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

[User] That’s what I’m out here watching now, the development of the 1.1. And there’s some big upgrades to the capsule itself that are being done to accommodate more payloads. I’m primarily overseeing and providing insight back to the CRS [Commercial Resupply Services] office for those big changes.

[Assistant] SpaceX is a very well-publicized company. They get a lot of media attention, and you also did some interviews with the media. Can you talk about that experience, because I don’t imagine you were trained for that as a NASA engineer. Especially when the second demonstration flight was flying [C2+], there was a lot more focus in the public eye.

[User] The first one or two on camera got me a little bit nervous, but our PAO [Public Affairs Office] folks coached me through what to typically do.

[Assistant] Was that the NASA PAO or from SpaceX?

[User] NASA PAO. All the interviews were set up through NASA PAO. I think they did a really good job giving me an idea of what I should talk about, what I shouldn’t talk about, plus I had a lot of coaching from Alan [J. Lindenmoyer, Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Manager] on where political hot points might be. NASA PAO also did a good job of not putting me in front of an antagonistic press audience that was going to ask a bunch of not-so-fun questions. They did a good job, I think. Overall I thought it was great experience.

[Assistant] On the first CRS flight, after they had demonstrated their capabilities under COTS, there was the engine failure. Was that a concern for you, or do you see that more as just a part of the development process for rockets?


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

[User] Determining the manifest I don’t do. That’s all done back in the Space Station Program Office. It’s driven by science priorities, and other Station resupply priorities. I am helping with some of the additional accommodations to be able to accommodate live animals, because it’s a change to the module design, new development work. They’re using some of my experience being able to develop projects to help with that activity, and adding it into the vehicle design.

[Assistant] That’s got to be fun.

[User] Yes. It’s nice working with the [NASA] Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] folks again, too. I originally started with NASA up at Ames Research Center, working with some of their live animal programs, and I’m getting connected back with a bunch of folks that I used to work with 15, 20 years ago.

[Assistant] They have lots of expertise in that field

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] That was something that you mentioned at the beginning of your first interview, looking at ways to get science samples back [from ISS]. Is that becoming more of a reality, that you can actually conduct those experiments, thanks to the COTS program?


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

[User] Yes. It’s nice working with the [NASA] Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] folks again, too. I originally started with NASA up at Ames Research Center, working with some of their live animal programs, and I’m getting connected back with a bunch of folks that I used to work with 15, 20 years ago.

[Assistant] They have lots of expertise in that field

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] That was something that you mentioned at the beginning of your first interview, looking at ways to get science samples back [from ISS]. Is that becoming more of a reality, that you can actually conduct those experiments, thanks to the COTS program?

[User] I think so. There was a gigantic program originally out of Ames to build a two-and-a-half meter centrifuge that I’d worked on, and a life sciences glove box, and animal and plant habitats. A lot of that got shut down because the [Space] Shuttle was being retired, and there was no way to be able to bring up all the supplies and the live specimens and bring them back down again. The Russian vehicles wouldn’t accommodate it, and there was no other return vehicles. Logistically, you just couldn’t support that big program.\n\n Now that we have SpaceX, there’s a capability to do at least a limited amount of that work again, be able to bring them up, and sometime in the future maybe to bring them back down again. It opens up that whole field of science again that had been kind of in hibernation for quite a while.

[Assistant] What other types of roles do you see opening up for commercial flight as a result of this effort, since that was one of the goals of COTS to open more commercial markets?


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

[User] I was. It’s funny, because my mother said, “Well, you always said you were going to work for NASA.” I said, “Yes, but I’m working at Ford.” She said, “Well, you got the NASA fellowship.” I said, “Yes, that’s true.” So I thought I was resigned. Okay, I had the NASA fellowship. Dr. Chopra was very critical in getting that. I had a project that I was working on and he thought that one of the research scientists out at Ames [Research Center, Moffett Field, California] would be interested and would sponsor me for the fellowship. His name was Khanh Nguyen. He was out at NASA Ames for a long time. I think he subsequently left, but it was because of him and working with Dr. Chopra. They supported me for three years on that fellowship. It was very nice because they sponsored travel out to NASA Ames, and I could present my project and talk to Khanh and get advice. It was a very good three years. I think it was at the tail end of the PhD phase of me being at University of Maryland.

[Assistant] Did you get a chance to work at Ames as a fellow?

[User] No. The NASA fellowship is a GSRP. Graduate Student Research Program I think is what it was called. You would get a NASA fellowship through the program. So I never got a chance to work out at NASA Ames. I worked with one of the research scientists, but never out there. Instead of going to a NASA Center after graduate school I ended up going out to Ford. Dr. Chopra, I don’t know if he was happy about that, but it was a good thing to do, [in] hindsight.

[Assistant] Well, I’m sure he’s pretty proud of you now.

[User] Yes. It’s a good way to pay back a great adviser, is to do well.

[Assistant] Tell me how you found out that NASA was selecting a new group of astronauts in 2009.


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

[User] It is. It is. So it’s another level.

[Assistant] Are there any challenges that you think you’ve encountered since you’ve come to work for the agency?

[User] Challenges as far as personal?

[Assistant] Personal challenges or work on the program.

[User] It’s interesting, because I think for me the biggest challenge was that when I came here my mother had passed away. I think the start of everything was so difficult because of that. So having to go through that and work through it for so many months it seems. It’s a challenge trying to get your work done and not focus on that. I think things may have started out a little interesting, but time heals all wounds. As time goes by you come back to your normal self and you start doing things as you normally would. So things become normal, which is nice. So I think that was probably, for me, that was the biggest challenge I think I’ve had since being selected. I thought it would be oh, it’s just a couple months, I’ll be back to normal. It takes a little longer than just a couple months. Realizing that is half the battle. Everything’s normal now. You know what I mean? I don’t know if that makes sense. But things begin to normalize and you feel like yourself and you can do things as you normally would. So it’s worked out pretty well.

[Assistant] Sounds like family is very important.


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

[User] Let's forget about chronology.

[Assistant] Absolutely.

[User] We had been there eight months, and hadn't had any accidents, and Jackie came home with that information. Are you familiar with the story of how long she tried to get the Army Air Corps to consider it?

[Assistant] Yes.

[User] I think it was General [Henry H. "Hap"] Arnold who suggested she try England to prove that American women could indeed handle military aircraft. So she went home with our record and got things going, and there was controversy whether or not the group—you probably know about that. But those of us who stayed felt really important. It's hard to explain in the year 2000 how wonderful it was to be considered valuable and useful for things other than housewifery and motherhood.\n\n Things just come back to me piecemeal. Anyone in uniform was treated with the greatest deference. At one time we had a rush order to get aircraft to Scotland and for, oh, it seemed forever, but probably only a couple of weeks, we'd taken aircraft up, come back on the night train, and we could usually sleep in the baggage car, but not always. People would move over and sit in the aisles so we could lie down. One time I slept in the aisle with my head on my parachute. When I woke up there was a blanket over me, which was very nice.\n\n Now, before I went off on that tangent, where were we? [Laughter]

[Assistant] Well, part of we were talking about was the planes that you were flying, and had asked you if you felt like you were in danger with those flights. How long were your flights when you would take—were you gone for days or weeks?


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

[User] No. They were pretty short. We were sometimes gone for days because of the weather, but the flights themselves, I had a lot of twenty-minute flights. England is a fairly small island, England and Scotland. We had, I think, only two pools in Scotland, one at Prestwick and one at Lauseymouth [phonetic] on the very northern rim of Scotland. It was rare that they had good weather. We flew with a difficult ceiling. Can't remember, it was certainly under 1,500 feet, which isn't much in bad weather. But that was so we would not interfere with operations. We also flew without radio contact of any sort for the same reasons, so we wouldn't interfere with combat operations.

[Assistant] Were you solo when you flew, or were you flying with others?

[User] No, always solo. In the larger aircraft, now, a lot of these were—think of the year, in the early forties, they were pretty antiquated early aircraft. When you needed more than one pair of hands to fly it, an air cadet, these were schoolboys about fifteen, who came to fly with us. If you were flying up here, the crank to do the landing gear down was in the back, you had a cadet with you. But usually it was alone.

[Assistant] They were fifteen. What age were you?

[User] I was twenty-four.

[Assistant] In a new country, doing a new job, it's quite an adventure.


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

[User] No, always solo. In the larger aircraft, now, a lot of these were—think of the year, in the early forties, they were pretty antiquated early aircraft. When you needed more than one pair of hands to fly it, an air cadet, these were schoolboys about fifteen, who came to fly with us. If you were flying up here, the crank to do the landing gear down was in the back, you had a cadet with you. But usually it was alone.

[Assistant] They were fifteen. What age were you?

[User] I was twenty-four.

[Assistant] In a new country, doing a new job, it's quite an adventure.

[User] It was a great adventure. I was homesick at first. See, I'd learned to fly in the big broad open spaces of California. England was not only a repetitive-looking country, but there was nothing except the railroad tracks to identify, really, and, of course, mountains, but the midlands in southern England. You could usually tell where you were by the coastline. But many of us, maybe not, well, many won't admit to being lost, but I was lost several times.

[Assistant] You mentioned your first stay there, they fitted you for uniforms. What other benefits did you get from this job, other than your uniforms? Were you paid much of a salary?


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

[User] I was twenty-four.

[Assistant] In a new country, doing a new job, it's quite an adventure.

