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

[User]
Yeah, I mean, we went back with our child, you know, he was like, that's what I remember. We went back to school with an 18 month old, then we went back and she was in kindergarten in Costa Rica for a few months. Then we went back and she was in the fourth grade or fifth grade.

Fast forwarding a bit, then she went down and started, you know, she volunteered and she lived with the Costa Rican family.

[Assistant] Was she a Peace Corps volunteer?

[User]
No, she was not.

In college she had a semester at Costa Rica studying and living with a Costa Rican family. She did work on the survey, during the volunteer's survey for research.

And she lived in Chile by volunteering at an orphanage for a year. And now she works as an epidemiologist in public health dealing with children at risk. Many of them are minority kids in New York City.

[Assistant] So it affected the whole family.

[User] Oh yes, she became very much a Latin American. I mean, her dissertation, she got a PhD in political sciences. She spent two years in Argentina doing her fieldwork. So, yeah, the Costa Rican experiences that she had as a child gave her the impetus to work on Latin America later on in academic work. Yeah, the whole family became a Latin American family.

[Assistant] Yeah. Okay. I think. Anything you want to add?


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

[User]
Yeah, there was no bridge.

And it was pouring and the village had come down and we were in the pouring rain.

Balancing yourself on the log.

And they're getting us across.

And so a couple of people from the town that were good friends came with us and carried our suitcases for us on the log and helped us, held their hands as we crossed the log.

Probably, probably the Peace Corps, which is a fully funded and small agency in the U.S. Government, probably there are an enormous amount that could be done to extract all the experiences and to turn them into greater benefit. That is, we're all, this is the first time we're getting together as a group. That was one small meeting a few years ago in New York. It was 40 years later. Now a lot of us are doing things that are one way or another related to those experiences, and yet there's no systematic effort to try to capitalize on that. Costa Rica is a country with whom the United States has great relations, but I can imagine a lot of places. Bolivia and the United States for having real problems now. There are thousands of returned volunteers from Bolivia, who probably had a really great time. I could, you know, people could use that. So there was no follow up. We left the Peace Corps and we never heard from them again.

[Assistant] Never heard from whom again?

[User]
Peace Corps as an organization. Once in a while they trace us. They finally got us and we put these things as a Peace Corps thing.

Well, now and then every year, when the Peace Corps comes to recruit volunteers, they asked for people who have been in the Peace Corps in the past to come and participate in some way, but they found us.

But it's pretty unsystematic.

Well in Peace Corps there's someone independently tries to find ex PCVs, and made a circle of former Peace Corps volunteers. But that was his own doing and had nothing to do with Washington.

[Assistant] Are you part of the National Peace Corps Association?

[User]
No.

No.

[Assistant] And because they do exist. Or have you heard of them?


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

[User]
Peace Corps as an organization. Once in a while they trace us. They finally got us and we put these things as a Peace Corps thing.

Well, now and then every year, when the Peace Corps comes to recruit volunteers, they asked for people who have been in the Peace Corps in the past to come and participate in some way, but they found us.

But it's pretty unsystematic.

Well in Peace Corps there's someone independently tries to find ex PCVs, and made a circle of former Peace Corps volunteers. But that was his own doing and had nothing to do with Washington.

[Assistant] Are you part of the National Peace Corps Association?

[User]
No.

No.

[Assistant] And because they do exist. Or have you heard of them?

[User] Here and there. And I guess I mean, in our particular case, since our lives are really as Latin American, as I became a director of a Latin American center, you know, this is what I do for a living. So I'm engaged in the thing as an individual. That's my profession. So I don't feel it's time to sort of try to seek that out as a way of, you know, if I were a businessman selling cars, I might to do that on the side. That's my mainstream as well.

[Assistant] OK, anything else? Do you want to add anything?


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

[User]
No.

No.

[Assistant] And because they do exist. Or have you heard of them?

[User] Here and there. And I guess I mean, in our particular case, since our lives are really as Latin American, as I became a director of a Latin American center, you know, this is what I do for a living. So I'm engaged in the thing as an individual. That's my profession. So I don't feel it's time to sort of try to seek that out as a way of, you know, if I were a businessman selling cars, I might to do that on the side. That's my mainstream as well.

[Assistant] OK, anything else? Do you want to add anything?

[User]
Um, not really. The Peace Corps has irrevocably changed our lives. If I hadn't been in the Peace Corps, a lot of what I am today would not be there. I mean, I wouldn't be the same person, you know. I hope that what I taught my students is help them to act better when they go to Latin America as a U.S. representative.

Profound respect for the all the people of other cultures that we could have never gotten any other way. Understanding that there are actually other people out there who were just as smart as you. This Francisco Mejia, third grade education is all he ever had. Smart as they could be, as articulate as anyone can be. Wow, you know.

This is what we learned. Just because you don't have formal education and you're poor doesn't mean that you're not smart. And I think we wouldn't have understood that if not for Peace Corps.

A lot of the views, Americans, you know, American government in the United States, we really get and somehow we, you know, that ain't so, that ain't so. And it's that kind of hubris is something that's gotten us into a lot of trouble in the contemporary period.

[Assistant] Yeah. I have to say this is the only interview I've done where I've gotten so choked up. OK, thank you.


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

[User] Not so much, no. I don’t think that we were that close. Me being a local kid, I didn’t have that problem, but now there were a lot of NACA engineers had come from other places, and so, they did become very close. They lived together in apartments and things like that, the engineers did, and then they built houses close to each other, and they became very close friends, yes. That’s very true. I wasn’t one of those. I did get to know a lot of guys that way, but I was fortunate enough to be a local rat. NACA people were known to be very strange people. They liked them, though, because it was very important to the economy in Hampton, Virginia.

[Assistant] I’m sure many became community leaders as well, getting involved with the local towns and doing some things within towns.

[User] Yes, of course. School boards and things like that. We changed this place [Clear Lake, area] when we came.

[Assistant] Yes, you did, definitely.

[User] I’ll tell you that. The education system improved 100 percent the day we walked in here.

[Assistant] There’s this local story of how at that time, the group of old men that always sat together at the bank and talked were trying to figure out just how many years NASA was going to be here before it left, and then they were going to have to deal with all these problems, all the buildings. It’s kind of funny now because people thought five years—until you got to the Moon, and then everybody would just disappear.


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

[User] Yes, of course. School boards and things like that. We changed this place [Clear Lake, area] when we came.

[Assistant] Yes, you did, definitely.

[User] I’ll tell you that. The education system improved 100 percent the day we walked in here.

[Assistant] There’s this local story of how at that time, the group of old men that always sat together at the bank and talked were trying to figure out just how many years NASA was going to be here before it left, and then they were going to have to deal with all these problems, all the buildings. It’s kind of funny now because people thought five years—until you got to the Moon, and then everybody would just disappear.

[User] Unfortunately, that’s beginning to come to roost, isn’t it?

[Assistant] So many years later. We’re glad you’re a—what did you call yourself, a local rat?


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

[User] No. No, I was sitting up in the radiation room. We were in the weather room up there, doing the solar weather. So I was a peripheral. I got to listen to it all go on.

[Assistant] Tell us about where you were for Apollo 11.

[User] Apollo 11, when it landed?

[Assistant] Yes.

[User] I was at the Cotswold Village Apartments with my fiancée, watching it on TV that night. I’d just gotten off console. In fact, what you’ll find is the people that were on console during Apollo 11 pulled rank on everybody that they could. There wasn’t anybody that didn’t realize that it was only going to happen for the first time once. So when you go look around right now for the people who were on console for Apollo 11, then they were in some kind of management position and they flat made sure they were going to be sitting there on the day so they could tell their grandkids.

[Assistant] I’m glad you straightened that out for us. [Laughs]


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

[User] Apollo 11, when it landed?

[Assistant] Yes.

[User] I was at the Cotswold Village Apartments with my fiancée, watching it on TV that night. I’d just gotten off console. In fact, what you’ll find is the people that were on console during Apollo 11 pulled rank on everybody that they could. There wasn’t anybody that didn’t realize that it was only going to happen for the first time once. So when you go look around right now for the people who were on console for Apollo 11, then they were in some kind of management position and they flat made sure they were going to be sitting there on the day so they could tell their grandkids.

[Assistant] I’m glad you straightened that out for us. [Laughs]

[User] All of us kids knew that we were on the third shift and we were going to have to watch it at home. Of course, I got to drink a beer with mine.

[Assistant] You knew your place. [Laughs]\n\n Let me ask you about the first time you saw a Saturn, or I should say the first time the Saturn launched, you happened to be there and you mentioned that you were there as part of the disaster team.


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

[User] The one Gene did?

[Assistant] Yes, that presentation.

[User] That was good.

[Assistant] Did you think that it was a good portrayal of what Flight Ops was like at the time?

