Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (2 page)

My text from that book remains as the first part of this expanded version outlining more of my career. That book does have a “band of brothers” flavor, appropriate for young men, bound together in facing the almost overwhelming challenges of Apollo. Our crucible was the Mission Control Center and all that it took to be ready to perform and succeed in that arena. I had hired almost all of the other authors in the Trench book and most of the others who served in the MCC flight dynamics discipline for Gemini, Apollo and Skylab. It still feels like family after fifty years.

In a way, Apollo was a pivot point in history. This group of young men and their parents and grandparents came from a time before widespread electricity, cars, planes, phones, indoor plumbing, charge cards and fast food restaurants. It was a world much more like the one people lived in during previous centuries. Our children, grandkids and subsequent generations live in an entirely different world (i.e. the modern one that came into being in the second half of the twentieth century). This pivot coincided with the Apollo era, when all things suddenly seemed possible.

For me, the second career stage moved quickly in the transition from MCC operations to program management in both the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) and the first U.S. space station, Skylab. However, in the twilight of my time in operations, I had the opportunity to significantly contribute to the successful recovery of the Apollo XIII crew – a very satisfying exclamation point on my time in MCC. The transition to program management was unexpected and happened quickly. And, it became the mainstream agenda for the rest of my NASA career and my time later in Industry.

In retrospect, we in the MCC were a very small unit in the much larger enterprise that it took to get to the moon. All of us, and certainly, I believe that I was most fortunate and privileged to participate in this singular and most historic achievement that is the NASA human space program. It was a truly grand adventure. I loved it.

GLYNN AND DAD BILL

My earliest memories were of the big yellow house on Main Street, in Old Forge Pennsylvania. It was the home of my mom’s parents, but my grandfather Joseph Glynn had already died in May, about six months before I was born. My grandmother, Winifred Hennigan Glynn, was the lady of the house, and we lived upstairs. It was common in those times for three or more generations to live in the same house, at least for some time.

Life was simple, compared to later times – no cars, no phones, not much indoor plumbing and the only packaged entertainment was the movies on Saturday afternoon. Restaurants were also extremely scarce and very rarely visited. In an interview with our mom sometime in the late ‘90s, we asked how things were during the years of the depression before the war. She offered that, “it was not so bad, we had enough to eat and, after all, everybody was in the same boat.” And that was the way Mom looked at life.

In terms of recollections, some simple and sometimes vague things come to mind:

All of the families had vegetable gardens in their yards.

The horse drawn wagon carried large blocks of ice for the ice boxes.

There were no refrigerators.

Outhouses were prevalent in all back yards.

Doctors made house calls.

We did not have a car until after the war. Hardly anyone did.

The town was divided along ethnic walls, not ethnic lines.

Everybody inside the Irish ethnic wall seemed related.

Everybody in the house ate at the big table at the same time, except Aunt Bea, who ate separately.

The smell of baking bread.

Mom singing.

Mountains cradling the valley.

Going to St. Lawrence Church on Sunday.

The smell of grass in the summer.

Terrible squeals as the next door neighbors slaughtered their hog.

Deep snow in winter.

Scary roots grew out of the potatoes in the cellar.

Catching fireflies in a jar.

Watermelon in the yard.

Swings and rocking chairs on porches.

And that was the way it was.

By the time of the war, I had two brothers Bill and Jerry. (At my age, it was hard to figure what little brothers were good for – although I did later.) In all our early photos, we were far over on the skinny side of life and it looked like cameras must have scared us. Clearly, no movie talent there. Once the war started, we moved first to Bethlehem where Dad worked at U.S. Steel. And soon, we moved to Philadelphia where Dad worked in the Navy shipyard, making submarines. We boys had a pretty good time in Philadelphia at 32nd and Pearl in a first floor apartment unit. The apartment was just a few blocks away from the University of Pennsylvania campus. There were a lot of kids on our block for kicking the can and playing stickball with. The idea of the war did not penetrate much at our age.

We also enjoyed the neighbor couple upstairs, Mabel and Grady Jones and Mabel’s mother, Floss. We thought Grady was cool. He was from North Carolina and had this drawl we tried to imitate. No matter how much Grady instructed us, we did not pass. Grady laughed at that a lot. He had a lot of funny, country sayings and was fun to be with. It was the first time that I ever met anybody from the South. Our parents always seemed to have a good time with Mabel and Grady and our folks continued to visit with the Joneses after we moved back to Scranton. Grady drove his 51 Ford sedan – a really cool car – up for a visit. He even let me drive it on the hill at the Old Forge home. It was the first time I ever saw an automatic transmission, let alone drove one. Also, it was on that visit that Grady bought me my first razor and showed me how to shave. They were great friends to our parents and us kids.

There was one group of outlaws on our block. Five kids lived on the second floor above our unit. We only knew them by their last name – Peppy. And we called them the Peppy Kids. They had a chicken wire fence around their second-floor porch. This “cage” allowed them outside. But, it also allowed them to taunt us street dwellers, and throw ugly things down on us. The unforgivable insult was when they urinated on the clothes that mom hung out to dry in the yard. But, even worse, they managed to add their urine to our apple pie which mom had set out on our porch rail to cool. Needless to say, all of this inflamed us natives. Very occasionally, the Peppy Kids would be out on the street by themselves. It might be by choice, by parent instructions or by God – we did not care. The cry went up – “the Peppy Kids are out” – and we would find them and bang them up, appropriate for their offenses. It was good that they were as skinny as we were.