[User] It was a great adventure. I was homesick at first. See, I'd learned to fly in the big broad open spaces of California. England was not only a repetitive-looking country, but there was nothing except the railroad tracks to identify, really, and, of course, mountains, but the midlands in southern England. You could usually tell where you were by the coastline. But many of us, maybe not, well, many won't admit to being lost, but I was lost several times.

[Assistant] You mentioned your first stay there, they fitted you for uniforms. What other benefits did you get from this job, other than your uniforms? Were you paid much of a salary?

[User] No. It seems to me it was three hundred a month. I can get you the exact figures, because I have them in my memento box at home.

[Assistant] Where did you stay? Did you have quarters that were assigned for the twenty-five of you?


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

[User] No. It seems to me it was three hundred a month. I can get you the exact figures, because I have them in my memento box at home.

[Assistant] Where did you stay? Did you have quarters that were assigned for the twenty-five of you?

[User] No, no. England was caught with its trousers down when the war started. We slept—all the civilians in England reported how many rooms they had in their house and how many people were living there. Anyone who had a spare room or two took a service person. I lived with a variety of families. The first one was very suspicious. They thought that the American girls were either gold-diggers or movie stars. [Laughter] We became very fond of each other, actually. But food was rationed and they did their best to feed us well.\n\n I left out a part of our training and a very vital part. After leaving Headquarters White Balsam, I went to Luton in Bedfordshire, where they made Churchill tanks. So if ever the weather was not bad, they lit smudge pot-type things to make fog, so the Germans wouldn't know where to bomb a tank factory. So our weather was consistently bad. You could fly, but it seemed impossible if you'd flown in clear weather. But you'd be surprised how soon you get used to flying in mist and haze.\n\n Each new person had to make twenty navigational flights in little open-cockpit aircraft. We were given a chit in the morning, which had four or five destinations. You were to find that and get a signature, go to the next one and come back. That was a real baptism of fire, I can tell you.

[Assistant] Your home base, was it still Bristol?

[User] No. We were based in Luton, in Bedfordshire, which was, I suppose a training place for new pilots, because at that time ATA [Air Transport Auxiliary] was not training pilots. Later on it was. But we were all people who had flown before.

[Assistant] Your life was so busy at that time. Did they ever give you a day off?


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

[User] No. We were based in Luton, in Bedfordshire, which was, I suppose a training place for new pilots, because at that time ATA [Air Transport Auxiliary] was not training pilots. Later on it was. But we were all people who had flown before.

[Assistant] Your life was so busy at that time. Did they ever give you a day off?

[User] Yes. Our days off were staggered. They were never the same. But they were two days in succession every so many days. Most of us gravitated to London, to the American Red Cross Club after it opened, because it was possible to get a Coca-Cola and a hamburger there. [Laughter]

[Assistant] That helped to feel like home, I guess, to be there.

[User] Yes, it did. And a hot bath. Fuel was rationed, and always wherever you were billeted, which was the phrase covering wherever you were boarded with a civilian family, baths were once a week, and hot water came out of a little gas thing which was lit at the bottom, heated the water. Indoor temperatures were in the fifties. It was always cold.\n\n Emily and I, the gal from New York, both got chill blades, because you're eager to succeed, forget about wet feet and get cold. I'd never heard of chill blades, but your toes swell up. It's kind of a pre-frost bite. They split and it's hard to get over. But we learned to take care of our feet.

[Assistant] How long were you in England?


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

[User] Yes, it did. And a hot bath. Fuel was rationed, and always wherever you were billeted, which was the phrase covering wherever you were boarded with a civilian family, baths were once a week, and hot water came out of a little gas thing which was lit at the bottom, heated the water. Indoor temperatures were in the fifties. It was always cold.\n\n Emily and I, the gal from New York, both got chill blades, because you're eager to succeed, forget about wet feet and get cold. I'd never heard of chill blades, but your toes swell up. It's kind of a pre-frost bite. They split and it's hard to get over. But we learned to take care of our feet.

[Assistant] How long were you in England?

[User] Eight years.

[Assistant] Goodness.

[User] I married an Englishman and my first two children were born there.

[Assistant] How did you meet your husband?


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

[User] Eight years.

[Assistant] Goodness.

[User] I married an Englishman and my first two children were born there.

[Assistant] How did you meet your husband?

[User] I'm a little ashamed to admit I was a pick-up. [Laughter] We were in Shepherds, which is a pub, but it's in Mayfair, a very high-class pub. I was with someone else who outranked my husband considerably. But I had "U.S.A." on my shoulder. Peter simply came over and introduced himself and said he knew America well. I said, "Fine." It turned out, I found out later, he had been a boy at camp in Upstate New York one season. [Laughter]

[Assistant] Where was he from originally?


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

[User] I married an Englishman and my first two children were born there.

[Assistant] How did you meet your husband?

[User] I'm a little ashamed to admit I was a pick-up. [Laughter] We were in Shepherds, which is a pub, but it's in Mayfair, a very high-class pub. I was with someone else who outranked my husband considerably. But I had "U.S.A." on my shoulder. Peter simply came over and introduced himself and said he knew America well. I said, "Fine." It turned out, I found out later, he had been a boy at camp in Upstate New York one season. [Laughter]

[Assistant] Where was he from originally?

[User] He was English. He lived in London. He was in the British calvary and, of course, I was horse-happy, having ridden several different horses to school. And I fell for his spurs and his uniform.

[Assistant] Tell us, you were married then in England.


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

[User] I'm a little ashamed to admit I was a pick-up. [Laughter] We were in Shepherds, which is a pub, but it's in Mayfair, a very high-class pub. I was with someone else who outranked my husband considerably. But I had "U.S.A." on my shoulder. Peter simply came over and introduced himself and said he knew America well. I said, "Fine." It turned out, I found out later, he had been a boy at camp in Upstate New York one season. [Laughter]

[Assistant] Where was he from originally?

[User] He was English. He lived in London. He was in the British calvary and, of course, I was horse-happy, having ridden several different horses to school. And I fell for his spurs and his uniform.

[Assistant] Tell us, you were married then in England.

[User] We were.

[Assistant] You found time from your schedule and his schedule to have a ceremony. How did you do that and where was it?


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

[User] He was English. He lived in London. He was in the British calvary and, of course, I was horse-happy, having ridden several different horses to school. And I fell for his spurs and his uniform.

[Assistant] Tell us, you were married then in England.

[User] We were.

[Assistant] You found time from your schedule and his schedule to have a ceremony. How did you do that and where was it?

[User] It took a lot. It was in St. Barnabus Church in London, and it took a lot of arranging, but people from my pool and from his regiment were there. We had as much of a wedding as you could in those days. We were both in uniform, and I still have it. He's seventy-nine now and in foster care. He's in bad shape, having survived cancer. We talk every day. He's about ten minutes from me. I live in a retirement center in Portland [Oregon].

[Assistant] You mentioned you were there for eight years, and were you flying the whole time that you were there?


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

[User] We were.

[Assistant] You found time from your schedule and his schedule to have a ceremony. How did you do that and where was it?

[User] It took a lot. It was in St. Barnabus Church in London, and it took a lot of arranging, but people from my pool and from his regiment were there. We had as much of a wedding as you could in those days. We were both in uniform, and I still have it. He's seventy-nine now and in foster care. He's in bad shape, having survived cancer. We talk every day. He's about ten minutes from me. I live in a retirement center in Portland [Oregon].

[Assistant] You mentioned you were there for eight years, and were you flying the whole time that you were there?

[User] Oh, no.

[Assistant] At what point did you stop?


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

[User] It took a lot. It was in St. Barnabus Church in London, and it took a lot of arranging, but people from my pool and from his regiment were there. We had as much of a wedding as you could in those days. We were both in uniform, and I still have it. He's seventy-nine now and in foster care. He's in bad shape, having survived cancer. We talk every day. He's about ten minutes from me. I live in a retirement center in Portland [Oregon].

[Assistant] You mentioned you were there for eight years, and were you flying the whole time that you were there?

[User] Oh, no.

[Assistant] At what point did you stop?

[User] When I learned I was pregnant. It was not quite as possible to plan your family in those days. I didn't expect to be pregnant. Our first child is an M.D., and fifty-five. I think that's right.

[Assistant] Did you miss flying the airplanes after?


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

[User] Oh, no.

[Assistant] At what point did you stop?

[User] When I learned I was pregnant. It was not quite as possible to plan your family in those days. I didn't expect to be pregnant. Our first child is an M.D., and fifty-five. I think that's right.

[Assistant] Did you miss flying the airplanes after?

[User] Yes, missed terribly. I did some volunteering with ATA. I missed it a lot.\n\n This marriage was complex, and we came back to America in 1949 and we eventually landed in a university town. I went back to graduate school to study psychology to find out whether my husband or I was the crazy one. [Laughter] Found out we both needed to be a little more tolerant.\n\n After I retired from that second career, I was a clinical psychologist, I worked in hospitals, not on the television.

[Assistant] I think that's good. [Laughter]


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

[User] Do you know Arizona at all?

[Assistant] A little bit.

[User] And camp. It was a wonderful interlude in my life. So I did fly again. Then at one point I realized I was very close to a power line that I knew was there, and Alair had an accident that she could have avoided. So we decided we'd quit, and my children gave me a bicycle. [Laughter]\n\n We've kind of got off flying in England.

[Assistant] Well, but it's your career in aviation. I didn't expect an Ultralight, so that was a good adventure for you to share with us.

[User] It was called the Quicksilver MX, one of the earliest Ultralights. The four of us looked at several kinds and decided the Quicksilver was maybe the best. We have lots of wonderful snapshots of those days.