[User] Yes, it probably was. Again, you’re going to get everything through the eyes of the guys that did it. And like I say, Flight Control, that’s one of the reasons why you go ask that question of people that weren’t in Flight Operations, they’ll give you a different answer. I told you earlier that Flight Control was probably one of the more arrogant organizations, and deservedly so.\n\n But a lot of things that happened, it was just on the line. It’s the kind of thing that says, “Sure. Wouldn’t you always want to entrust everything you’re doing to a bunch of twenty-seven-year-old kids?” [Stephen G.] Steve Bales was twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old when he was in the Control Center. Fortunately, they’d simed [simulated] that case, and [John R.] Jack Garman had seen it before and Jack was in the backroom, so they knew what they had. But still, I’ve heard from the guys that were sitting just behind Steve, that he didn’t exactly announce that to the Flight Director in his calmest level of voice. Don Puddy told me, “The hair stood up on the back of my neck when Steve—.” [Laughs] I worked for those guys back when Don was the Division Chief and Steve was my Branch Chief and Deputy Division Chief.\n\n So Flight Ops definitely had an attitude, and we weren’t the only ones. The Engineering Directorate had some prima donna organizations that they had, and Mission Planning and Analysis was the same type operations. So like I say, it was everybody working against each other for a common cause. It was competition for the best way to do things, and there was nobody going to give an inch until it was decided.

[Assistant] Are there any other areas or anything else you can think of today that you’d like to mention about these two areas?


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

[User] Yes, and that same thing was true, we had the job of man-rating the Atlas program and also the Titan program—which was called the Mercury first manned flight—well, first orbiting manned flight was in the Mercury. [Alan B.] Shepard [Jr.] was not in orbit; he was in space, but was not in orbit. There was Mercury and then the Gemini.\n\n Incidentally, there wasn't a single failure. There was something like twenty-five launches; I don't know the exact number. But between the two of them, about twenty-five launches.

[Assistant] That must have been very rewarding to see them so successful.

[User] Yes, it was. It was.

[Assistant] You talked about man-rating the Atlas and the Titan. That's a very important fact in that these were originally designed to be missiles to go out and explode. How did you work to man-rate them?

[User] Well, I can't give you a lot of detail, but just one example is that the Gs, the forces of gravity, a machine can take many more Gs than a man can, so they had to apply a different burn rate to get the Gs down so that the man could tolerate them from a physical standpoint. That was a key thing as far as a man was concerned. Just exactly what had to be done to the missile, it worked, whatever it was. I can't give you the details.

[Assistant] When were the first discussions about using the Atlas for the Mercury program, do you recall those?


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

[User] Yes, it was. It was.

[Assistant] You talked about man-rating the Atlas and the Titan. That's a very important fact in that these were originally designed to be missiles to go out and explode. How did you work to man-rate them?

[User] Well, I can't give you a lot of detail, but just one example is that the Gs, the forces of gravity, a machine can take many more Gs than a man can, so they had to apply a different burn rate to get the Gs down so that the man could tolerate them from a physical standpoint. That was a key thing as far as a man was concerned. Just exactly what had to be done to the missile, it worked, whatever it was. I can't give you the details.

[Assistant] When were the first discussions about using the Atlas for the Mercury program, do you recall those?

[User] No, I really don't recall when they first started, but we were working together with NASA on it right from the very beginning. They were the only boosters we had that could put a man into space. We didn't have anything else. We had the Atlas—period. Then the Titan came along. Of course, going to the moon was another matter. You had a much larger rocket engine, complex of engines for that, and those were all developed by NASA. But we had the rocket stands we had the Muroc Lake in California, were all part of that program as well. We had a very large rocket test capability there, built additional test stands and so forth.\n\n So we were working together with NASA, in addition to just the project. We had people throughout the NASA organization working with them on major programs of that nature. I had General [Osmond J.] Ritland over there for a while, and he was my deputy on the West Coast after that. So we really worked together at the working level, let's put it that way.

[Assistant] Wonderful. In fact, the Air Force was in control of the launch facilities even at Cape Canaveral [Florida], as well, is that correct?


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

[User] Well, yes. NASA had the responsibility for the launch, but it was a team. But the Air Force had the responsibility for carrying out the launch process, and they worked together. I've forgotten who had the "push the button" responsibility, but I presume it was NASA, because it was their program, and we provided the booster to get the astronaut into orbit. We were working together on that, too, in doing the testing and so forth. It was a NASA responsibility, and we pitched in where—well, not only pitched in, but working together just as a single team.

[Assistant] If you hadn't been able to work together, things probably wouldn't have gone the way they did.

[User] Well, there was plenty of motivation to work together.

[Assistant] Absolutely.

[User] We didn't want to leave somebody up there in orbit, you know, and so forth, or have it crash, or have a failure on the pad. You know what happened as far as when the Shuttle launch went awry [Challenger STS 51-L]. It created a tremendous stir. So we had our fingers crossed. We took the risk to bring back the faith of the American people that we could do it.

[Assistant] And, like you said before, those were very successful missions. The boosters worked well, everyone came back well.


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

[User] Well, there was plenty of motivation to work together.

[Assistant] Absolutely.

[User] We didn't want to leave somebody up there in orbit, you know, and so forth, or have it crash, or have a failure on the pad. You know what happened as far as when the Shuttle launch went awry [Challenger STS 51-L]. It created a tremendous stir. So we had our fingers crossed. We took the risk to bring back the faith of the American people that we could do it.

[Assistant] And, like you said before, those were very successful missions. The boosters worked well, everyone came back well.

[User] That's right.

[Assistant] As the Mercury program was first starting up, in fact, even before anyone had flown on the Atlas, right after Alan Shepard's launch, President Kennedy made the challenge to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the Earth by the end of the decade. What did you think when you heard that challenge?


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

[User] Well, look how fast we've—after all, Sputnik occurred in 1957, in October 1957, and you talk about—what did you mention that we were—

[Assistant] Going from flight with the Wright brothers up to—

[User] Yes, but motivation.

[Assistant] Motivating factor.

[User] Motivating factor. That motivating factor has really worked, particularly in the commercial side and in the military side. So the twenty-first century will be a very interesting one, but since I got started fairly early in the twentieth, I don't know that I'll see much of the twenty-first. [Laughter]

[Assistant] Well, hopefully you'll see at least some of it starting out and everything.


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

[User] Yes, but motivation.

[Assistant] Motivating factor.

[User] Motivating factor. That motivating factor has really worked, particularly in the commercial side and in the military side. So the twenty-first century will be a very interesting one, but since I got started fairly early in the twentieth, I don't know that I'll see much of the twenty-first. [Laughter]

[Assistant] Well, hopefully you'll see at least some of it starting out and everything.

[User] I hope so.

[Assistant] You seem to be going along fine now.


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

[User] Motivating factor. That motivating factor has really worked, particularly in the commercial side and in the military side. So the twenty-first century will be a very interesting one, but since I got started fairly early in the twentieth, I don't know that I'll see much of the twenty-first. [Laughter]

[Assistant] Well, hopefully you'll see at least some of it starting out and everything.

[User] I hope so.

[Assistant] You seem to be going along fine now.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] It's not far away.


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

[User] I hope so.

[Assistant] You seem to be going along fine now.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] It's not far away.

[User] That's right.

[Assistant] And you've certainly seen a wide change in technologies and abilities so far in your lifetime.


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] It's not far away.

[User] That's right.

[Assistant] And you've certainly seen a wide change in technologies and abilities so far in your lifetime.

[User] I started out in fabric, wood, and open cockpit, a very glamour kind of helmet and goggles and scarves and so forth. And look what we've got now.

[Assistant] Did you ever imagine where your career could lead you?


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

[User] That's right.

[Assistant] And you've certainly seen a wide change in technologies and abilities so far in your lifetime.

[User] I started out in fabric, wood, and open cockpit, a very glamour kind of helmet and goggles and scarves and so forth. And look what we've got now.

[Assistant] Did you ever imagine where your career could lead you?

[User] No. I had more feel for it after World War II and I spent a couple of tours in the Pentagon and National War College. I think my vision was a little bit more than just sitting in the cockpit.

[Assistant] Looking back at relations between NASA and the Air Force, were there formal agreements made or did everything just kind of flow together? How did that work?


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

[User] Well, I think so. This country can do anything if it sets its mind to do it.

[Assistant] In 1959, you moved over as commander—

[User] We had the policy of the hard jobs we do overnight, the impossible jobs take a little longer.

[Assistant] [Laughter] Take a few days, at least, right?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] And you certainly achieved what once was considered impossible. I believe one of the science advisors for one of the Presidents one year said that ballistic missiles wouldn't be possible for many, many years down the road.


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

[User] We had the policy of the hard jobs we do overnight, the impossible jobs take a little longer.

[Assistant] [Laughter] Take a few days, at least, right?

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] And you certainly achieved what once was considered impossible. I believe one of the science advisors for one of the Presidents one year said that ballistic missiles wouldn't be possible for many, many years down the road.

[User] Well, that, unfortunately, was one of the scientists. I knew him well. I can remember having a meeting with him in the Pentagon. He said, "Bennie—" And he was a tremendous man and a wonderful man. "Why don't you take it a step at a time and move forward on a shorter-range missile?" And I said, "Well, we're going to be doing a shorter-range missile, but I don't think we need to do it in sequence." That's what most of the scientists said. I said, "This isn't my decision from a technical and scientific standpoint, but they say we can do it, so I think it's important that we shoot for the moon, so to speak, and get the range that we need." Because a short-range missile, after all, the only major threat at that point was the Soviet Union, was Communism, represented by the Soviet Union.\n\n So it certainly wasn't unanimous, and particularly with respect to the reentry phase of it. That was the one that quite a few scientists thought was very, very almost impossible thing to do. And we figured out a test program to actually carry out a test of that by taking a nose cone into space and then having enough rocket power to accelerate it so it goes back into space essentially at the same velocity that our nose cones would be coming back in. And we proved it could be done that way, or else we'd have been delayed probably for a couple of years or longer. We called it the 117-L program, which Lockheed Aircraft did, very successful program, and got a lot of people off our back.

