Magnificent Desolation (30 page)

For the next few years we had to scramble back from the bottom to build a business of some sort, something that we hoped would allow us to live in a lifestyle at least somewhat similar to the one we had enjoyed during the first part of our marriage. Lois began taking the calls, wheeling and dealing with people or groups that wanted me to come to speak for them or to participate in some special event. Prior to being married to Lois, I had had a secretary come in every so often and simply write a bunch of “thanks, but no thanks” notes, turning down almost every invitation that came to me. I had not wanted to be a public person again.

But when Lois’s fortune was wiped out, we had to find some way to survive, and it seemed ridiculous to turn down offers from people who were willing to pay me to speak about what I loved talking about anyhow! So we started accepting a few speaking engagements. Lois and her daughter, Lisa Cannon, a Stanford graduate who had left the music business as a performer to work as an entertainment attorney, took care of the business side, negotiating the contracts, and helped me on the performance side to hone my presentations. Before long, I was busy on the speaker’s circuit. That year, with the book advance and a couple of extra endorsement deals that came along, we earned about $250,000. It was a good start, and we felt our lives were rich and full. We didn’t see ourselves as older or slowing down; we were healthy and excited about life.

My petite little platinum blonde beauty of a wife suddenly turned into a public-relations dynamo. “The business is Buzz!” she proclaimed, and indeed so it became. Lois encouraged me to do interviews and attend more social functions. She protected my reputation in every way, and just had a knack for helping me to be seen in the right places, at the right times. For my part, I loved it. I was the star performer, who just needed to show up on stage as the curtains parted, and did not need to concern myself with any of the logistics. Admittedly, there
were a few occasions when I balked, but every time we attended another event, it gave me more of a platform on which to talk about my ideas regarding space exploration. We rarely traveled simply for the sake of travel anymore. Now it was mainly for business. Lois’s father was delighted to see Lois in the business world—finally making that Stanford education pay off!

O
N
J
ANUARY
20, 1989, my fifty-ninth birthday, Lois and I went to Washington, D.C., to attend the inauguration of President George H. W. Bush. While we were there, Lois’s mother passed away, which was a blow to Lois; her mother was like a best friend. Fortunately, we were able to return to Phoenix immediately after the inauguration with the help of our friends Julia and Ambassador George Argyros, who flew us in their private jet to arrive just in time for the funeral. When Lois saw her mother in the casket, she fell apart, dissolving in tears. It was one of the few times since I’d known her that I had ever seen Lois break down. Her tears were genuine and she grieved for a season, but not without hope of being reunited in the hereafter, a belief with which she was raised in her family and church.

Six months later, on July 20, 1989, we were back in Washington, D.C., at the twentieth anniversary of the
Apollo 11
landing on the moon. I gave my pitch along with Neil and Mike on the steps at the Smithsonian in Washington, and listened as President Bush stated that America would move aggressively forward in space to do three things: first, complete the space station by 2000; second, go back to the moon, this time for keeps, by setting up a base there; and, third, begin missions to Mars. I was elated. This was good news indeed.

Unfortunately for the space program, the Democratic majority in Congress wanted to thwart Bush 41's plans any way they could, and that included stunting the enthusiasm for getting America’s space program back in gear. “How much does all this cost?” we heard over and over again. “Why should we spend all that money when there are so many pressing needs on Earth?”

A ninety-day feasibility study was done, with Congress concluding that the president’s plans were too expensive, and refusing to fund them. The $400-billion price tag was too outlandish, opponents said. America’s renewed thrust into space was dead on arrival.

Naturally, I was disappointed. But because of the lack of government support, I began ruminating more about commercial ventures, including space tourism. As I thought about matters, it seemed to me that ShareSpace, the organization I had envisioned several years earlier, was the way to get ordinary citizens into space. I felt sure that enthusiasm and excitement about the exploration of space were lying latent in American adventurers. All we needed to do was to find a way to help them make their dreams a reality. I had witnessed the United Airlines pilots’ excitement over wanting to fly the space shuttle; some companies even wanted to purchase a space shuttle for commercial use. I had known high-profile individuals like John Denver who had a desire to fly into space. I believed that if we could find a way to pay for it, people would want to travel into space and enjoy the experience firsthand. And I was convinced that I had come up with a plan to get them there.