[Assistant] Well, quite a difference from the time that you sat out in your fields and watched the geese fly by in formation. Here you were flying as close to a bird as you could.


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

[User] Yes. Yes, particularly from my mother. She feigned illness, she raved and ranted, but my father, who was my stepfather—mother was the disciplinarian, and Dad really recognized an individual. Mom kept trying to hammer out of solid granite a little lady, and it just wasn't my speed.\n\n Yes, people called me a damned fool. However, have I mentioned the farmer I flew for, Elmer von Gom, the Dutchman? My passage to Montreal was delayed, and I was out of money, and he, dear man, loaned me several hundred dollars. Wasn't that great?

[Assistant] Yes.

[User] I paid him back the moment I got a salary. But not everybody called you an idiot. Some people understood.\n\n The ATA—oh, I'm glad I remembered this—was made up from people from, I believe, the number is eighteen different nations. At my pool alone, which was an all-women's pool, there was an Australian, a girl from Chile, one from Argentina, a Dane, I think two Czechs, a Norwegian and, of course, English girls. But that in itself was—I was a little country bumpkin, you see, from the corner of the state of Washington. And it was a wonderful experience, particularly the English women, couple of whom were titled, some whom already had children at home, and they had been wealthy and learned to fly as a sport.\n\n There was no upstaging. My commanding officer, Margo Windengore [phonetic], was decorated, had a very distinguished brother. But we were just all gals together, all accents. One of our members, Gray Stevenson, from Oklahoma, had a drawl. It was a great group.

[Assistant] At the time you were in England, and as you mentioned earlier, that Jackie Cochran came back, or came to America—

[User] Back to the United States.

[Assistant] —after about eight months to tell the United States of what the wonderful job that you were doing.


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

[User] I paid him back the moment I got a salary. But not everybody called you an idiot. Some people understood.\n\n The ATA—oh, I'm glad I remembered this—was made up from people from, I believe, the number is eighteen different nations. At my pool alone, which was an all-women's pool, there was an Australian, a girl from Chile, one from Argentina, a Dane, I think two Czechs, a Norwegian and, of course, English girls. But that in itself was—I was a little country bumpkin, you see, from the corner of the state of Washington. And it was a wonderful experience, particularly the English women, couple of whom were titled, some whom already had children at home, and they had been wealthy and learned to fly as a sport.\n\n There was no upstaging. My commanding officer, Margo Windengore [phonetic], was decorated, had a very distinguished brother. But we were just all gals together, all accents. One of our members, Gray Stevenson, from Oklahoma, had a drawl. It was a great group.

[Assistant] At the time you were in England, and as you mentioned earlier, that Jackie Cochran came back, or came to America—

[User] Back to the United States.

[Assistant] —after about eight months to tell the United States of what the wonderful job that you were doing.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Were you able to keep up with that news? Did you know that this is what she was trying to do?


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

[User] Back to the United States.

[Assistant] —after about eight months to tell the United States of what the wonderful job that you were doing.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Were you able to keep up with that news? Did you know that this is what she was trying to do?

[User] We knew about it, and we eventually, I forget how many months later, had an invitation from her, anyone who had gone with her to England, was, without question, a member of the WASP, if we wanted to come back, and five did. Everyone finished their contract, which was eighteen months, so all of us had a minimum of a year and a half of service in England. I can't remember all five, but do you want names?

[Assistant] How long was your service? You said a minimum of eighteen months, but how long did you actually spend in the ATA?


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Were you able to keep up with that news? Did you know that this is what she was trying to do?

[User] We knew about it, and we eventually, I forget how many months later, had an invitation from her, anyone who had gone with her to England, was, without question, a member of the WASP, if we wanted to come back, and five did. Everyone finished their contract, which was eighteen months, so all of us had a minimum of a year and a half of service in England. I can't remember all five, but do you want names?

[Assistant] How long was your service? You said a minimum of eighteen months, but how long did you actually spend in the ATA?

[User] I flew eighteen months. I started a second contract and became pregnant. I did volunteering after that without pay.

[Assistant] Now, your stay there caused you to be in England during the war.


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

[User] We knew about it, and we eventually, I forget how many months later, had an invitation from her, anyone who had gone with her to England, was, without question, a member of the WASP, if we wanted to come back, and five did. Everyone finished their contract, which was eighteen months, so all of us had a minimum of a year and a half of service in England. I can't remember all five, but do you want names?

[Assistant] How long was your service? You said a minimum of eighteen months, but how long did you actually spend in the ATA?

[User] I flew eighteen months. I started a second contract and became pregnant. I did volunteering after that without pay.

[Assistant] Now, your stay there caused you to be in England during the war.

[User] Oh, sure.

[Assistant] So you and your family endured those times, and so that must have been a bit harrowing for you there as well.


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

[User] Is our time up?

[Assistant] It's close to being finished. I did want to ask you one question, though. When I was talking to Dawn Seymour and she suggested that I give you a call, her comment to me was, "Without those girls with the ATA, the WASP wouldn't have been able to do what we were able to do."

[User] I think that's true.

[Assistant] I was wondering if you could share with us your feelings about the fact that you were such a pioneer in this and how it affected the rest of the women in aviation.

[User] It just never occurred to me. The impetus was, and it's the reason pilots from all over the world were drawn to England, to help the Royal Air Force, who were such a gallant lot and took such a terrible beating. By the time I stopped flying, a lot of the pilots looked eighteen, really, so young. I don't know where they got their courage, but night after night they were up there.\n\n Quite honestly, it never entered my head. I think most of us were so busy and we felt so useful. We were frightened to death by the war. I'm kind of ashamed of my hateful feelings about the Germans. I got over them. My maternal grandfather was German. I'm darned if I know how to respond to your question.

[Assistant] Well, I will tell you that so much of what we've read does point to the fact of the courage of the ATA made it easier for pilots, for female pilots, all the way down the line to those are now in the astronaut program that you serve as a role model for them. I'm also curious, do you have a chance to visit with any of the other ATAs?


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

[User] I’m glad to be here. I’m essentially retired, so I don’t have much of a schedule anymore.

[Assistant] Why don’t we begin by getting some background on you. Why don’t you tell us about your interest in aviation and aerospace when you were a child, how you developed that interest, maybe what sort of events or people sparked this interest.

[User] Well, it started—I guess actually it started when I was a child, but I don’t remember a point in time when I suddenly became interested in it. When I was a kid, I grew up in a very small town in Mississippi, and we didn’t have a big university or any high-tech industries or anything. We had a pretty good library, and I did a lot of reading when I was a kid. I read adventure stories. I also read science fiction, and I guess my first interest in space came through science fiction, some of which was absolutely fantasy-type stuff, and some of it was pretty realistic. I read some interpretations of some German science fiction, which was much more realistic than a lot of the other stuff.\n\n Also, I had a neighbor, his name was J.A. Glenn [phonetic], Joe Glenn. He was a P-38 fighter pilot in World War II, and when he’d come on leave, he was kind of the town hero. Since he lived next door, I could go visit with him, and he used to talk about flying and that sort of thing.\n\n Finally, when I got in school, I just kind [of] had a knack for math and physics and science and that sort of stuff, so I was interested in technical things. I don’t remember exactly when that happened, but all of that together, I guess, kind of led me to be interested in aviation.

[Assistant] You actually graduated from the U.S. Military Academy [West Point, New York] in ‘55.

[User] Right.

[Assistant] I notice that you elected to work with the Air Force rather than the Army. Can you tell us about that decision?


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

[User] Sure. You bet. That’s your job.

[Assistant] Tell us how this program was different for you than the one that you had just come from, and, of course, how it was similar.

[User] We were going to use the leftover Apollo hardware to essentially put in space the first temporary Space Station, so this was another big step forward. We were going to have some very sophisticated science on board. The solar physics observatory, the telescope to see the sun, was going, [and] it turned out [the things we learned] rewrote every chapter in every astronomy book on solar physics. This was a big deal.\n\n There were some very sophisticated medical experiments that were going to be run, [what would be the] long-term effects of weightlessness on the human body. These [experiments] were going to be very significant for moving on into longer trips into space.\n\n There were some very sensitive instruments for Earth resources, [with which] you could look down at the Earth and measure crop densities or see what the water content in the soil was and predict harvest rates and this sort of thing. So there were some very sophisticate Earth resources experiments. All of which [was] very exciting, so, you got over one disappointment and pressed on to the next big challenge.

[Assistant] Tell us what some of your first roles and responsibilities were when you got moved over to start working with Skylab.

[User] My assignment was the Earth resources equipment, and so I helped design—excuse me—I observed the design and put [in] the crew [requirements]. Again, I’m not an electrical engineer. I’m not an optics engineer. There were people doing that. But the crew interface, the human factors, the operational questions again were my responsibility, so I worked for quite some time on the Earth resources package of equipment that was going to go up.

[Assistant] I think you mentioned earlier you were named as a backup for Skylab III and IV. Did your role start to change then, and what kind of training did you receive?


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Could you give us the situation and how you began to prepare for that and then the length of time we’re talking about?

[User] Well, we were also the backup crew, so we immediately jumped in the simulators to see whether there was a reliable way that we could bring them back with the one set of thrusters not working properly. Basically Vance was the lead on that and came up with a wonderful procedure that management [said was] totally safe to do. So we were so clever as the backup crew that we worked ourselves out of a flight as the rescue crew. You really didn’t want to have to go rescue them. You really wanted to bring them back safely with all their equipment, so that was the right choice.