[Assistant] Was that the Corona and Discoverer program?


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

[User] Well, it had two purposes, one having to do with ability of man to operate over extended periods, but it also had a mission to perform, which I don't know whether it's declassified yet or not, so I won't tell you what it was. But there was an operational mission involved.\n\n A new administration came in and decided that that mission could be carried on adequately by unmanned and more cheaply with unmanned satellites, and that's what led to the cancellation of the MOL. It was in being for about, oh, four or five years, I guess, maybe longer, but around that time period. So as commander of Systems Command, I was also given the job of being director of the MOL program, so they reported directly to me and it was a unique arrangement.

[Assistant] Certainly a unique arrangement and a unique program, too.

[User] Yes. Well, I think actually that it made sense to determine man's capability. I think that actually NASA had not picked up at that point in time an orbiting laboratory such as they are doing now, in conjunction jointly with the Russians. I don't know who else is involved in it. Well, you know, after all, we were involved in something brand new, and it wasn't just a plaything that we were dealing with.

[Assistant] Certainly not.

[User] What else was on that question? MOL.

[Assistant] That was most of it. That was most of it. As the programs moved forward from the ICBM and then into NASA with Mercury, then into Gemini, you were, I believe, involved on the Gemini Program Planning Board. What did that entail?


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

[User] Yes. Well, I think actually that it made sense to determine man's capability. I think that actually NASA had not picked up at that point in time an orbiting laboratory such as they are doing now, in conjunction jointly with the Russians. I don't know who else is involved in it. Well, you know, after all, we were involved in something brand new, and it wasn't just a plaything that we were dealing with.

[Assistant] Certainly not.

[User] What else was on that question? MOL.

[Assistant] That was most of it. That was most of it. As the programs moved forward from the ICBM and then into NASA with Mercury, then into Gemini, you were, I believe, involved on the Gemini Program Planning Board. What did that entail?

[User] Well, I can remember one problem. There were several problems, actually, bringing in smoothly the G loading on the individual, on the astronaut. Gemini [Titan], being a two-stage device, had what they called a pogo, uneven application of G loading, which was, of course, a propulsion problem. And I've forgotten now whether it was the first stage or the second stage where the problem was, but we did have a panel or committee set up to take a look at that, and that's the only time that I can remember being involved in that kind of a look-see, because normally—but it was important enough that I think I was chairman of it, if my memory's right, but that's the only problem that I can remember that we had with the Titan, which we really were caught out on a limb, so to speak.\n\n We never did get rid of the pogo effect completely, but at least we got it down to a—it was a random kind of thing, so that was a worry. Uneven burning created the G loadings that man couldn't take, so we solved them to the point where we never had a problem with it in flight, but I've still heard some of the astronauts saying they got some fairly substantial jolts.

[Assistant] I guess as long as they got up there and did the job—


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

[User] What else was on that question? MOL.

[Assistant] That was most of it. That was most of it. As the programs moved forward from the ICBM and then into NASA with Mercury, then into Gemini, you were, I believe, involved on the Gemini Program Planning Board. What did that entail?

[User] Well, I can remember one problem. There were several problems, actually, bringing in smoothly the G loading on the individual, on the astronaut. Gemini [Titan], being a two-stage device, had what they called a pogo, uneven application of G loading, which was, of course, a propulsion problem. And I've forgotten now whether it was the first stage or the second stage where the problem was, but we did have a panel or committee set up to take a look at that, and that's the only time that I can remember being involved in that kind of a look-see, because normally—but it was important enough that I think I was chairman of it, if my memory's right, but that's the only problem that I can remember that we had with the Titan, which we really were caught out on a limb, so to speak.\n\n We never did get rid of the pogo effect completely, but at least we got it down to a—it was a random kind of thing, so that was a worry. Uneven burning created the G loadings that man couldn't take, so we solved them to the point where we never had a problem with it in flight, but I've still heard some of the astronauts saying they got some fairly substantial jolts.

[Assistant] I guess as long as they got up there and did the job—

[User] They got there and got back.

[Assistant] Shows some of the intricacies of the various systems.


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

[User] Well, I can remember one problem. There were several problems, actually, bringing in smoothly the G loading on the individual, on the astronaut. Gemini [Titan], being a two-stage device, had what they called a pogo, uneven application of G loading, which was, of course, a propulsion problem. And I've forgotten now whether it was the first stage or the second stage where the problem was, but we did have a panel or committee set up to take a look at that, and that's the only time that I can remember being involved in that kind of a look-see, because normally—but it was important enough that I think I was chairman of it, if my memory's right, but that's the only problem that I can remember that we had with the Titan, which we really were caught out on a limb, so to speak.\n\n We never did get rid of the pogo effect completely, but at least we got it down to a—it was a random kind of thing, so that was a worry. Uneven burning created the G loadings that man couldn't take, so we solved them to the point where we never had a problem with it in flight, but I've still heard some of the astronauts saying they got some fairly substantial jolts.

[Assistant] I guess as long as they got up there and did the job—

[User] They got there and got back.

[Assistant] Shows some of the intricacies of the various systems.

[User] Well, we don't have to deal with that, you know, as far as a missile goes. [The missile] can stand very high Gs, many more than a man can stand. We talk about eight Gs in an airplane is about the maximum. We go higher than that once in a while with test-pilot work, but I don't know what the ultimate—you have to be young and all kinds of things to take high Gs, else you pass out.

[Assistant] Yes, the human body doesn't like to have too much pressure on it.


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

[User] They got there and got back.

[Assistant] Shows some of the intricacies of the various systems.

[User] Well, we don't have to deal with that, you know, as far as a missile goes. [The missile] can stand very high Gs, many more than a man can stand. We talk about eight Gs in an airplane is about the maximum. We go higher than that once in a while with test-pilot work, but I don't know what the ultimate—you have to be young and all kinds of things to take high Gs, else you pass out.

[Assistant] Yes, the human body doesn't like to have too much pressure on it.

[User] But we probably had some other problems, too, but that was the main problem as far as the Gemini program was concerned.

[Assistant] That program, with the pogo and then also on the Atlas, there was a few difficulties. I know on the Atlas they'd have some weaknesses sometimes in the early launches, would have a tendency to explode occasionally. Were there times when they would look at both the Atlas and the Titan, and when you would look at it, wonder if it was going to be able to accomplish the mission? Or did you think that it would just take enough work and tweaking to make it work?


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

[User] But we probably had some other problems, too, but that was the main problem as far as the Gemini program was concerned.

[Assistant] That program, with the pogo and then also on the Atlas, there was a few difficulties. I know on the Atlas they'd have some weaknesses sometimes in the early launches, would have a tendency to explode occasionally. Were there times when they would look at both the Atlas and the Titan, and when you would look at it, wonder if it was going to be able to accomplish the mission? Or did you think that it would just take enough work and tweaking to make it work?

[User] Well, we thought we could make it work or else we wouldn't have done it. You can say that maybe if you'd had something that wasn't as important as showing the American people that we were still in the ball game, you know, then we might not have taken that risk, but there was a certain amount of risk involved. We had five Atlas failures in a row in one instance during the test program, but that was behind us, you know, when we got to the Sputnik thing. This was in the early sixties that the manned space flight started. I've forgotten when the first launch was made.

[Assistant] 1961.

[User] '61. Okay. Early sixties. That's right. Well, by that time we had Atlas operational in the inventory up in Cheyenne [Wyoming]. Not just one. I mean, we had one there in 1959, I think one or two. You know, you have to look at all factors, and in some instances you take more risks than others. Certainly where life is concerned, that's the highest risk that one takes, because the reaction of the American people is very bad publicity for the guys who did it. "What the hell did you do it for? You should have known better."

[Assistant] We've talked about your interactions with NASA. Were you also involved working with [Wernher] von Braun's group down in Marshall Space Flight Center [Alabama]?


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

[User] Well, yes. The only times we were very closely working together was on the Thor and the Jupiter. See, they were both intermediate-range missiles, and the Jupiter was being built for shipborne launch from naval vessels, later changed to ground deployment, and they were deployed when Italy and—Italy, I know. And we deployed the Thor in Great Britain. So they were using the same rocket engine that we were using. The Thor and the Jupiter had the same rocket engine. So we worked together on that fairly close. On most other things, we were not working that closely, because when they got involved in the lunar program, we were not involved in it at all in terms of working with them. I'm sure we had some liaison people there, but they were not really part of his team.\n\n But I knew Wernher quite well. One aspect you have to remember is that I worked very closely with Keith Glennan, worked very closely with Jim Webb, and it took a little while to get really—we were working together during the most heated phase of what we do and what they do, and so forth and so on. But from a personal standpoint, we got along very well together, although we didn't always agree. But I had a great respect for him, and I think he respected me, too. But I liked Jim, and he was a little explosive at times, but we had no personal problems. We had disagreements from time to time, but we worked them out.

[Assistant] I think disagreements—nobody can ever get along perfectly, so disagreements are—

[User] Tom Paine came in third, but I think—I'm pretty sure I had retired by the time Tom Paine took over, because I retired in '66. I don't think he took over until about '68 or something like that.

