Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (17 page)

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Page 82

1953. Blanch Lovell holding Barbara, flanked
by Marilyn and Jim. Credit: Lovell

By this time the Lovells had three children, Barbara, nine, Jay, seven, and Susan, four. Marilyn went to inspect the local rural school that they would attend, finding a old brick school with bare planks for a floor. The children wore cutoff jeans and were barefoot. The teacher had a paddle hanging on the wall for discipline. "I was mortified," she remembered. Though Marilyn sent her children there at first, she along with the wave of new settlers from NASA, including scientists, astronauts, engineers, and designers quickly brought change to this roughhewn setting. Soon a new public school was built, with modern facilities.

Next Marilyn started looking for a church to join. Though Jim had been raised Presbyterian and Marilyn was Lutheran, several of her new neighbors told her about a little country Episcopal church about ten miles to the north in a small town called La Porte.

St. John's Church was a small brick building located on the town's main street. Its priest, Donald M. Raish, had spent most of the nearly fifty

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years of his life working in the Episcopal Church of the American Southwest. He had just become rector at St. John's.

The Lovells liked both this church and its soft-spoken rector, and quickly became church members.

The Bormans meanwhile were still living in a rented house in Houston, waiting for their new house in El Lago to be finished. It was Christmas 1962, and they felt isolated living in a city. Both preferred the close-knit community of a military base.

Each Sunday evening they would go to a nearby Houston Episcopal church for services. One Sunday another couple came up to them after church. "We know who
you
are!" the woman said with a grin. Jim and Margaret Elkins lived in Houston with their own three children, and had noticed how alone the Bormans seemed. They invited Frank and Susan to their home to have Christmas dinner. Very quickly the two couples hit it off, becoming close friends. They spent almost every weekend together, going to high school football games or to the Elkins's lake house north of Houston to get away.

At the same time, Susan Borman joined several other astronaut wives to create what they called an astronaut wives' club. Even if they no longer lived on a military base with its community and traditions they could still recreate these in a civilian setting. They published a mimeographed newsletter and scheduled group activities for themselves and their families.

Soon what had been cowfields in the Texas countryside was a thriving American town, no different from a hundred thousand other communities across the nation.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

While the Bormans and Lovells were settling into the more comfortable but hectic public life of an astronaut's family, Bill Anders was still struggling to get into the test pilot program. The Anders were now at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio where Bill attended the Air Force Institute of Technology.

Not only did Bill work like mad taking nuclear engineering, he went to night school at Ohio State, studying aircraft stability and control. He also

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rose early each morning and went flying for several hours before breakfast, just to log more flight time.

They now had three children, Alan, five, Glen, four, and Gayle, one, and were living in their first home, a four bedroom brick "palace" purchased for under $15,000.

Each night Bill and a number of the other student officers would gather in his study. Valerie would bring them food and coffee, and for hours they would review physics and engineering problems.

Bill's schedule was so tight that the only break he took was fifteen minutes each evening to eat dinner and watch the news. Sometimes one-year-old Gayle would crawl to Bill's study door, lie on her belly and put her hands through the gap at the base of the door. Bill would see her fingers, come out to hold her for a while, then go back inside.

For Valerie, the price of marrying a man who wanted to be an astronaut was as hard and unrelenting as her husband's schedule. She, like Marilyn and Susan, tolerated miserable living conditions in the 1950's in order to further her husband's career. At Bill's first assignment in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, the couple lived for a time in a tiny one-room storefront office, with no air conditioning and the only bedroom window made of glass bricks that couldn't open. This was just as well, as the bedroom faced the town's main street and "there was a cricket epidemic," Valerie remembered. "The whole town was filled with black crickets everywhere." Valerie, used to the comfortable San Diego climate, soon developed a kidney infection which was followed by infectious mononucleosis.

Nor were the sacrifices she and the other wives faced merely discomfort and meager living conditions. They also sacrificed careers and university degrees. All three women attended college something few were able to do in the 1950's. Wherever Valerie lived she enrolled at the nearest university, taking courses from astronomy to oceanography, simply because the subjects interested her. Later, when NASA did a background check on her husband to see if he was qualified to become an astronaut, it also investigated Valerie, making sure that she, like Marilyn and Susan, could handle the pressures and challenges she was certain to face. Just as he had to measure up, so did she.