[Assistant] At what point in the program, your involvement in the Skylab Program, did you realize that your opportunity to be able to fly as part of an Apollo crew was gone?

[User] Well, as part of the Apollo crew, it was when we were assigned to Skylab.

[Assistant] I’m sorry. I meant Skylab.


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

[User] Well, we were also the backup crew, so we immediately jumped in the simulators to see whether there was a reliable way that we could bring them back with the one set of thrusters not working properly. Basically Vance was the lead on that and came up with a wonderful procedure that management [said was] totally safe to do. So we were so clever as the backup crew that we worked ourselves out of a flight as the rescue crew. You really didn’t want to have to go rescue them. You really wanted to bring them back safely with all their equipment, so that was the right choice.

[Assistant] At what point in the program, your involvement in the Skylab Program, did you realize that your opportunity to be able to fly as part of an Apollo crew was gone?

[User] Well, as part of the Apollo crew, it was when we were assigned to Skylab.

[Assistant] I’m sorry. I meant Skylab.

[User] In Skylab, [we had another great disappointment.] Washington makes these incredibly “wise” decisions—they decided never to launch the second Skylab. We were at a social gathering. I had a chance to talk to the Administrator and say, “You can’t do this. You can’t waste a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar piece of equipment and not go up and do the follow-on science that you can get with these incredible solar observatories.” The telescopes that we were using to observe the sun were absolutely rewriting the whole textbook on solar physics.\n\n Totally emotionless, he said, “That would delay the Shuttle by a year,” at which point I just sort of smiled and walked away. They had their criteria, and in their set of values, they made the right decision. In my set of values, they wasted a wonderful opportunity, but Headquarters being what Headquarters is, they make the decisions. You salute smartly and press on.

[Assistant] Did you have any involvement with bringing the Skylab down when they started to deorbit it?


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

[User] No, I didn’t really have anything to do with that mission, because by that time, we were involved in Shuttle.

[Assistant] How did they transition you over to the Shuttle area? Did they give you specific responsibilities at the beginning?

[User] I can’t remember just exactly what the very early responsibilities were. They just announced in a pilots’ meeting, “The following group of people will now be working on the Shuttle Project.” So, you get assignments accordingly.

[Assistant] Before we move on to the Shuttle, I meant to ask, there’s a couple of things that you did I thought were of interest that you might want to talk about. One was that you were with fourteen other astronauts when you participated in the food compatibility test for Skylab missions. You got to test the foods that were going up.

[User] Oh yes, yes.

[Assistant] Can you share with us what that was like and how they put that together for you?


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

[User] Oh, yes, the Spacelab was very well designed. We had had a fair amount of input with the Europeans who built it, and [it] worked out very nicely for us. We had no problems at all.

[Assistant] Tell us about the differences and the similarities of training for the Apollo flights that you did compared to training for a Shuttle flight.

[User] By the time we got to Shuttle, things were so much better known, because we knew what the physiological changes would be in the human body. We knew what all the mechanical problems [would be with] zero-G toilets and urinals in space and that sort of tomfoolery. How to handle washing your hands, and wringing out washrags so that water doesn’t float around, and food preparation. Many of the housekeeping tasks in Shuttle were well thought out, because we now had [experiences with these matters].\n\n Whereas in Apollo, we had to anticipate what things were going to be like. So the training didn’t quite have the glory [of the earlier programs]. Hey, it was exciting. I’m not downgrading it at all. But it didn’t have the sense of history, by the time we got to [the] Shuttle, that we had had in Apollo. But space is not routine, by any stretch of the imagination. But it was more manageable, because we had so much more data by that time.

[Assistant] How did the simulations compare to your launch?

[User] Oh, very, very [well]. The simulations in NASA are spectacularly accurate. With the motion-based simulators, you even get some of the visceral sensations, because they can move the machine around and give you the sense of onset of zero-Gs; you can’t hold it indefinitely, but we had flown hundreds of parabolas in the zero-G aircraft [KC-135], the so-called “vomit comet,” so you were really quite accustomed to those things.

[Assistant] After waiting so long, did you feel like you adapted to space well and felt like you hung for seven days?


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

[User] By the time we got to Shuttle, things were so much better known, because we knew what the physiological changes would be in the human body. We knew what all the mechanical problems [would be with] zero-G toilets and urinals in space and that sort of tomfoolery. How to handle washing your hands, and wringing out washrags so that water doesn’t float around, and food preparation. Many of the housekeeping tasks in Shuttle were well thought out, because we now had [experiences with these matters].\n\n Whereas in Apollo, we had to anticipate what things were going to be like. So the training didn’t quite have the glory [of the earlier programs]. Hey, it was exciting. I’m not downgrading it at all. But it didn’t have the sense of history, by the time we got to [the] Shuttle, that we had had in Apollo. But space is not routine, by any stretch of the imagination. But it was more manageable, because we had so much more data by that time.

[Assistant] How did the simulations compare to your launch?

[User] Oh, very, very [well]. The simulations in NASA are spectacularly accurate. With the motion-based simulators, you even get some of the visceral sensations, because they can move the machine around and give you the sense of onset of zero-Gs; you can’t hold it indefinitely, but we had flown hundreds of parabolas in the zero-G aircraft [KC-135], the so-called “vomit comet,” so you were really quite accustomed to those things.

[Assistant] After waiting so long, did you feel like you adapted to space well and felt like you hung for seven days?

[User] Yes, thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, yes, yes. No, it was a wonderful experience.

[Assistant] Are there some special anecdotes or some special memories of that flight that you’d like to share with us?


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

[User] We thoroughly enjoyed NASA. We thoroughly enjoyed the Houston area. There’s the ballet and the—what do you call the amphitheater in the park up there?

[Assistant] At Hermann Park?

[User] Yes, the outdoor theater there and, oh—and the opera season here. We thoroughly enjoyed Houston. But it always felt temporary. We were raised in the mountains, and [Houston is] flat. [Laughs] The skiing is not very good in Houston. So we thoroughly enjoyed the twenty years we were here, but we felt that it was temporary, that sometime when you retire, you’re going to go back to the mountains where the skiing is.

[Assistant] Well, we certainly have enjoyed hearing everything from you today. Is there any other aspect or area that you’d like to discuss or any other thoughts?

[User] I think you have brought up all the different areas. To me, this was as exciting as [Ferdinand de] Magellan’s trip around the world. I used to think as a kid, “Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to sail with Magellan? Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to sail with Captain [James] Cook?” Except in that little unpleasant thing in Hawaii where they [were] killed. And this was, to me, just as exciting as anything that I read about in history.\n\n [I] keep saying, “Oh, why was the Lord so good to get me into this thing?” I [feel] really privileged to be involved in these [exciting] things. I’ve had a chance to do [special] things, landing on aircraft carriers and flying into space and getting involved, intimately involved, in the preparations for the landing on the Moon. And I look back and think, “Oh, the Lord has been so good to me.” So I’m just grateful to have been involved in this.

[Assistant] Well, we thank you for sharing all this today.


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

[User] Because I had friends.

[Assistant] It was those relationships that you’ve talked about since the beginning.

[User] The relationships were everything. Everything was relationships.\n\n In the last portion of this interview, Mr. Walker is referring to photographs in his personal collection.\n\n This was what the old photo lab was. We didn’t have a secretary for a long time. Our secretary died of cancer. We finally got a secretary. My wife was in the computer division. On the way home from work that day, I told her, “Hey, we got a secretary.”\n\n She said, “What’s her name?”\n\n I said, “Grace Toddy.”\n\n She said, “You stay away from her.”\n\n That’s Grace Toddy, and that was Art Laufman our sound man. See, that was some—

[Assistant] Some of the personality coming out there.

[User] Some of the personality coming out.

[Assistant] Oh, that’s interesting. Is this the local paper?


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

[User] Some of the personality coming out.

[Assistant] Oh, that’s interesting. Is this the local paper?

[User] It was the Elyria [Ohio] paper, the Chronicle-Telegram. That was my private shop where I could modify and do things, make things work different. That’s the zero-g [gravity] group. This is where I did a lot of work for the British government and the German government. A lot of top-secret work was done there. Nobody knew about it except the director of the lab, the head of security, and then this group of people. The head of security, because he had to transport our film by courier to have it done all the time. That was a great bunch of guys. This was one of my co-ops [cooperative education student]. Really, really an outstanding co-op.\n\n That’s inside the Zero-G [Facility]. You’re 550 feet in the air, and I’m using one of my girls to help me. We were mounting cameras along this. I designed this thing to be able to photograph objects falling 500 feet. Actually, we could fire them from bottom up, photograph them going up. Then they would turn around and fall back down, and you’d get 10 seconds of zero-g time, until Houston shut us down. They said they wanted to do all this work on the [Space] Shuttle, and of course then they couldn’t get the Shuttle to fly. We were shut down for probably two years. The facility was shut down, from politics from Headquarters. We went back into business again. We would open it up and do work for the Department of Defense.\n\n Getting an award from one of the Directors. This was from the Director. I don’t know what this is. She’s from editorial. She worked for me in composing, she worked for me in the print shop, and that was my division chief, who was an artist at the time. This is my old—

[Assistant] Air Force group.

[User] Yes, that’s my [Korean] War II stuff. This was my photo class. You learned to study there.

[Assistant] I bet you did.


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

[User] Yes, that’s my [Korean] War II stuff. This was my photo class. You learned to study there.

[Assistant] I bet you did.