[Assistant] I believe that's correct.

[User] But he had been the number-two man under Webb for a while, I think, before—I'm pretty sure he was number two for a while, for Webb. A good man, too.

[Assistant] Were there any others that were key factors in this all coming together so well? Any other people?


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

[User] Tom Paine came in third, but I think—I'm pretty sure I had retired by the time Tom Paine took over, because I retired in '66. I don't think he took over until about '68 or something like that.

[Assistant] I believe that's correct.

[User] But he had been the number-two man under Webb for a while, I think, before—I'm pretty sure he was number two for a while, for Webb. A good man, too.

[Assistant] Were there any others that were key factors in this all coming together so well? Any other people?

[User] Well, not so much in my case. I worked pretty much with the top group. Because we had so many Air Force people at various levels working together, they were the emissaries of either good or bad, and that was essentially all—not all, but essentially all very good.

[Assistant] In general, the space program and the manned space program, in particular, what effect did it have on national security?


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

[User] Oh, I don't know. I guess—well, it's hard to say. I think the greatest success was my opportunity to have assignments that dealt with creating a new force structure as it relates to the Air Force, because I was at Wright Field [Ohio] prior to the war, and at Stanford University [California] when the war started, and came back and had the assignments which I think gave me an opportunity to be involved in what Hap Arnold was talking about, applying technology, new technology, to overhauling, you might say, the Air Force, because we were in the Air Force.\n\n Getting into the long-range missile and space activity, I was a disciple, you might say, of Hap Arnold, and particularly his jet engine, his rocket engine, and the application of nuclear weapons. Thank God they have actually deterred a major war. We haven't fired another nuclear weapon since the one that was dropped on Nagasaki [Japan]. That's been quite a few years ago.

[Assistant] Quite a few. That was quite a success, that you were able to bring the program to where it needed to be to do that [deter war].

[User] Well, of course, I'm talking about being involved in maintaining it. I was involved in all of those things, and putting them into what you might call a peacetime environment, although there hasn't been a peacetime as far as regional wars is concerned. So I think our next big challenge is how do we really stop them before they start.

[Assistant] That is going to be quite a challenge.

[User] That's deterrence.

[Assistant] Looking back over the involvement between NASA and the Air Force, are there any last thoughts that you have on how that interaction went or how much the ICBM program helped NASA, or any last thoughts on that?


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

[User] That's deterrence.

[Assistant] Looking back over the involvement between NASA and the Air Force, are there any last thoughts that you have on how that interaction went or how much the ICBM program helped NASA, or any last thoughts on that?

[User] Well, I don't really believe the ICBM program helped NASA. I mean, the technology that was involved was important to NASA as well as important to the military. One thing that I commiserated with Keith Glennan and Jim Webb and, since I've retired, with various other administrators of NASA, was that we weren't putting enough money in aviation research, but whether they were pushing it enough or not, the amount of effort on aviation went down.\n\n I worked before the war, when I was at Wright Field as a test pilot, I went to Langley [Research Center, NACA, Hampton, Virginia] quite frequently. I have a high regard for the Langley operation, the Cleveland operation [Lewis Research Center], and the propulsion area at San Jose [Ames Research Center, California], did a tremendous job. I think we can't forget aviation. It still needs a lot of additional work. But I don't really know how well the services are working with NASA today, because I don't get at that interface that often. But it seems to me that I don't hear much that—you still have military people working over there, and I think they're all working well together where aviation and space meets. That should be stressed, and I think it is being stressed. I don't have enough knowledge, really, of the details of the operation at the moment, what they're doing in the way of detailed projects and programs, but my message is, keep working together.

[Assistant] For the future—and this is just speculating, based on your experiences—do you see a specific military space agency developing at all, or do you see things just kind of progressing as they are?

[User] You mean a military space agency? For research and development and so forth?

[Assistant] Or to just pursue military and defense initiatives in space.


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

[User] Great question. Pilots, we need our flying time. You’ve got to get it in the front seat. You have to have that experience, a minimum number of hours. So that was why. That’s why I did that all the time with my pilots too when I was a commander and when I was a pilot for my commander. If you have an MS that wanted to go but believe me, flying an STA [Shuttle Training Aircraft] at El Paso until 11:00 at night is not exactly their idea of a good time and a great way to get their flying time. So a lot of times when you were flying those STAs out there on a night range nobody was in your backseat, because nobody really cared. They didn’t want to go with you.

[Assistant] Oh, that’s too bad.

[User] Yes I know. But they were still getting their hours.

[Assistant] How many hours did you have to fly as a pilot in the office?

[User] Fifteen hours a month. The typical flight time is about 1.3. So it works out to be 11 or 12 sorties a month. So when you think about that, that’s two and a half a week kind of thing, something like that. That’s a full day of flying.

[Assistant] Did you ever practice something like emergency landings? Or was it pretty much just flying?


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

[User] I didn’t have much input on that. Phil and John, they’re better witnesses to this than I am. I left it to them to decide where the competencies were in the Centers and where the various tasks should go, and I think they did a pretty good job of that initially.\n\n If you’re interested in this, Phil is getting as old as I am. As a matter of fact, Phil might be a little older that I am. You should get him to contribute, if you haven’t. He’s down in Cocoa Beach [Florida]. He lives down in Cocoa Beach. But he could give you more insight on how that was done.

[Assistant] What did you think of the lead Center concept?

[User] You’ve got to remember I left the agency relatively shortly after we had put all this together.

[Assistant] The Space Station, at the point when you left, had it been going along how you had anticipated at that point?

[User] Yes, I was generally satisfied. We had not really gotten very far along, but what we had done, I was very satisfied with the design concept. As I say, that hasn’t really changed a whole lot since that time. They were still arguing about details, but the core concept had been put together, and I thought it was a good one, and still do.

[Assistant] The original Station seemed to have quite a diverse constituency in terms of supporting the missions for the Station, and some of those have dropped off or come back or been added or changed over the years. Maybe you can share with us some of that process in terms of recruiting these different organizations.


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

[User] I’m not so sure, in my mind, that NACA had the urgency or knew what the urgency was at that time. We were doing a program that had to advance flight. I was not privy to how much of it was military, how much of it had to be done because the military needed this or needed that, other than that B-29 that I read about in the book. I think when the space program came around, it was like somebody shot a hypodermic needle in you. You had a goal that everybody knew. Here was aeronautics—no space, just aeronautics—and now you had something that the nation knew about, the world knew about. I think that was a big shot in the arm, to be honest with you.

[Assistant] I know you mentioned guidelines for writing the reports, but it was a time that America felt, or maybe some of the leaders felt, that we were in a race. The information was protected, so that the Russians didn’t know what we were doing. Did you have that over your head when you were preparing materials to send to the public? Did someone have to check your information?

[User] I didn’t. I wasn’t in that area at the time. I don’t know how they did that. The reports were classified as technical note or a technical report, and there were various security associated with these. A TN [Technical Note] and a TM—when you talk to these other engineers, maybe they could tell you.

[Assistant] In your case, the information that you shared with the public and the teachers, it was all of a level that was just—

[User] That was all general.

[Assistant] Did you get to put those materials together?


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

[User] That was all general.

[Assistant] Did you get to put those materials together?

[User] It was mostly done by Headquarters. There were a few things that we printed out of Lewis. When I retired, in fact, prior to the retirement party—the Wright Brothers had flown in 1903, and I forget what the occasion was, 75th anniversary of flight. I guess that’s what it was. I had 30 or 40,000 of these things run off, which was a picture of the Wright Brothers [standing next to their famous airplane]. Anybody came in the door, they were handed one. We put them in everything that went out.\n\n When I retired, there was still quite a stack of them left, [which I found in the briefcase gift I received. They gave me one framed and signed, “Cal – Best wishes to a dear friend – Will and Orv. Thanks for the push!” It’s hanging over my desk today]. They gave me [the briefcase] to travel because when I left here—it was funny, the last day I was here, as I was cleaning up my desk there was a telephone call, and it was the local Cuyahoga Community College [Cleveland]. There was a woman there that was setting up a program for elders, and she said, “Is there anybody there that could come and help us teach about aeronautics and space?”\n\n I said, “You’re talking to him right now.” I left and went there, and I taught there for 10 years.\n\n Getting back to this suitcase, they gave me the suitcase. I opened it up, and here were all the pictures of the Wright Brothers that were left over.

[Assistant] “And take these with you.”

[User] I could take these with me and pass them out when I go someplace.

[Assistant] I know that you mentioned that you used to have the inspections, so did you have big open houses and were you involved in coordinating that?


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

[User] Yes, we always call it the lab. I think they called it the clubhouse, or something. We’d get funny names we’d call it, just for the fun.

[Assistant]
Sandra, did you have some questions that you wanted to ask?

I was just going to ask, since you were with the Public Relations and setting up the educational resources, did you ever work with any of the other NASA Centers, in setting that up?

[User] We kind of did our own thing because everybody was a little different. We couldn’t quite compete with the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], with [all their] possibilities. Now, I guess, it’s quite something that’s down there. We were kind of independent. We had guidance from Headquarters, but the public affairs people there had nothing to say as to what I did as far as this Visitor Center was concerned. They were very interested in it after it was up and very interested in what was going on, particularly the teachers’ resources room. Of all the things we did, that I did, all the people that I talked to over all those years, I think it kind of just came together. It was like I was in a training program to build that thing, when it finally came around. The teachers’ resources room to me was tops because I had something that the other Centers did not have.