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February, 1959. Valerie Anders lived in her grandmother's
home in San Diego while Bill was stationed in Iceland. She
holds Alan, with her grandmother Babette Prasser on the left
and her mother Elsie Hoard on the right, holding Glen.
Credit: Anders

The women accepted these sacrifices for the sake of their husbands and children. They knew that the men they loved were unique, destined to achieve great things. And they knew that if they did their part, their respective spouse's achievements might even be greater, for themselves and their nation.

For the Anderses, the sacrifices and hard work paid off. Bill graduated from the Institute of Technology with high honors and, having finally obtained the advanced degree that the test pilots' school at Edwards demanded, he went back to reapply.

In the interim two years, however, the test pilot school had changed the rules. Now they didn't want schooling, they wanted pilots with lots of flying experience. Had he not gone to school the last two years he would have been a shoo-in. Once again he was locked out.

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Nonetheless, he kept applying. The family moved to Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico where Bill became an engineer and flight instructor. There, he and a friend periodically took a plane and flew to Edwards to schmooze and play politics. Sometimes he flew demonstrations, even repeating the flying maneuvers required by the entrance exam.

He might not have the flying time they wanted, but he could do anything in the air that anyone else could do. Bill Anders was determined not to take no for an answer.

Berlin

On August 13th, 1962, the first anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall passed. Several thousand demonstrators gathered along the wall, throwing bottles and stones at the East German guards. At one point the crowd threw a paving stone through the window of the Soviet Intourist travel agency, located near the wall in West Berlin. The East Germans in turn responded with tear gas and water cannon.

Few in America noticed. Two days earlier, on August 11th, the United States had been shocked by yet another Soviet first in space. In less than twenty-four hours the Soviets had launched their third and fourth cosmonauts into space. For three days Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich orbited the earth, talking and actually singing duets as their separate capsules passed each other in space.

Once again American commentators were appalled at the seemingly insurmountable Soviet lead in space. Not only had the communists launched two rockets in quick succession, they kept two men in space for just under three and four days respectively, and their craft actually seemed to demonstrate an ability to perform a rendezvous in space.* Near the beginning of their mission the spacecraft were only four miles apart, and the cosmonauts reported they were close enough to see each other's capsule.


* Though Soviet newspapers made this claim, neither craft had the ability to maneuver in space, and were never piloted towards each other.

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A few commentators wondered whether Khrushchev had deliberate timed the two space shots to occur during the Berlin Wall's first anniversary. Whatever his intentions, the space flights certainly dominated world news. With the safe return of the cosmonauts on August 15th the Soviet government triumphed their success, noting that ''communism is scoring one victory after another in its peaceful competition with capitalism."
¹⁸The New York Times
, meanwhile, editorialized that "The Jules Verne journey of the two Soviet cosmonauts now safely back from their rendezvous in space . . . is a spectacular accomplishment, an amazing feat."
¹⁹

While cosmonauts Nikolivich and Popovich were being lauded and celebrated in Moscow, two East Berliners decided they would make their own statement about the merits of communism.

Peter Fechter, 18, a construction worker in East Berlin, had had enough of living behind the wall. As he wrote to his sister (who had fled to West Berlin in 1956), "Those swine have stepped up our work quotas again so we lose fifty to sixty pfennigs an hour and have to work ten hours to earn what we used to make in 8 1/2."
²⁰

On August 17th, four days after the wall's first anniversary and two days after the return of the cosmonauts, he and co-worker Helmet Kulbeik broke for lunch, a meal of boiled bacon and potatoes. It was the first time he had had bacon in four months.

Then the two men walked over to a part of the wall very close to Checkpoint Charlie, the one remaining border crossing between West and East Berlin. Two days earlier they had scouted out the area and discovered a construction crew hard at work renovating an abandoned building that abutted the wall. Because the two youths also wore construction clothes, no one had questioned them as they entered the building and wandered from floor to floor. To their surprise, one ground floor window facing the Berlin Wall was not bricked up but was instead blocked only with barbed wire and wooden planks.

Now they entered again and went straight to that window. They ripped out the boards and pulled the barbed wire clear.

Before them was the hundred foot-wide barricade of barbed wire rolls leading to the eight-foot-high wire fence of the wall. Patrolling that death

BOOK: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8

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