interesting and had a lot more future to it.

[Assistant] Met lots of people in your job, didn’t you?

[User] Oh, boy, I’ll say.

[Assistant] Some of the people that you worked with, you said they had started their own businesses. Did you have dealings with them, or did they have a business that you could sell to?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No. I think at that point, I was in sales, and I didn’t want to go back into engineering because sales was very interesting and had a lot more future to it.

[Assistant] Met lots of people in your job, didn’t you?

[User] Oh, boy, I’ll say.

[Assistant] Some of the people that you worked with, you said they had started their own businesses. Did you have dealings with them, or did they have a business that you could sell to?

[User] All those things. One of the fellows I knew at Ames was the one that started this business called AirTEC. I became his representative in the area, and it became my biggest seller. They were the ones making these amplifiers that went to the Moon shot. It all sort of ties together.

[Assistant]
It does, yes. Good friendships that started.

Are you involved with the alumni group for the NACA?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, boy, I’ll say.

[Assistant] Some of the people that you worked with, you said they had started their own businesses. Did you have dealings with them, or did they have a business that you could sell to?

[User] All those things. One of the fellows I knew at Ames was the one that started this business called AirTEC. I became his representative in the area, and it became my biggest seller. They were the ones making these amplifiers that went to the Moon shot. It all sort of ties together.

[Assistant]
It does, yes. Good friendships that started.

Are you involved with the alumni group for the NACA?

[User] No, but I’ll tell you one thing I did do that involved, I guess it may have been NASA by then. They had a group that took classes of young kids, maybe fourth, fifth, sixth graders, and Ames had a simulator. Does this ring a bell?

[Assistant] I know they had simulators.