[Assistant] Did they ever come to you and ask you later how you did that?

[User] I left, I don’t know. I don’t know what happened after that. In fact, I think most of the others were terminated there at about the same time. I don’t really know. The other Centers, the people that were there, I was the only one of the Centers who was not an educator. I was one of the “unwashed,” as the term went at the time. The rest of them were all people that had been teachers or had been on the Spacemobile program, and then took over a job at the Centers. So they came at it from a little different angle than I came at it.

[Assistant] Did you travel to the other Centers?


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

[User] It was, it was a special bond. Today, those six fellows that we have—when Howard Wine came, he said, “Wait till you go up. The rigmarole you have to go through to get through that front gate now is something else.” I can remember the time when we had the first guardhouses out there, and they had an arm that went up and down. It went up and the car went through, and [then] it came down. One time Dr. Sharp came around the corner and they didn’t lift it, and he went right through it. Then, he stopped and read them out about when the Director comes through here, that gate better be open.\n\n We had a Farm House [Administrative Services Building]. When this place first started with the 200 acres, all that was here was this parking lot for the National Air Races, [and the] Farm House, down at the corner, and that was the [only] building. They built a hangar first, and everybody worked out of the hangar—I was not here at that time—until they got the other buildings. That Farm House was right at the end of a runway. When I was in the Education Office, when the new people came in, many an airplane came right over the top. You could look up at your desk and look out, here he comes. Several hundred feet above you, but to look out and see this thing whipping at you. They finally moved [the Farm House] up here, so that it was away from the [runway].

[Assistant] No wonder you were happy, you got airplanes surrounding you everywhere you were.

[User] Oh, I loved it. One of my offices right in the corner of the hangar was here, so I had the pilots up above me. We had a good time.

[Assistant] You didn’t have to wonder when the T-38s were here, did you?

[User] No, it was wonderful. I can’t regret it, not at all.

[Assistant] Was there anything else you’d like to share with us?


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

[User] Oh, I loved it. One of my offices right in the corner of the hangar was here, so I had the pilots up above me. We had a good time.

[Assistant] You didn’t have to wonder when the T-38s were here, did you?

[User] No, it was wonderful. I can’t regret it, not at all.

[Assistant] Was there anything else you’d like to share with us?

[User] I don’t know. I said if anybody ever wanted to know about the NACA, this book, Frontiers of Flights, by Gray—that orientation program that I used to give everybody, it all came out of here, out of the first part of it.

[Assistant] That’s great. Why did you feel like it was good for people to understand the history of where they were about to work?


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

[User] No, it was wonderful. I can’t regret it, not at all.

[Assistant] Was there anything else you’d like to share with us?

[User] I don’t know. I said if anybody ever wanted to know about the NACA, this book, Frontiers of Flights, by Gray—that orientation program that I used to give everybody, it all came out of here, out of the first part of it.

[Assistant] That’s great. Why did you feel like it was good for people to understand the history of where they were about to work?

[User] Oh, that’s true of anything. [You can’t get ahead without knowing where you’ve been.] You better know who you’re working for, as far as I’m concerned. They should be proud of what this organization was doing, because I think we were different, in a way. You’re working for your country. [NACA had only one] public affairs man in the whole [agency]. We weren’t out there blowing our horn, as to we’ve done this, we’ve done that, we’ve done that. Silverstein would say, “The people that want to know us, know us.” The industry. These people worked here, and I think that was the feeling, that we were doing something important whether people knew about it or not. But when the space program came along, blow your horn.

[Assistant] That’s right, and then they found out more about what you had done.


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

[User] I actually hired in in 1980, so [OV-]102 Columbia was already at [NASA] Kennedy Space Center [Florida]. The bulk of the design had already been completed. I worked on mostly certification of systems for flight. But as we flew the vehicles we found that there would be efficiencies for processing the vehicle or safety improvements. Then there were changes.\n\n We also had some cases where we had difficulty with the hardware performing to specifications. We had a unit called the wing vent relief door, and it allowed venting of the wing through the mid-body if the wing external vent door did not open. It was a large panel that was supposed to open at a certain differential pressure. The cracking pressure range was very narrow, and there’s a lot of vibration in that area.\n\n We had a lot of issues with the door either opening too soon—mostly too soon, which is not really a hazardous situation. Too late would create too much pressure. We looked at the environment to see if we were overtesting, and ended up finally making a recommendation that we could delete the door and just vent the wing with the mid-body compartment. That saved us a considerable amount of weight, it saved software space, it eliminated some critical failure modes. All in all it turned out to be a good change.\n\n There were many mods [modifications] that came on as a result of large projects that PV&D was a small part of. One was the addition of the drag parachute system and the crew escape system. Things like that always involved the PV&D group.

[Assistant] Were those part of the modifications after the [Space Shuttle] Challenger accident [STS 51-L]?

[User] After the Challenger accident, yes.

[Assistant] Were you part of the work that resulted in the development of replacing the ducting with Kevlar [para-aramid synthetic fiber] and epoxy [polyepoxide]?

[User] No, I think that was before my time. It was always Kevlar-epoxy.

[Assistant] You also worked during that time period on the thermal control system.


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

[User] After the Challenger accident, yes.

[Assistant] Were you part of the work that resulted in the development of replacing the ducting with Kevlar [para-aramid synthetic fiber] and epoxy [polyepoxide]?

[User] No, I think that was before my time. It was always Kevlar-epoxy.

[Assistant] You also worked during that time period on the thermal control system.

[User] Yes. The thermal control system, or TCS, are the internal blankets. When you see video of the vehicle and the doors are open and you see nothing but white, those are the TCS blankets. They’re to control temperatures of the structure and the other hardware systems when you’re on orbit, because going from sunshine to night you’re ranging from +150 degrees to -150 degrees [Fahrenheit]. That design was pretty much done. It was a small group of people and they needed a supervisor, so I just inherited them along with my PV&D group.\n\n The interesting thing about that system is almost any change someplace else affected the blankets. If you changed the structure you had to adjust and adapt, if you ran new lines you needed penetrations. The difficult part was that the blanket design always got done at the end. Once everybody finished and finalized their design, then we came at the end and accommodated everybody else—as long as they remembered to tell us.\n\n Sometimes at the Palmdale [location in California] they’d go to install a blanket and they’d say, “We can’t install this blanket because there’s this tube that needs to go through the blanket and there’s no penetration.” We’d have to scramble at the last minute and get those kinds of things changed.

[Assistant] Did that happen a lot where you were having to scramble at the end?


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

[User] No, I think that was before my time. It was always Kevlar-epoxy.

[Assistant] You also worked during that time period on the thermal control system.

[User] Yes. The thermal control system, or TCS, are the internal blankets. When you see video of the vehicle and the doors are open and you see nothing but white, those are the TCS blankets. They’re to control temperatures of the structure and the other hardware systems when you’re on orbit, because going from sunshine to night you’re ranging from +150 degrees to -150 degrees [Fahrenheit]. That design was pretty much done. It was a small group of people and they needed a supervisor, so I just inherited them along with my PV&D group.\n\n The interesting thing about that system is almost any change someplace else affected the blankets. If you changed the structure you had to adjust and adapt, if you ran new lines you needed penetrations. The difficult part was that the blanket design always got done at the end. Once everybody finished and finalized their design, then we came at the end and accommodated everybody else—as long as they remembered to tell us.\n\n Sometimes at the Palmdale [location in California] they’d go to install a blanket and they’d say, “We can’t install this blanket because there’s this tube that needs to go through the blanket and there’s no penetration.” We’d have to scramble at the last minute and get those kinds of things changed.

[Assistant] Did that happen a lot where you were having to scramble at the end?

[User] It depended how many mods were being done. If there was a lot of rerouting of hardware—we’d do our best to do the coordination up front, but sometimes people are in a rush and they hurry and they forget to hand off that information.

[Assistant] While you were there we lost Challenger. Talk about the impact on the areas that you worked in, and how the loss of that orbiter impacted the changes that were made for the future.


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

[User] No, I went back and forth. I actually never spent much time out there. The Challenger FRF was probably the worst trip I had because I had planned to go for four or five days, and I ended up there for about two and a half weeks. You only take enough clothes with you for the time you think you’re going to be there.

[Assistant] You mentioned the propulsion guys. Were you working with people from [NASA] Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama] as well or were you a separate team?

[User] No, the orbiter propulsion guys were the ones I worked with. They worked really closely with the Marshall folks.

[Assistant] I find these projects very interesting because they’re all little standalone ones—the drag chute panel [on STS-95].

[User] The door fell off [during launch], yes.

[Assistant] Tell us about when you learned about that event and how your team helped resolve that issue.


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

[User] For me a lot of it is the people. Obviously the vehicle and the system and the performance is amazing, but some of the most rewarding parts are dealing with the people and pulling teams together and getting them to work together in common cause and come to a solution. It’s also the most frustrating at times.

[Assistant] It can’t be easy when you have lots of experts sitting at the table.