The street fights were not always bloodless. I remember one battle against another neighborhood group of boys that was pretty intense. When I got home, I found that I was sweating profusely and, when I rubbed my hand through my hair, it came away covered in blood. Something heavy had pounded my head and split the skin open. I believe that it was my first time for stitches.

But our great adventures were mostly on the weekends when Dad was home. Everybody in the family except Jerry had a bike. Mine was a 24-inch one and Bill had a small wheel size of 20 inches. He had to peddle like the devil just to keep up with us. Jerry rode on the bar in front of Dad’s seat. This arrangement worked pretty well most of the time. Except once, Jerry held up our ride for about an hour because he could not find his pillow. By the time we got back from our couple of hours of biking, Jerry was in considerable discomfort and unable to sit. You can imagine the outpouring of sympathy for him. By my process of elimination, the pillow thief had to be Bill, but he did not own up. Bill was fairly stubborn about things. He could kneel down and bang his head on the sidewalk when he got mad or frustrated. He did turn out okay despite this affliction.

Many times, we biked down in the park and mom brought lunch in the basket attached to her bike. These were great times for the family. We liked to visit a park area called Lemon Hill. Many bike-riding families showed up there on the weekends and enjoyed being out of the city streets and flying kites on the rolling green hills. For the parents, it had to be a welcome break from the work routine and the concern for relatives off in military service. Mom’s brother, our uncle Steve, was out in the Pacific somewhere with the Seabees.

I started at St. Agatha’s grade school on Spring Garden Street, about eight to ten blocks from our place. Bill followed in two years and Jerry did not start school until we moved back to Scranton after the war. Brother Bill and I walked to school every day and, with no school buses or parents to chauffeur us, we would collect a crowd by the time we got there. This gave us too much of a chance to visit with other classmates on the way home and sometimes we were late.

St. Agatha’s grade school was run by the nuns. As anyone who went to school with the nuns back then will tell you, they were great for at least two things, one being the basics and the other being discipline. They were probably great human beings also, but in our station of life, it was all about the first two, with emphasis on the discipline part. Discipline came in the form of one of those three-sided rulers, about three-quarter inches on a side. They were designed by the devil, but the sisters used them anyway. And they were very good at it. They had our attention, so the basics could begin. And, if you got in trouble, your parents knew it was your fault, and no one else’s.

On August 6, 1945, just eight days before the news of the unconditional surrender of Japan, Dad was inducted into the U.S. Army and served in the Army Air Corps. Dad was stationed at a number of places around the country and I remember that Mom went to visit him one time when he was stationed in Georgia. This was during the winter and Mom expected the weather in such a warm southern state to be just like summer. It was not so.

Another problem followed Dad all of his service time. Somehow, the Army lost his papers, or at least the payroll papers. They could still ship him around to new assignments. But, the real downside was that he never got paid. Mom got a counter clerk job at the local drugstore. So, her paycheck had to support the home front and she also sent money to Dad for cigarettes and incidentals. The kids, of course, were never told any of this. It must have been about this time that Pop, my Dad’s father, came to live with us. Our guess is that it was to watch us while Mom worked.

Dad spent his last time in service at Shepherd Field in Texas. He told us of the German POWs who were kept there. We were surprised to hear that they were relatively free to walk around the base, not in serious confinement during the day. And, they were very happy to be where they were rather than on any front, especially the Eastern one. I remember the celebrations when V-E day and then V-J day occurred, people in the streets, car horns blasting, lots of cheering and weeping. I don’t think I was aware that the next destination for Private Lunney would have been the Pacific. When Dad finally got back home, he had this big duffel bag full of standard gear, all of which we thought was really cool. Uncle Steve of the Seabees brought home koala bear stuffed animals and a boomerang from Australia. It had been damaged some, but we loved throwing it out in the field. It did not work like we saw in the movies, but it was fun trying.

After the war, Dad bought a large truck, like you might see in the U-Haul lot today. The cargo section was accessible from the cab and was good for traveling and camping. I don’t know how Dad swung the money; maybe his Army pay finally caught up with him. Either way, Dad wanted to go into the moving business and tried to get a license to start the business but he was never successful. The story that I understood was that the local cab company blocked any approval. Whatever the reason, Dad was very disappointed and we did not forgive the yellow cab company.

With no more submarines to build in Philly, we moved back to Scranton. Dad was going back to the mines.

When we moved back to Scranton, we rented the middle unit of a triplex in West Scranton at 1139 Eynon Street. This was probably in 1946 and we lived there for about five years. We went to school at St. Anne’s, which was a very large parish with a twelve-grade school. The nuns had different names than at St. Agatha’s, but they all went to the same training course. They looked the same and had the same three-sided rulers. (I make fun of what has become a stereotype of the nuns, but they were selfless teachers for generations of young kids and the world is now a poorer place as they and their schools become more rare.)

At St. Anne’s, I went in training to become an altar boy. The priest who led that instruction was Father John Mark. And he was a rigorous perfectionist and disciplinarian. But we really did learn the Mass and how to serve the priest who was conducting the service. Father John Mark drilled us on all the procedures and especially all the responses in Latin. Even today, I still find myself replying to myself in Latin to the prayers that the priest now says in English. And yes, I did get to try the wine.