[User] Once a month, you had to do KP [kitchen patrol]. KP started at 2:00 in the morning, and you didn’t get off until 9:00 at night. Then they would tell you, “Wash back three times, and that’s what you’re going to do for the rest of your career.” Wash back can be if your mother dies and you go home for a funeral, if you get appendicitis and you’re in a hospital, or you fail one phase test—wash back three times.

[Assistant] It’s KP forever.

[User] Yes, and believe me, you studied. This group of guys studied like crazy.

[Assistant] Yes, because you couldn’t really control those other things, but you could control how much you learned.


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

[User] Once a month, you had to do KP [kitchen patrol]. KP started at 2:00 in the morning, and you didn’t get off until 9:00 at night. Then they would tell you, “Wash back three times, and that’s what you’re going to do for the rest of your career.” Wash back can be if your mother dies and you go home for a funeral, if you get appendicitis and you’re in a hospital, or you fail one phase test—wash back three times.

[Assistant] It’s KP forever.

[User] Yes, and believe me, you studied. This group of guys studied like crazy.

[Assistant] Yes, because you couldn’t really control those other things, but you could control how much you learned.

[User] I was in politics for several years, too. This was one of my co-op students. We were doing a job for the Navy on torpedoes. There’s Andy Stofan and his wife. This was the guy that took the job that I turned down, and he wound up as my deputy.\n\n This one here—my boss really hated this. It went in a little news [article] on the same page, at the same time. He got his recognition award for a federal executive order, and I was elected as chairman of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. His big point in time, and it was spoiled. Everybody in the lab said, “Boy Ernie, you really faked him out on that one.” I didn’t have nothing to do with that.\n\n This photograph is showing how you can use one type of lens and change it for all these different kinds of cameras. We made up different kinds of adapters for it, so that you could use them.

[Assistant] So you worked with the machinists to make those adapters, or were those off-the-shelf adapters?


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

[User] Yes, and believe me, you studied. This group of guys studied like crazy.

[Assistant] Yes, because you couldn’t really control those other things, but you could control how much you learned.

[User] I was in politics for several years, too. This was one of my co-op students. We were doing a job for the Navy on torpedoes. There’s Andy Stofan and his wife. This was the guy that took the job that I turned down, and he wound up as my deputy.\n\n This one here—my boss really hated this. It went in a little news [article] on the same page, at the same time. He got his recognition award for a federal executive order, and I was elected as chairman of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. His big point in time, and it was spoiled. Everybody in the lab said, “Boy Ernie, you really faked him out on that one.” I didn’t have nothing to do with that.\n\n This photograph is showing how you can use one type of lens and change it for all these different kinds of cameras. We made up different kinds of adapters for it, so that you could use them.

[Assistant] So you worked with the machinists to make those adapters, or were those off-the-shelf adapters?

[User] No, we just had them made in the machine shop. Called them up. I won a presidential award there.

[Assistant] Oh, that’s your paper that was in the book?


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

[User] No, we just had them made in the machine shop. Called them up. I won a presidential award there.

[Assistant] Oh, that’s your paper that was in the book?

[User] This is one of them. This was another paper that was given. That’s the third conference, reducing temperature in high-speed photography. This was one of my co-op students. This is multi-mirror there. This is performance of multi-mirror quartz line lamps in high-pressure environments. Boy, they can blow up big.\n\n That’s some of the stuff I did. I don’t know what all this stuff is. There’s some from NASA. This is one of our picnics. That’s the icing research group. But you see, you worked together. That’s Bill Swann. He was head of flight.\n\n I did a lot of medical work. Worked with Dr. Beck starting in 1955, doing heart operations, before we had a heart-lung machine, and then all the way through. This is glaucoma surgery, glaucoma and cataract surgery. One of my most prized commendation letters is from President [Ronald W.] Reagan.

[Assistant] Oh, really?

[User] Yes, on my retirement. The group wrote him and got him to send me a letter.

[Assistant] Not everyone that retires gets a letter from the president. That’s for sure.


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

[User] I’d say it was a learning environment. Most of it was informal with the people I was working with, and with Dave Dennis, who kind of oversaw things. It was more particular than my education, but there were no surprises in that you just took what you had learned and pushed it further. I think I was pretty quick to pick things up. I was trying to remember, when I looked at this, if we had orientation classes. It seems like maybe we did, and maybe a little of that was toward scientific knowledge, so that you had a little feel for what else was going on around the Center. I don’t know if you’ve ever run into that, Glenn?

[Assistant] Helen Davies ran some sort of orientation, but not everybody took it.

[User] I think I went to some sessions of that that were just helpful in general areas. Yes, I remember Helen, when you mentioned her name.

[Assistant] Did you have a lot of opportunities to cross over and meet other people that were working on different areas?

[User] I would say no. We were pretty insulated here. Even from the branch that was across the hall, we were not heavily interacting with them. My thought would be not much interaction—we were just doing our thing, here.

[Assistant] I believe there was what they referred to as inspections back in 1958.


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

[User] I think I went to some sessions of that that were just helpful in general areas. Yes, I remember Helen, when you mentioned her name.

[Assistant] Did you have a lot of opportunities to cross over and meet other people that were working on different areas?

[User] I would say no. We were pretty insulated here. Even from the branch that was across the hall, we were not heavily interacting with them. My thought would be not much interaction—we were just doing our thing, here.

[Assistant] I believe there was what they referred to as inspections back in 1958.

[User] The Centers would get together and give papers.

[Assistant] Yes. Were you involved with those as well?


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

[User] I would say no. We were pretty insulated here. Even from the branch that was across the hall, we were not heavily interacting with them. My thought would be not much interaction—we were just doing our thing, here.

[Assistant] I believe there was what they referred to as inspections back in 1958.

[User] The Centers would get together and give papers.

[Assistant] Yes. Were you involved with those as well?

[User] Maybe you have the history—I certainly was at a couple of them, and I don’t know if they were when we were NACA or NASA. I was at one here, and then at one back at Langley, where I traveled on the airplane with Harvey Allen. In fact, we had a little trouble with the room reservations, and I ended up sleeping in the same room with Harvey Allen. He was a great friend later on and a great, great scientist and a great man. I think I gave a paper back there. For some reason, I remember [once] here, and somebody from Langley gave a paper on boundary layers. There came questions from the audience, and they were some pointed questions and some disagreements. [The speaker] got done and he went over to somebody and said, “Who is that?” That was Harvey Allen questioning him and [Harvey] didn’t quite agree with his theory. That was kind of fun. I don’t remember a lot about those—I just remember that they were happening. I don’t know when they stopped, but probably not long after NASA.

[Assistant] In your role, did you have a lot of research that you needed to do on what other people were doing? If so, how were you able to obtain that?


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

[User] The Centers would get together and give papers.

[Assistant] Yes. Were you involved with those as well?

[User] Maybe you have the history—I certainly was at a couple of them, and I don’t know if they were when we were NACA or NASA. I was at one here, and then at one back at Langley, where I traveled on the airplane with Harvey Allen. In fact, we had a little trouble with the room reservations, and I ended up sleeping in the same room with Harvey Allen. He was a great friend later on and a great, great scientist and a great man. I think I gave a paper back there. For some reason, I remember [once] here, and somebody from Langley gave a paper on boundary layers. There came questions from the audience, and they were some pointed questions and some disagreements. [The speaker] got done and he went over to somebody and said, “Who is that?” That was Harvey Allen questioning him and [Harvey] didn’t quite agree with his theory. That was kind of fun. I don’t remember a lot about those—I just remember that they were happening. I don’t know when they stopped, but probably not long after NASA.

[Assistant] In your role, did you have a lot of research that you needed to do on what other people were doing? If so, how were you able to obtain that?

[User] I wouldn’t say a lot, but we were looking at NASA memorandums and that kind of thing. The stuff we were doing was mostly coming out of NACA and NASA, and not the industry particularly. The library would have copies of Confidential, and we could get Secret when we wanted it. We were looking at some of those that had testing in the same area, some from Langley, particularly, since there was a lot of overlap.

[Assistant] Was there a feeling of competition?


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

[User] Yes, right.

[Assistant] From one rival to the other?

[User] Yes, that was interesting. I think it was good, as I said, to have somebody from Ames there and somebody from Langley here, and maybe quieted things down. It was a friendly rivalry; we were just trying to outdo each other.

[Assistant] What do you think you brought from Ames that benefited the operation at Langley?

[User] I’d say the overall knowledge of aeronautics and the management capability, but a lot of it was I understood what was going on, and I could be a good leader in terms of developing a program and putting it together. Don Hearth and I agreed to split things up, and I ran the aeronautics part at Langley and he ran the space part. I ran the facilities part and he ran the personnel part. We worked very well together. We took some psychology tests and we were opposites, which was good. He was a guy who liked snap decisions and I was the guy who liked to toss it around and think about all the possibilities. He was honest, he said he thought that was helpful, so we worked well together. That was a good time at Langley.

[Assistant] Then at some point, you moved in and were in charge of everything, is that correct? As a Director there?


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

[User] Yes, that was interesting. I think it was good, as I said, to have somebody from Ames there and somebody from Langley here, and maybe quieted things down. It was a friendly rivalry; we were just trying to outdo each other.

[Assistant] What do you think you brought from Ames that benefited the operation at Langley?