[User] Yes, and lots of personalities. But working on something that’s so visible is great. When you know how complicated the vehicle is and we have so few problems. There’s a million things that could go wrong, and they don’t. It’s kind of discouraging that we’re going to stop flying, because I feel like we’re just hitting our stride. The number of problems we have on the ground has gone down significantly, and the number of problems and the severity of the problems that we see on orbit has gone down significantly. People really know their stuff, and now we’re going to stop. That’s sad. I’d say the technical stuff is not the hard part. It is challenging and it pushes you, but the most challenging thing right now is facing stopping and all the people who are going to be out of work.

[Assistant] Are you involved in the transition toward retirement at all?

[User] Some of that work is being done by folks in my department, in my project office. I’m involved in setting what the reduced budgets are going to be and in defining the areas that are going to go down and to what level and what timing.

[Assistant] That has to be difficult after 30 years of building it up. I guess it’s like you’re both ending your career at the same time. Have you thought about the most challenging aspect of your life in the Shuttle program?


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

[User] Yes, and lots of personalities. But working on something that’s so visible is great. When you know how complicated the vehicle is and we have so few problems. There’s a million things that could go wrong, and they don’t. It’s kind of discouraging that we’re going to stop flying, because I feel like we’re just hitting our stride. The number of problems we have on the ground has gone down significantly, and the number of problems and the severity of the problems that we see on orbit has gone down significantly. People really know their stuff, and now we’re going to stop. That’s sad. I’d say the technical stuff is not the hard part. It is challenging and it pushes you, but the most challenging thing right now is facing stopping and all the people who are going to be out of work.

[Assistant] Are you involved in the transition toward retirement at all?

[User] Some of that work is being done by folks in my department, in my project office. I’m involved in setting what the reduced budgets are going to be and in defining the areas that are going to go down and to what level and what timing.

[Assistant] That has to be difficult after 30 years of building it up. I guess it’s like you’re both ending your career at the same time. Have you thought about the most challenging aspect of your life in the Shuttle program?

[User] I think it’s been working after the two accidents, because there’s just the despair and loss of direction. But everybody jumps in, and there’s so much to do and the pace is so fast that you don’t have time to think about that aspect of it. Columbia seemed much worse to me than Challenger. I’m not really sure why, but it just felt more personal. Maybe it’s because of the fact that the debris fell on the ground, and we saw that for months and months of activity. I did have a chance to go to Florida where they had put all the recovered pieces of the vehicle and laid it out. That was very sobering.

[Assistant] Have you had an opportunity to go to a launch?


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

[User]
I grew up in eastern Connecticut, still a bit rural, um, in a family of teachers. My mother's side are all teachers. Uh, she taught kindergarten and first grade and Latin and all her sisters and cousins, my aunts, all the women on that side are teachers. High school, university. My father taught at Eastern Connecticut State University and very academic family. Um, already a bit of a mix of cultures. My dad is Bronx Jewish and my mom is a small town New Hampshire self-described WASP, and they met at UNH in Durham and fell in love. And that was, that was that story. I have one sister, older sister, and she now lives in Philadelphia with her kids.

We saw both sides of the family very frequently. My mother's family all were still in New England, so closer, and we spent summers all together in one house at the beach with my grandmother and grandfather and the four of us and my mother's sister and her family, four more people. Um, and when the nearby cousins would all come in, we'd have 17 people around the dining room table. I grew up running wild in the woods in the afternoons, which I don't think kids are allowed to do these days anymore, and being encouraged to be intellectually curious. And with a sense of fairness and effort.

Other stories I heard frequently were, my parents had both been involved in protests in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There were a couple of conscientious objectors, Harvey and Daniels, who were jailed at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and my folks were leading the protests to, to have them released, so I heard a lot about that.

[Assistant] So. When it came time to go to university, what did you, where did you choose to go?

[User] I started going to university at Smith College and made it a year and dropped out for a semester. Worked teaching environmental ed and then enrolled at Eastern Connecticut State.

[Assistant] And that's where you finished?

[User] That's where I finished.

[Assistant] Uh huh. So did you go into Peace Corps as soon as you finished at Eastern Connecticut State, or did?


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

[User] I started going to university at Smith College and made it a year and dropped out for a semester. Worked teaching environmental ed and then enrolled at Eastern Connecticut State.

[Assistant] And that's where you finished?

[User] That's where I finished.

[Assistant] Uh huh. So did you go into Peace Corps as soon as you finished at Eastern Connecticut State, or did?

[User] Yup.

[Assistant] How did that decision come about?


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

[User] Yup.

[Assistant] How did that decision come about?

[User] No, I don't think I did. No, I did, yeah. I was, I was applying during the end of university. Um, it was, it was just time. It was the next thing. And, um, yeah, it wasn't a conscious decision. It was, it was just what I'm doing next. And I've always been going to do next.

[Assistant] Right. Interesting.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] And was that pervasive in your, did your sister also carry that expectation of herself?


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

[User] No, I don't think I did. No, I did, yeah. I was, I was applying during the end of university. Um, it was, it was just time. It was the next thing. And, um, yeah, it wasn't a conscious decision. It was, it was just what I'm doing next. And I've always been going to do next.

[Assistant] Right. Interesting.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] And was that pervasive in your, did your sister also carry that expectation of herself?

[User] Not a bit. No. She's a, she's a city person. Yeah. Preferably a clean city with lots of coffee on every corner.

[Assistant] Right. So. All right, so you applied and you must have gotten accepted. How, how did that come about?


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

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] And was that pervasive in your, did your sister also carry that expectation of herself?

[User] Not a bit. No. She's a, she's a city person. Yeah. Preferably a clean city with lots of coffee on every corner.

[Assistant] Right. So. All right, so you applied and you must have gotten accepted. How, how did that come about?

[User] The application process, in retrospect, I think is a very good screening tool for whether you have the persistence to make it through service. Um, my application process was seven months long, which I heard from other folks was about average. And, you know, if you're missing a piece of information or a checkbox isn't checked, you wouldn't hear from Peace Corps about it. You just wouldn't have heard from them in a while. So you would call up and ask what's going on. So I think sticking with it and doing your own footwork, um, are requirements from the application process all the way through service. And I don't know if that's conscious on their part or not, but that seems how it worked out.

[Assistant] So you had to persist.


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

[User] Not a bit. No. She's a, she's a city person. Yeah. Preferably a clean city with lots of coffee on every corner.

[Assistant] Right. So. All right, so you applied and you must have gotten accepted. How, how did that come about?

[User] The application process, in retrospect, I think is a very good screening tool for whether you have the persistence to make it through service. Um, my application process was seven months long, which I heard from other folks was about average. And, you know, if you're missing a piece of information or a checkbox isn't checked, you wouldn't hear from Peace Corps about it. You just wouldn't have heard from them in a while. So you would call up and ask what's going on. So I think sticking with it and doing your own footwork, um, are requirements from the application process all the way through service. And I don't know if that's conscious on their part or not, but that seems how it worked out.

[Assistant] So you had to persist.

[User] Mm hmm.

[Assistant] And were you given an option when you applied as to where you might serve, and if so, what, what did you state?


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

[User] The application process, in retrospect, I think is a very good screening tool for whether you have the persistence to make it through service. Um, my application process was seven months long, which I heard from other folks was about average. And, you know, if you're missing a piece of information or a checkbox isn't checked, you wouldn't hear from Peace Corps about it. You just wouldn't have heard from them in a while. So you would call up and ask what's going on. So I think sticking with it and doing your own footwork, um, are requirements from the application process all the way through service. And I don't know if that's conscious on their part or not, but that seems how it worked out.

[Assistant] So you had to persist.

[User] Mm hmm.

[Assistant] And were you given an option when you applied as to where you might serve, and if so, what, what did you state?

[User] They said, as I remember, the form said something about you can indicate a preference. You may or may not get it, which again I understand is very different nowadays. Um, I said mountain or desert or island. I didn't specify a country.

[Assistant] That's pretty broad. That left them a lot of flexibility. Okay, so what happened? When did you get your invitation and what was your reaction?


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

[User] Mm hmm.

[Assistant] And were you given an option when you applied as to where you might serve, and if so, what, what did you state?

[User] They said, as I remember, the form said something about you can indicate a preference. You may or may not get it, which again I understand is very different nowadays. Um, I said mountain or desert or island. I didn't specify a country.

[Assistant] That's pretty broad. That left them a lot of flexibility. Okay, so what happened? When did you get your invitation and what was your reaction?

[User] I don't know when exactly in the calendar year I got the invitation, but my reaction was it had, it had been building up for seven months. I don't, I don't remember specifically my reaction. I assume I was pretty excited. And, you know, it went from not a running in place feeling, but a, you know, I'm in the process, I'm applying, I'm applying, I'm applying. And then the momentum shifting forward to I'm going to serve. And I actually, I got my invitation to Haiti first and turned it down. And then I got an invitation to Mauritania and figured I was probably not going to get a third one, so I took it.

[Assistant] And do you mind sharing why you rejected the Haiti invitation?


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

[User] They said, as I remember, the form said something about you can indicate a preference. You may or may not get it, which again I understand is very different nowadays. Um, I said mountain or desert or island. I didn't specify a country.

[Assistant] That's pretty broad. That left them a lot of flexibility. Okay, so what happened? When did you get your invitation and what was your reaction?

[User] I don't know when exactly in the calendar year I got the invitation, but my reaction was it had, it had been building up for seven months. I don't, I don't remember specifically my reaction. I assume I was pretty excited. And, you know, it went from not a running in place feeling, but a, you know, I'm in the process, I'm applying, I'm applying, I'm applying. And then the momentum shifting forward to I'm going to serve. And I actually, I got my invitation to Haiti first and turned it down. And then I got an invitation to Mauritania and figured I was probably not going to get a third one, so I took it.

[Assistant] And do you mind sharing why you rejected the Haiti invitation?

[User] As I remember, political unrest and, um. The country description was pretty heavy on the Christian aspect, which seemed daunting. But then I ended up in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. So.

[Assistant] So you went from, you were still deeply engrossed in a country that had a major religion associated with it.


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

[User] I don't know when exactly in the calendar year I got the invitation, but my reaction was it had, it had been building up for seven months. I don't, I don't remember specifically my reaction. I assume I was pretty excited. And, you know, it went from not a running in place feeling, but a, you know, I'm in the process, I'm applying, I'm applying, I'm applying. And then the momentum shifting forward to I'm going to serve. And I actually, I got my invitation to Haiti first and turned it down. And then I got an invitation to Mauritania and figured I was probably not going to get a third one, so I took it.

[Assistant] And do you mind sharing why you rejected the Haiti invitation?

[User] As I remember, political unrest and, um. The country description was pretty heavy on the Christian aspect, which seemed daunting. But then I ended up in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. So.

[Assistant] So you went from, you were still deeply engrossed in a country that had a major religion associated with it.

[User] Different to my own. I mean, the U.S. is fairly Christian as well. I don't know if it would show up in somebody else's literature as such, but I was raised Jewish, so I've always felt that contrast.

[Assistant] Okay. So you started your training in September of 2000. Was that also the year you graduated from Eastern Connecticut State, or had you worked a year or so before, or a while before you, um, joined Peace Corps?


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

[User] As I remember, political unrest and, um. The country description was pretty heavy on the Christian aspect, which seemed daunting. But then I ended up in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. So.

[Assistant] So you went from, you were still deeply engrossed in a country that had a major religion associated with it.

[User] Different to my own. I mean, the U.S. is fairly Christian as well. I don't know if it would show up in somebody else's literature as such, but I was raised Jewish, so I've always felt that contrast.

[Assistant] Okay. So you started your training in September of 2000. Was that also the year you graduated from Eastern Connecticut State, or had you worked a year or so before, or a while before you, um, joined Peace Corps?

[User] I think that must have been when I graduated, because I graduated high school in '95. And I must have had some kind of odd job. I've always worked. I always had, you know, something, but I can't remember what that might have been. I didn't have my first real job until I got back, because I remember showing Peace Corps pictures to my colleagues.

[Assistant] Right. So, um, talk about training. Where did, where did you train? And, um, you were needing to leave your family too. Was there any, anything you remember particularly, uh, um, unusual about saying goodbye to your family and being off to the country, or off to training?


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

[User]
Yeah. Oh, and a madala. Uh, a madala is like a seven foot long, three foot wide piece of foam with a with a cloth sewed over it. It's a portable bed. It's in the, in the hot season, or most times if it's not raining, you take your madala outside to sleep. And we also got a mosquito net. And maybe a pillow, and I think it was stuffed with plastic bags, very crinkly and not very soft. So we learned how to use all these things, and we learned how to name all these things. In some of the language lessons we'd sit and talk with each other, and some of them we'd go to the market with an assignment to practice a certain set of vocabulary words.

We had old volunteers come in, sometimes leading the technical trainings, sometimes cultural things. We were very busy. There were vaccinations now and then. A lot of meals together.

[Assistant] How many were you?

[User]
We were. In my stage group, there was the ag-fo, the agro- forestry group, and there was also small business, small enterprise development or SED. So there was ag-fo and there was SED and there were fairly different kinds of people. If you just think of like farmers and finance people broadly, but all of, all of those farmers and finance people are the kind of people who go to Peace Corps. So we had more in common than not. But maybe, maybe 20 in ag-fo and maybe 15 in SED?

And by the end of stage, of training, half of the group had ET'd, had early terminated service and gone home. And I think that was just half of the ag-fo. I'm not sure if that was SED and ag-fo. And the interesting part was of the ag-fo who remained and entered service, half of us extended for a third year. So.

[Assistant] So how many, if you, if in your cohort you had 20 people initially.

[User] Maybe? No idea if that's an accurate number.

[Assistant] Right. Yeah. And about half of them, so maybe as many as ten left?


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

[User] Maybe? No idea if that's an accurate number.

[Assistant] Right. Yeah. And about half of them, so maybe as many as ten left?

[User] Maybe. And that may be an exaggeration. I don't know who I could possibly check it with. There's no Peace Corps in Mauritania anymore.

[Assistant] Right. Yeah.

[User] Yeah. They closed the program.

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah. So and what was your sense about why they left?


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

[User] Maybe. And that may be an exaggeration. I don't know who I could possibly check it with. There's no Peace Corps in Mauritania anymore.

[Assistant] Right. Yeah.

[User] Yeah. They closed the program.

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah. So and what was your sense about why they left?

[User] Somebody told us. I don't know if it was the director. It was somebody, some staff member, an American staff member said that Mauritania was considered a hardship country in Peace Corps. Um, and I think the things that would make it so, if that was accurate, would be the weather. Um, you know, it's the Sahara Desert. So in the hot season, it's 120 degrees for several months.

[Assistant] And no air conditioning.


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

[User] Yeah. They closed the program.

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah. So and what was your sense about why they left?

[User] Somebody told us. I don't know if it was the director. It was somebody, some staff member, an American staff member said that Mauritania was considered a hardship country in Peace Corps. Um, and I think the things that would make it so, if that was accurate, would be the weather. Um, you know, it's the Sahara Desert. So in the hot season, it's 120 degrees for several months.

[Assistant] And no air conditioning.

[User]
No air conditioning. No, I mean, there's air conditioning if you make friends with the European NGOs and go visit them at their houses. Or if you, um, are in the capital, um.

Religious proselytizing, kind of well-meant harassment. I never felt unsafe because of religion, but it would, it would just pop up and pop up. You know, you were having a normal conversation, or what I felt was a normal conversation about the trees we were planting, or town gossip or the weather or just, you know, um. And I would often, at first it was being blindsided. And then later I got kind of cynical, and I'd wait for it, for someone to encourage me to pray to Allah and sometimes with a visual aid. I, more than once somebody lit a lighter and pointed at the flame to illustrate that if I did not become Muslim, that I was going to the fire. So there was that.

But they, but the, the harassment there, at least because they were so strictly religious, there wasn't physical harassment. Like men would not touch a woman they weren't related to in public, um, at least. You know, people had people climbing over the walls because there's, uh, perceptions of who we are and what we're like because of where we come from and how we dress.

[Assistant] Explain that just a bit. What were those perceptions?


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

[User] Mm hmm.

[Assistant] Okay.

[User]
Yeah, there was lots of, lots of hissing and whistling kind of sexual harassment, but no grabbing. That was the difference. And I didn't travel much, um, while I was there. I wish I'd traveled more around the continent. But friends who went to, you know, Morocco and Nigeria and South Africa said that the physical harassment was much more aggressive, that people would actually grab you and pinch you and so on. And that really didn't happen in Mauritania.

And I could use it to my advantage. Once I learned Hassaniya, I was in the market once, and a man was kind of following me in a, in a sleazy way and going [hisses], um. And I sat down with the market women, just plunked down and shouted in Hassaniya, I don't know you! Why are you talking to me? You're not from my family. You're not from my village. Stop talking to me! And the women all gave it to him. They were yelling at him and telling him to leave this decent girl alone and so on. You know, I'd become culturally literate enough to know what buttons to press to get help.

[Assistant] And did, did you sit on that day, did you sit among women you knew or were these, knew, these were women?

[User] This was in the city.

[Assistant] This was in the city. And they didn't know you and you didn't know them, but you sat with them and shouted out at him, called him out for what he was doing, and they joined you.


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

[User] This was in the city.

[Assistant] This was in the city. And they didn't know you and you didn't know them, but you sat with them and shouted out at him, called him out for what he was doing, and they joined you.

[User] Mm hmm. They found my, my behavior appropriate. And I mean, they may have known me by sight because I, when I would go into the capital, I would, I would go wandering in the market frequently. And that was one of, one of my spots to kind of ground. And I need a lot of alone time, or like wandering, exploring kind of time. And that was just, walking around the city was one way to do that. So I had been in that in that space many times, but I didn't. There was only a few people that I spoke to regularly, and we knew each other by name and face, like there was the money changers I always went to. I knew them, um, and there was a couple of women who made cloth, but most, most people, I was just in my own head. I wasn't, I didn't, um, make as many personal connections in retrospect as I wish I would have. I had, I got stuck in my own experience. I wish I had, I had opened up more and sulked less.

[Assistant] Did you cover your hair?

[User] I did. I wore kind of a kind of a fisherman's hat, like a, like a cap with a brim all the way around.

[Assistant] And put your hair inside of it?