[User] I’d say the overall knowledge of aeronautics and the management capability, but a lot of it was I understood what was going on, and I could be a good leader in terms of developing a program and putting it together. Don Hearth and I agreed to split things up, and I ran the aeronautics part at Langley and he ran the space part. I ran the facilities part and he ran the personnel part. We worked very well together. We took some psychology tests and we were opposites, which was good. He was a guy who liked snap decisions and I was the guy who liked to toss it around and think about all the possibilities. He was honest, he said he thought that was helpful, so we worked well together. That was a good time at Langley.

[Assistant] Then at some point, you moved in and were in charge of everything, is that correct? As a Director there?

[User] Yes, in 1986, Don decided to retire and he very nicely did everything he could, and I think was influential, in being sure I became the Director. He really wanted that to happen, which was nice. I became Director in 1986, and by that time, I was very comfortable there and had a good Deputy, and had five years as the Center Director, which was also a good time, and I think I was well cut out for that. Arguing with Headquarters about money and so forth.

[Assistant] That never goes away, does it? Did you have a challenge of direction there, with maintaining a balance with aeronautics as well as the other operations that Langley was moving into?


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

[User] It’s a good question. I don’t think I ever contributed that much to aerodynamics. As I got into management and I understood it and I enjoyed seeing what the folks did, but they were smarter than I was in aerodynamics, so I was just following along. I’d say in management, one of the things I always said was that I worked for the employees; they didn’t work for me. It was my job to get them the right resources and direct them in the right directions so they could make use of all the talent that was there. I think I was fairly successful at that, and I think I was a good manager and I was popular with the people, mostly. Some people, you’re never popular with.

[Assistant] You’d be really special if you were with all of them.

[User] Right, yes. There were some challenges in management, but nothing too serious.

[Assistant]
I was going to ask Sandra, do you have any questions you want to ask?

Yes, in speaking about management style, is there any one person or any people that you patterned your management style after? Since you said you worked for the people under you.

[User] I think back—Sy Syvertson, I think, was somebody who had the type of management style that I did. Hans definitely didn’t.

[Assistant] Or maybe an example of what you didn’t want to be.


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

[User] Right, yes. There were some challenges in management, but nothing too serious.

[Assistant]
I was going to ask Sandra, do you have any questions you want to ask?

Yes, in speaking about management style, is there any one person or any people that you patterned your management style after? Since you said you worked for the people under you.

[User] I think back—Sy Syvertson, I think, was somebody who had the type of management style that I did. Hans definitely didn’t.

[Assistant] Or maybe an example of what you didn’t want to be.

[User] No, I wouldn’t say that. He just had capabilities that I couldn’t touch. He was a special kind of guy. Harvey Allen, I don’t think was a good example because he was a little bit out of his element. Don Hearth, who I went to work for, I think was a good, good example. I think working for the people was just natural with me. That’s what I was interested in. I saw, unfortunately, more at Headquarters, managers who were interested in working for the people above them, and they wanted to make a good impression upward, which I think is bad, but that’s the way it goes. Somehow, some of them get up there.

[Assistant] You were at Langley at an interesting time when you became Director, ’85-’86, around that time, and of course, the Shuttle Challenger [STS-51L] accident. Do you have any memories of that, or how it affected Langley?


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

[User] We had a newsletter. I don’t remember a lot of social events. There may have been, but we had social events within our branch and things there, and then I played on a basketball team that played for six or eight years, until we got too old. One night, I was playing and I sort of ran out of breath and had a little panic attack and I said, “That’s enough of that.” The problem is, I could slow down, but if I’m on the court, I can’t slow down, I had to give it everything, and I didn’t have it anymore. That was fun. One of the interesting things is one of the guys that was on that team was J. [Jerry] Lohr, if you’ve drunk his wine?

[Assistant] No.

[User] He was working here at NACA, and he married a gal whose father was in the real estate development business. He went into that business and did very well, and somewhere along the line, started a winery. I tried to make it through the screen with an email to him, but it didn’t get to him. You know how you do that, you try to say where you knew him and so forth. Tom [Thomas J.] Gregory, who’s still around, was on the basketball team, and we had some good poker games among the guys who were in the branch. But, I don’t remember big social events. There may have been. I don’t know what you’ve got.

[Assistant]
It varies.

Glenn, did you have some questions?

I did. Can we go back to Purdue a little bit?

[User] Sure.

[Assistant] Why is it you decided to go there? What were the sort of things that your classmates were interested in? Did the studying that you were doing there really prepare you to run a supersonic wind tunnel, or did that happen at Caltech?


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

[User] You mean after?

[Assistant] Yes, from Purdue.

[User] They scattered around with engineering jobs. Goodyear, some of them, a lot of them Indiana. One of them became a politician. I was in a fraternity, and they were fraternity brothers, mostly. One of them worked for the steel mills in Chicago as an engineer, and they just scattered all over the place. Purdue engineers, I’d say a third to a half of them stay in Indiana, but the rest go all over the place. You could go to any company and there were lots of Purdue engineers—Boeing, Lockheed. In fact, Purdue, for many, many years, had more graduate engineers than any other school. Texas A&M [University, College Station] became a competitor for the most engineering alumni. Good school, good reputation.

[Assistant] A lot of astronauts come out of [Purdue], too.

[User] Yes, there was a contest between the [United States] Naval Academy [Annapolis, Maryland] and Purdue as to who had the most astronauts, and Purdue was ahead for quite a while. I don’t know what it is now. I went to an astronaut reunion at Purdue, somewhere like ’98 or something like that, and they had 21 of them there, which was quite something. I knew Neil [A. Armstrong] and I knew Gene [Eugene A.] Cernan from Purdue, and Jerry [L.] Ross, who was later, I got to know because he did a lot of work at Langley. I got to know a bunch of the astronauts along the way.\n\n Met Neil, had a class at Purdue, aircraft drafting, where Neil was a student instructor. He was a year ahead of me. That’s how I met him, and that class took place in what they called the Quonset huts they had from World War II in one position on the campus. Where those were located is where the Neil Armstrong Engineering Building is right now, so that’s kind of a kick. Neil was a great guy. I was sorry when we lost him.

[Assistant] And someone who thought of himself as an engineer, first.


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

[User] Her name’s Jody. She was raised in San Francisco, went to Cal-Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley], but she had a boyfriend, who came back to Purdue and joined our fraternity. He was a year behind me. When I got to San Francisco, I lived in Palo Alto, actually, and started work here, he and his wife came because he had just finished [Purdue and was going to go to Stanford Business School. While] I was at Caltech, he was finishing Purdue. [In Palo Alto] they moved into an apartment two doors away from mine—partially because I was there and they saw this place and it looked good. He kept saying, “I know this great girl, I think you’d really like her.” I was a little involved with a couple others, but after about three or four months, I finally said, “Okay, Mark, I’ll try it,” and she said she’d given up on blind dates, but she trusted Mark. We went on a blind date and that’s where it all began.

[Assistant] You had a social life outside of work?

[User] I always had a social life. I liked to be involved, and of course, San Francisco was great. I don’t know how I did it sometimes. We were dating and it was not only the weekend, I was up there a couple nights during the week, and we had the Kingston Trio and the Gateway Singers, and all kinds of good entertainment. I did a lot of driving back and forth, and sometimes didn’t get as much sleep as I should have had, but it was fun.

[Assistant] If I do my math right, you were here at Ames when Sputnik [Russian satellite] went up. Do you remember that being a major event around here? Did everybody sort of start talking about how things were going to change?

[User] Was I here?

[Assistant] October ’57? You would have just started?


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

[User] I always had a social life. I liked to be involved, and of course, San Francisco was great. I don’t know how I did it sometimes. We were dating and it was not only the weekend, I was up there a couple nights during the week, and we had the Kingston Trio and the Gateway Singers, and all kinds of good entertainment. I did a lot of driving back and forth, and sometimes didn’t get as much sleep as I should have had, but it was fun.

[Assistant] If I do my math right, you were here at Ames when Sputnik [Russian satellite] went up. Do you remember that being a major event around here? Did everybody sort of start talking about how things were going to change?

[User] Was I here?

[Assistant] October ’57? You would have just started?

[User] Yes. I remember hearing that it was up there, and knowing that if we hadn’t screwed around so much with the Navy and Vanguard [TV3 rocket failure], that [Wernher] von Braun could have done it before they did it. They finally let him do it. Knowing a little more about it, it wasn’t so disastrous as the laymen thought, that they were way ahead of us. They weren’t that far ahead of us. It was kind of distressing that they did it first. That’s about all I remember about that. Of course, we were already looking at Mercury [Program], and that actually came out of Langley, but we were looking at it here, too. That was already started, and that’s what I remember [Sputnik].

[Assistant] Specifically, to learn a little bit more about Sy Syvertson and Al Eggers. The blunt body was, of course, Harvey Allen’s idea, that Langley and [Maxime A.] Faget had picked up on. Al Eggers, a year or two before Sputnik, had started talking about what became the [Northrop] M2-F2 lifting body, the semi-[conical] one, which I think was one of the first things you tested.


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

[User] Was I here?

[Assistant] October ’57? You would have just started?

[User] Yes. I remember hearing that it was up there, and knowing that if we hadn’t screwed around so much with the Navy and Vanguard [TV3 rocket failure], that [Wernher] von Braun could have done it before they did it. They finally let him do it. Knowing a little more about it, it wasn’t so disastrous as the laymen thought, that they were way ahead of us. They weren’t that far ahead of us. It was kind of distressing that they did it first. That’s about all I remember about that. Of course, we were already looking at Mercury [Program], and that actually came out of Langley, but we were looking at it here, too. That was already started, and that’s what I remember [Sputnik].

[Assistant] Specifically, to learn a little bit more about Sy Syvertson and Al Eggers. The blunt body was, of course, Harvey Allen’s idea, that Langley and [Maxime A.] Faget had picked up on. Al Eggers, a year or two before Sputnik, had started talking about what became the [Northrop] M2-F2 lifting body, the semi-[conical] one, which I think was one of the first things you tested.

[User] Which was a flat-top, by the way.

[Assistant] I think Eggers’ thought was that this was a better returnable capsule and the way to go with Mercury, and then, of course, Sputnik accelerated everything and they went with the ballistic [blunt body]. Did you remember your first research project there being part of the larger Mercury Program, or had they already decided on the blunt body, the ballistic capsule sort of shape?


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

[User] Yes. I remember hearing that it was up there, and knowing that if we hadn’t screwed around so much with the Navy and Vanguard [TV3 rocket failure], that [Wernher] von Braun could have done it before they did it. They finally let him do it. Knowing a little more about it, it wasn’t so disastrous as the laymen thought, that they were way ahead of us. They weren’t that far ahead of us. It was kind of distressing that they did it first. That’s about all I remember about that. Of course, we were already looking at Mercury [Program], and that actually came out of Langley, but we were looking at it here, too. That was already started, and that’s what I remember [Sputnik].

[Assistant] Specifically, to learn a little bit more about Sy Syvertson and Al Eggers. The blunt body was, of course, Harvey Allen’s idea, that Langley and [Maxime A.] Faget had picked up on. Al Eggers, a year or two before Sputnik, had started talking about what became the [Northrop] M2-F2 lifting body, the semi-[conical] one, which I think was one of the first things you tested.

[User] Which was a flat-top, by the way.

[Assistant] I think Eggers’ thought was that this was a better returnable capsule and the way to go with Mercury, and then, of course, Sputnik accelerated everything and they went with the ballistic [blunt body]. Did you remember your first research project there being part of the larger Mercury Program, or had they already decided on the blunt body, the ballistic capsule sort of shape?

[User] I think when we tested it, it was pretty well decided. I’m not really positive about that. The M2-F2, in my mind, came later, later than 1960. I was certainly aware of the development of that, but I think that was when I was down at the 3.5-Foot, as best I can remember.

[Assistant] Do you remember much interaction between Sy Syvertson and Al Eggers?


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

[User] Which was a flat-top, by the way.

[Assistant] I think Eggers’ thought was that this was a better returnable capsule and the way to go with Mercury, and then, of course, Sputnik accelerated everything and they went with the ballistic [blunt body]. Did you remember your first research project there being part of the larger Mercury Program, or had they already decided on the blunt body, the ballistic capsule sort of shape?

[User] I think when we tested it, it was pretty well decided. I’m not really positive about that. The M2-F2, in my mind, came later, later than 1960. I was certainly aware of the development of that, but I think that was when I was down at the 3.5-Foot, as best I can remember.

[Assistant] Do you remember much interaction between Sy Syvertson and Al Eggers?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Were they competitors, collaborators?


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

[User] I think when we tested it, it was pretty well decided. I’m not really positive about that. The M2-F2, in my mind, came later, later than 1960. I was certainly aware of the development of that, but I think that was when I was down at the 3.5-Foot, as best I can remember.

[Assistant] Do you remember much interaction between Sy Syvertson and Al Eggers?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Were they competitors, collaborators?

[User] No, no, collaborators. They worked together quite well. Al was the senior, but they were good together. We used to laugh because Al Eggers is one of those guys who has a million ideas, and you’d get together and he’d say, “Well, we ought to look at this idea.”\n\n Somebody would say, “That’s not going to work.”\n\n He would say, “Well, I think it might,” and he might get talked out of that, but then he had another idea. He was one of those, 1 out of 10 was pretty good, and we could sort out, maybe, 5 of the 10 without having to do them. There was one other thing that Al was famous for. If you do supersonic stuff, you have very pointy noses and you have very sharp edges on the wings, but particularly the nose. He was famous for coming in and saying, “Boy, that’s really sharp,” and he’d try it out with his finger, which would bend it a little bit. People used to say, “Don’t touch it, Al!” I didn’t have a lot of interaction with him, but he and Sy, I think, worked very well together. Then, eventually, he left for the National Science Foundation, so he got out of the loop. I thought for a while, he might [have been] a Center Director. He was a good guy.

[Assistant] You have any thoughts on why he didn’t?


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Were they competitors, collaborators?

[User] No, no, collaborators. They worked together quite well. Al was the senior, but they were good together. We used to laugh because Al Eggers is one of those guys who has a million ideas, and you’d get together and he’d say, “Well, we ought to look at this idea.”\n\n Somebody would say, “That’s not going to work.”\n\n He would say, “Well, I think it might,” and he might get talked out of that, but then he had another idea. He was one of those, 1 out of 10 was pretty good, and we could sort out, maybe, 5 of the 10 without having to do them. There was one other thing that Al was famous for. If you do supersonic stuff, you have very pointy noses and you have very sharp edges on the wings, but particularly the nose. He was famous for coming in and saying, “Boy, that’s really sharp,” and he’d try it out with his finger, which would bend it a little bit. People used to say, “Don’t touch it, Al!” I didn’t have a lot of interaction with him, but he and Sy, I think, worked very well together. Then, eventually, he left for the National Science Foundation, so he got out of the loop. I thought for a while, he might [have been] a Center Director. He was a good guy.

[Assistant] You have any thoughts on why he didn’t?

[User] No. I can’t remember whether it was because they didn’t select him or because he just got interested in the National Science Foundation. He was competing with [Dean R.] Chapman, who was a pretty popular guy at that time. I’d have trouble putting together, time-wise, who was involved because we didn’t see a lot of Eggers, but he was still around quite a bit.

[Assistant] What about Vic [Victor L.] Peterson and Loren [G.] Bright? Were they people that you worked very closely with?


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

[User] Oh, yeah. I had no real concept of what, you know, an Indian reservation would be like. I was surprised by the poverty, surprised by the living conditions.

[Assistant] I finally remembered the name of the guy that was the sheriff, it was Nickson. I think it was.

[User] It might have been, yeah, the Indian policemen, they were kind of scary guys, I thought. Living in the trailers, helping to set the trailers up, you know, that was.

[Assistant] What did you do out on the reservation? What did you do on the reservation? As part of your, you mentioned welding, was that out on the reservation too, or just other stuff?

[User] No, my recollection is of most of our training experience and learning experience was actually in setting up the trailers. They were the ones that we put in the sanitation systems. We’d put in the sewage lines and things like that. We learned a little bit about irrigation because, you know, the Maricopa had the cotton fields and the irrigation systems. I remember working with Larry Wohlwend, he helped to get a bulldozer running more efficiently than it was running. We were talking about that and I didn't think it was running, but not very well. But we started the chicken co-op, we built the chicken, we've built a chicken houses, the chicken shelters, and brought in all the chickens and gave some classes and in poultry science to the Maricopas, to the tribe there. I remember some of the Indian women who worked in the kitchen, I guess it was at the tribal center. And they were they were very nice, the ladies that were there. The standing joke was as soon as we left, it was going to be the biggest chicken barbecue in the history of Maricopa County.

[Assistant] Probably. What about after that training in Arizona, can you talk a bit about the next phase?


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

[User] Well, the last thing that I remember is leaving Arizona, of course, we had a graduation program and that was very nice, but I had four wisdom teeth taken out a couple of days before we left, before we left Arizona. And I think I had them. They weren't through my gum. So I had to have them and I had to have them cut out and pulled out. And I had some stitches. And we left on a Saturday, I believe, to go to Puerto Rico. And I went and had the stitches out because I remember flying in the plane, with jaws like a chipmunk. My face was swollen up from having those teeth pulled. We traveled as a group, and I thought that was neat. I remember we had a whole plane to ourselves and back then anyway, flying was very glamorous. At least I thought it was, you know you know, everybody, they really treated you well. They treated you nicely. We had the whole plane to ourselves. We flew, I know we had a little layover in New Orleans. And we went down to Bourbon Street and walked around and got on the plane again and got to Puerto Rico. Got to the training camp in the Yungas, I guess it is?

[Assistant] Near Arecibo.

[User] Yeah, the tropical rainforest there.

[Assistant] Camp Crozier, I think it was.

[User] Cape Crozier, yeah, that was the name of it.

[Assistant] What do you remember about the Puerto Rican experience?


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

[User] Yeah, the tropical rainforest there.

[Assistant] Camp Crozier, I think it was.

[User] Cape Crozier, yeah, that was the name of it.

[Assistant] What do you remember about the Puerto Rican experience?

[User] Well, the physical training there, as I say, in my experience, it was more demanding than basic training in the Army. With all the, to me, they weren't physical challenges, they were more mental challenges, you know, to be able to slide down the pulley rope and rappel over the side of a dam and do the drown proofing in the ocean. When I that that was something, I've never been a good swimmer and I didn't like that at all, being out in the ocean and just staying out there and learning how to drown proof yourself. But what I remember most about it is the trek we had to do across, the kind of survival trek that we had to do across the island. All of the Puerto Rican people that we met out in the countryside were so very nice. They were they were always inviting us in for something to eat or something to drink. And when they heard we were going to sleep outside.

[Assistant] Felt sorry for you.


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

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] So, OK, so, uh, did you at the end of your first year, did you have any kind of sense of, you know, how things are going in all, remember how things were midway through the experience?