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

[User] Mm hmm. They found my, my behavior appropriate. And I mean, they may have known me by sight because I, when I would go into the capital, I would, I would go wandering in the market frequently. And that was one of, one of my spots to kind of ground. And I need a lot of alone time, or like wandering, exploring kind of time. And that was just, walking around the city was one way to do that. So I had been in that in that space many times, but I didn't. There was only a few people that I spoke to regularly, and we knew each other by name and face, like there was the money changers I always went to. I knew them, um, and there was a couple of women who made cloth, but most, most people, I was just in my own head. I wasn't, I didn't, um, make as many personal connections in retrospect as I wish I would have. I had, I got stuck in my own experience. I wish I had, I had opened up more and sulked less.

[Assistant] Did you cover your hair?

[User] I did. I wore kind of a kind of a fisherman's hat, like a, like a cap with a brim all the way around.

[Assistant] And put your hair inside of it?

[User] I think I had a ponytail coming out the back.

[Assistant] And that was ok, that was acceptable to them?


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

[User]
I think I want to describe the context of a few images that, that recur to me when I think about Peace Corps from training. One image is, I think I was off to language class in the morning and the daughter of the house was, could be 12 or 13, and she was doing something menial and gross with the dishes. I think she was scrubbing them with sand or something. It was her job to do that every day. She was kind of the, the workhorse, but she was, she was the daughter of the family and did a lot of work. Um, richer families would actually have slaves, literal slaves that which still exist in Mauritania. And like, I can talk more about that later. But this was, you know, she just got the crap jobs because she was the youngest female.

And I remember her watching me leave for class. And just something about, I don't, I don't think I ever spoke to her much. She showed me how to carry water on my head, but other than logistics. But, you know, maybe I was, maybe I made this up and maybe I really saw it, but it seemed like she was looking at me just from, from another world. And I think about what is she doing now and the chances I have had and the resources I have consumed, and just the magnitude of the difference in our lives. And I don't even remember her name, but I remember her looking at me that morning.

[Assistant] And did, could you read her expression?

[User] That's what I read from it. I don't know if that was me projecting or if she was just kind of glancing up and I caught it in a moment of intensity.

[Assistant] Right. And I'm going to see if I can interpret what your, what you were reading, which was perhaps a mix of, of, um, resentment because you were doing something that she, that was totally out of her reach. Does that?

[User] Yeah, that resonates. Maybe, maybe envy, maybe resentment, maybe just curiosity.

[Assistant] Was she literate?


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

[User] That's what I read from it. I don't know if that was me projecting or if she was just kind of glancing up and I caught it in a moment of intensity.

[Assistant] Right. And I'm going to see if I can interpret what your, what you were reading, which was perhaps a mix of, of, um, resentment because you were doing something that she, that was totally out of her reach. Does that?

[User] Yeah, that resonates. Maybe, maybe envy, maybe resentment, maybe just curiosity.

[Assistant] Was she literate?

[User] I think so. But I think, you know, to the, to probably, she probably went to school until puberty hit. So whatever writing you can get in in that time. And I think, I think only boys went to madrassas and learned to read and write the Quran, or at least just memorize it. They may not have actually read and written, but I don't think girls were sent to Koranic study.

[Assistant] And you said there was another image, or a few more images from training?


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

[User] Yeah, it stood out as a word from the flow of language. You know, when you don't know a language, it's just a, it's just a river of sound. And then when you can pull words and meaning.

[Assistant] Yeah, it's a breakthrough.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] It's a breakthrough in language learning. Yeah. So are we ready to yank you out of your comfort, shall we say, comfortable training?

[User] I was about to go on a tangent about language instruction in the U.S. versus in Peace Corps and school.

[Assistant] Well, if we have time, let's get back to that.


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

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] It's a breakthrough in language learning. Yeah. So are we ready to yank you out of your comfort, shall we say, comfortable training?

[User] I was about to go on a tangent about language instruction in the U.S. versus in Peace Corps and school.

[Assistant] Well, if we have time, let's get back to that.

[User] Okay.

[Assistant] But let's take you to your first assignment. Or maybe it was your.


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

[User] I was about to go on a tangent about language instruction in the U.S. versus in Peace Corps and school.

[Assistant] Well, if we have time, let's get back to that.

[User] Okay.

[Assistant] But let's take you to your first assignment. Or maybe it was your.

[User] Only assignment.

[Assistant] Only assignment. Okay.


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

[User] Okay.

[Assistant] But let's take you to your first assignment. Or maybe it was your.

[User] Only assignment.

[Assistant] Only assignment. Okay.

[User]
So I was in the regional capital of Ayoun el Atrous in the Hodh El Gharbi region, which is the next to last governorate going east from Nouakchott. It's about, I don't know, 200 miles inland from the Atlantic coast. And regional capital, so, you know, the high school and the airport. And by the end of my service, there was an internet cafe. The new volunteers were coming in with laptops, which was bizarre to us. Um, and that's all, that's all normal now. Um, I don't know how many people live there. I want to say around 10,000 if you count the skirting villages.

And I can't remember if we were assigned a host family when we got there. The village volunteers were because they had to have somewhere to live. And I, I didn't end up having a host family that I lived with the whole time in service. Um. I rented a few different rooms, and I was friends with a couple of families that I would visit regularly, but I didn't have my host family as assigned.

[Assistant] The rooms that you rented, were they in family homes?


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

[User] Only assignment.

[Assistant] Only assignment. Okay.

[User]
So I was in the regional capital of Ayoun el Atrous in the Hodh El Gharbi region, which is the next to last governorate going east from Nouakchott. It's about, I don't know, 200 miles inland from the Atlantic coast. And regional capital, so, you know, the high school and the airport. And by the end of my service, there was an internet cafe. The new volunteers were coming in with laptops, which was bizarre to us. Um, and that's all, that's all normal now. Um, I don't know how many people live there. I want to say around 10,000 if you count the skirting villages.

And I can't remember if we were assigned a host family when we got there. The village volunteers were because they had to have somewhere to live. And I, I didn't end up having a host family that I lived with the whole time in service. Um. I rented a few different rooms, and I was friends with a couple of families that I would visit regularly, but I didn't have my host family as assigned.

[Assistant] The rooms that you rented, were they in family homes?

[User] Yep. yeah. They didn't have non, there wasn't a hotel.

[Assistant] A commercial kind of leasing opportunity. So you just rented a private home from a private family.


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

[User] Yep. yeah. They didn't have non, there wasn't a hotel.

[Assistant] A commercial kind of leasing opportunity. So you just rented a private home from a private family.

[User] And a room in the compound, in the courtyard.

[Assistant] Uh huh.

[User] Yeah, I lived in the maison de passage for a while.

[Assistant] What is that?


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

[User]
Potatoes. Lots of potatoes that most, I think they came up from Mali. Potatoes and onions were really the only vegetables. So maybe this goes back to the comment about it being a hardship country is the food. Um, a lot of couscous and rice, uh, dressed with, um, I would call it rancid. There's probably some culinary term for doing this on purpose to butter and milk, but sour milk and sour melted butter as, as dressing. Sour milk. Um, and people in Mauritania say they're, in the, in the hot season, they go out to the countryside and graze with the animals and drink milk. And people commonly say, I'm going to drink milk. And we learned that in training.

One of the old volunteers was taking us on a, on a walk or, you know, a language, just around, around the town where we were having training. And somebody called out, where are you going? In Hassaniya, and he was translating this for us later. And he answered, we're going to drink milk. And they cracked up, the whole family that was, you know, being neighborly nosy of where you're going. They thought that was the greatest thing, because that's the common answer. Like going to drink milk is a, is a, that's how you describe going to your country home.

[Assistant] Which means that they would be able to get fresh milk every day from those animals. They didn't have to worry about refrigeration, and they didn't have to worry about sour milk because it would be fresh from the animals.

[User] And they don't mind sour milk.

[Assistant] Right.

[User] They like it.

[Assistant] They're used to it.


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

[User] And they don't mind sour milk.

[Assistant] Right.

[User] They like it.

[Assistant] They're used to it.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] But this was a treat.


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

[User] They like it.

[Assistant] They're used to it.

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] But this was a treat.

[User] Yeah. Yeah, a seasonal treat. So we're going out to the Badia to drink milk and, yeah. And year round people drink zorig which is, um, either condensed milk or sour milk from cow or camel or sheep or what have you, um, watered down with a lot of sugar and whisked. And it's pretty good.

[Assistant] I was going to say it sounds good to me.


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

[User] Yeah.

[Assistant] But this was a treat.

[User] Yeah. Yeah, a seasonal treat. So we're going out to the Badia to drink milk and, yeah. And year round people drink zorig which is, um, either condensed milk or sour milk from cow or camel or sheep or what have you, um, watered down with a lot of sugar and whisked. And it's pretty good.

[Assistant] I was going to say it sounds good to me.

[User] Yeah. Well, sour milk.

[Assistant] Yeah, I like sour milk. I mean, I eat yogurt, you know, that's sour milk, one form.


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

[User] Yeah. Yeah, a seasonal treat. So we're going out to the Badia to drink milk and, yeah. And year round people drink zorig which is, um, either condensed milk or sour milk from cow or camel or sheep or what have you, um, watered down with a lot of sugar and whisked. And it's pretty good.

[Assistant] I was going to say it sounds good to me.

[User] Yeah. Well, sour milk.

[Assistant] Yeah, I like sour milk. I mean, I eat yogurt, you know, that's sour milk, one form.

[User] In a sense.

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah. Cultured.