[User] Well, of course, in November. We got a letter from President Kennedy at the end of our first year. I thought that was quite an honor to get a letter from the White House that the president sent congratulating us on the first year.

[Assistant] And it actually got to you in Bolivia!

[User]
Yeah, yeah. The other thing that I remember very clearly was the day that President Kennedy was assassinated because I had eaten lunch and I was upstairs, you know, taking a siesta. And I had a, the Peace Corps give me a transistor, Zenith transoceanic radio, shortwave radio. And I was listening to the Voice of America. I used to listen to the Voice of America and the BBC. And this announcer kept talking and he said several times, President Johnson. And I was laying there kind of half awake, half asleep. And I said, what's the matter with this guy? Doesn't he know it’s Vice President Johnson? But, you know, he said it several times and then he started to recount the assassination of the president and, you know, that was just absolutely shocking. And besides that, besides the shock of that and hearing about it in that way, I was surprised by the messages of condolences from all the Bolivian people in the village. They were very upset. And I know they had, in Cochabamba, they had tributes and they had memorials. And it really, his assassination really had an impact on the Bolivian people.

I was surprised by that. I was really surprised by that. But those, those sympathies were sincere.

[Assistant] Yes, they were.


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

[User] Oh, yeah. There's no doubt about it. My grandmother. My grandmother died, when I was in the army, but I had lived with her for a couple of years on the farm after my grandfather died. She says, well, when you graduate from high school, you'll meet a nice girl and get a job and get married. And if you want to, you can live here on the farm. You know, she had she had those kinds of plans for me, you know? So, yeah, I went in an entirely different direction. And, you know, as I said, I spent 33 years in the Department of Corrections and a pretty responsible position. I worked with people from all over the country and people from all over the world and people with all kinds of experiences, but I always go back to my Peace Corps experience and I say, you know what? There's something that I remember from here that I can use there.

[Assistant] So if you had to put it in a nutshell, what would you say you got out of that Peace Corps experience? That applies in all these different ways?

[User] Geez, that's a hard question.

[Assistant] I'm just, I don't know the answer. I'm just asking it, just you know what?

[User] Well, confidence. Absolute confidence that, you know, if I could go through everything that I went through in the Peace Corps. And I thought I could pretty much do anything. I was the first person in my family to go to college, first person to graduate from college. You know, I have just always been able to do the things I had to do and, you know, and it's no matter what, you know, what life throws at you, you know, I've always felt confident that I could deal with it.

[Assistant] Well, that's a pretty great thing.


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

[User] Geez, that's a hard question.

[Assistant] I'm just, I don't know the answer. I'm just asking it, just you know what?

[User] Well, confidence. Absolute confidence that, you know, if I could go through everything that I went through in the Peace Corps. And I thought I could pretty much do anything. I was the first person in my family to go to college, first person to graduate from college. You know, I have just always been able to do the things I had to do and, you know, and it's no matter what, you know, what life throws at you, you know, I've always felt confident that I could deal with it.

[Assistant] Well, that's a pretty great thing.

[User] Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I.

[Assistant] I think we're about at the end of our time. And thank you.


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

[User] Yes. Yes. I have to go look at the list sometime and see if there’s anybody else that I knew before then.

[Assistant] One of the things I know that was involved in the interview process was writing an essay on “Why I want to be an astronaut.” Do you recall what you wrote?

[User] No. It was about that much, though. [Gestures]

[Assistant] Okay. [Laughs]

[User] But I don’t. Duane [L. Ross] didn’t keep that stuff, did he? [Laughs]

[Assistant] Well, if he did, I haven’t seen it. That might be kind of interesting to read some of those.


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

[User] No. It was about that much, though. [Gestures]

[Assistant] Okay. [Laughs]

[User] But I don’t. Duane [L. Ross] didn’t keep that stuff, did he? [Laughs]

[Assistant] Well, if he did, I haven’t seen it. That might be kind of interesting to read some of those.

[User] Well, I remember reading some during the astronaut selection process, but until you mention it, I didn’t even remember writing my own. I know I did. [Laughs]

[Assistant] Where did you eventually end up settling when you moved to Houston?


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

[User] Of course, there weren’t any problems with the backup flight software. I believe that the problem that we had that scrubbed the original launch was the redundant set problem, that complicated pass stuff. I believe that was it. I’m trying to remember back.\n\n It was pretty exciting. Everybody’s gone through a lot of simulations. We had sat back there during the integrated simulations and then done some of that, so a lot of it was not new, but the whole anticipation of a real launch was definitely there. Lots of doughnuts being consumed. [Laughter]

[Assistant] So what are your memories of liftoff then?

[User] I was holding my breath that it would hold together and actually work. I mean, you know, there’s all the testing and everything, and still, you know, you put that together, and it was such a different structure for something to fly, with this big thing hanging off the side of a tank, solid rocket motors and everything. I just held my breath. Still do. [Laughs]

[Assistant] Where were you when they landed?

[User] I think I was back in the control center for landing, again in the SPAN, but I remember that, and I remember everybody pouring out, waving their flags or whatever.

[Assistant] Now, I understand you were a chase pilot for the next two missions. How did you get that assignment?


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

[User] No.

[Assistant] Or you went back to El Paso.

[User] Went back to El Paso, right. Right. We didn’t want to land at White Sands. You don’t want to land a T-38 at White Sands. You don’t want to land anything at White Sands. [Laughs] The Orbiter wound up sitting out there for a month and got so much sand in it that I don’t think they ever got it out.

[Assistant] Your next assignment, according to your biosheet, was you were a support crewman for STS-5.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about that and what that involved?


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

[User] No. He had just came in. Of course, the Apollo 7 guys were the ones that were in primary training and the ones that, if I went over to the simulator to sit over there and take notes and abuse and stuff and write it down, they were the ones that were in training during that summer. There were others in the office that I got to know, primarily because they knew that—you know, there were some Air Force Academy guys around. Jim [James A.] McDivitt was the one I remember the most in doing that at that time.

[Assistant] Well, why don’t we stop and take a break, and we’ll change out the tape.

[User] Okay.\n\n [Tape change.]

[Assistant] So we were going to talk about your CapCom [Capsule Communicator] duties first.

[User] Okay. Do you need to say anything so you know what tape this is or anything?

[Assistant] No, we’ve got that.


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

[User] Yes. There was a lot of tension. There were some really trying times. But it actually worked pretty well.

[Assistant] As you were working with getting all of this organized and getting the curatorial facilities set up, what involvement, if any, did you have with the astronauts who were preparing for the later missions? Did you have any of them coming and looking at moon samples or anything?

[User] From time to time the astronauts would come around and look. Apollo 14 was the only one that I fully participated in, where there was still a quarantine, and we had interaction with them in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, used to try to add information to what they had recorded or talked about during the mission.\n\n For Apollo 14, that wasn't terribly successful, not that they weren't interested in helping, but my impression is that the experience on the moon was so intense that in some ways it just made everything a blur, that they really were not very good at remembering details after they got back. So you couldn't ask them a question like, "Do you remember picking up that rock? Why did you do that?" It was just a blur to them by that time.\n\n Some of the astronauts took a great interest in the samples afterwards and even wrote technical papers on their missions. Some of them didn't take all that great interest in the science afterwards.

[Assistant] I'm sure Harrison Schmitt was one of the ones that did take a good deal of interest.

[User] Yes. John Young, of course, has been great. He's been a devotee of the moon ever since he was there, and has interacted over the years with the scientists and science community. I have a great deal of respect for John.

[Assistant] That's great. And he's still so involved over at JSC.


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

[User] From time to time the astronauts would come around and look. Apollo 14 was the only one that I fully participated in, where there was still a quarantine, and we had interaction with them in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, used to try to add information to what they had recorded or talked about during the mission.\n\n For Apollo 14, that wasn't terribly successful, not that they weren't interested in helping, but my impression is that the experience on the moon was so intense that in some ways it just made everything a blur, that they really were not very good at remembering details after they got back. So you couldn't ask them a question like, "Do you remember picking up that rock? Why did you do that?" It was just a blur to them by that time.\n\n Some of the astronauts took a great interest in the samples afterwards and even wrote technical papers on their missions. Some of them didn't take all that great interest in the science afterwards.

[Assistant] I'm sure Harrison Schmitt was one of the ones that did take a good deal of interest.

[User] Yes. John Young, of course, has been great. He's been a devotee of the moon ever since he was there, and has interacted over the years with the scientists and science community. I have a great deal of respect for John.

[Assistant] That's great. And he's still so involved over at JSC.

[User] You bet.

[Assistant] It's good to see him interested in the science aspects. Did you have any contribution or any involvement at all in looking at some of the lunar landing sites, any of the selection in that?


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

[User] Yes. John Young, of course, has been great. He's been a devotee of the moon ever since he was there, and has interacted over the years with the scientists and science community. I have a great deal of respect for John.

[Assistant] That's great. And he's still so involved over at JSC.

[User] You bet.

[Assistant] It's good to see him interested in the science aspects. Did you have any contribution or any involvement at all in looking at some of the lunar landing sites, any of the selection in that?

[User] No, I didn't participate in that part of the process. That had been going on since the mid sixties. At that Woods Hole conference, already there was discussion of the landing sites, and the Geological Survey organization in which I worked was actually developing the maps and identifying potential landing sites and was, in fact, involved in astronaut training as well for the missions. But I didn't take part in that.

[Assistant] During the missions, while you were curator, what did you do at that time? Did you follow the missions closely, go to Mission Control at all? Or did you just wait for the samples to come back?