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T
HE MORE I STUDIED THE COST OF SPACE TOURISM, THE MORE
I wondered if there was a better way than just offering seats on the space shuttle to rich people who could afford to spend $20 million or more. The number of those who could afford such an expenditure, while larger than one might think, is still relatively small compared to the people who would be interested in traveling into space if it were an attainable goal.

Even a price tag of $100,000 for a suborbital trip would be exorbitant for most, although I’m sure the seats would be in high demand for those wanting a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Nevertheless, I became more convinced that the lottery was the best way to get the “average Joe” involved, selling lottery tickets at a reasonably affordable price and offering various prizes leading up to the time when we could offer actual spaceflights. I kept talking about it everywhere I went, and increasingly people began to say, “Yes, why not?”

L
OIS AND
I were still living in Laguna Beach, but we weren’t there often. We crisscrossed the United States and hopscotched all around the globe. Traveling as much as Lois and I do sets you up for some unusual experiences. Once, on our way home from Europe, I stopped over
in Houston for some meetings. Lois decided to go directly to our home in Emerald Bay to do some catching up on our business with our secretary. It was October 1993, and fires were raging all along the California coastline beginning in the Thousand Oaks area of Los Angeles, and then jumping northward toward Santa Barbara. South of L.A., fires broke out in the Anaheim Hills and worked their way toward Laguna Beach. The line between houses that could be saved and those that were lost was determined often by only a few feet. In Laguna, the fires engulfed one home after another, many of which were valued in the millions of dollars. Fanned by the Santa Ana winds, shooting embers drifted from house to house, setting the roofs on fire and then quickly torching entire homes. Many of Laguna Beach’s residents had to flee in the face of the flames.

As the fires crept closer, Emerald Bay’s volunteer fire department issued an evacuation order. Lois’s secretary left immediately. Lois needed to evacuate, as well. The sky was dark, and Lois knew that fires were raging in Laguna Canyon; yet, she wasn’t too concerned or afraid. She assumed the danger was still a good distance away. But when she opened the front door that faced up the hill, she saw huge waves of flames widely surging over the top of the ridge, heading straight toward our home. The fire was only about six streets up from where Lois stood, dangerously close to the highest tier of hillside homes, moving fast, and consuming everything in its path.

Lois grabbed a large box of memorabilia that we had recently filled with some of my more precious items, including some of the envelopes that we had taken to the moon, signed by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and me, and some stamped envelopes that we had arranged to have canceled on the day of our lunar landing. Originally, my fellow astronauts and I had signed these “first day cover” envelopes as a sort of “insurance policy” for our families. When we went to the moon in 1969, NASA had no extra insurance built into its program to cover our families should anything catastrophic happen to us, so, as morbid as it might sound, we signed some of the envelopes and left them behind. Others we actually took with us to the moon. Upon our safe return, we
split up all the envelopes between us and signed each other’s while in quarantine. For some reason, rather than keeping the valuable treasures in a safe deposit box in a bank vault, Lois and I had simply put them in a box in the closet “for safekeeping.”

When it came time to escape the fires, Lois didn’t look for money, jewelry, or clothing. She left with only the clothes she was wearing and the one box containing the precious items that had flown all the way to the moon and back. She drove to the Balboa Bay Club where she was a member and could stay in one of the Bay Club rooms for the night.

More than fourteen fires raged around Los Angeles and Orange County Not one had yet been brought under control, despite firefighters using helicopters to dump huge loads of water and planes to drop chemical fire retardant. The flames burned all around our home, too, gutting expensive houses only a few yards away.

The following day, Lois awakened not knowing whether our home had survived. Logic told her to expect the worst, but she continued to hope for the best. That afternoon, Lois received a call from Stone Philips, a reporter from NBC’s
Dateline.
Stone asked if he could pick her up the next morning and take her to Laguna to tour the region and do an interview for
Dateline
in some of the burned-out areas. Lois wasn’t thrilled about being on nationwide TV without makeup and in the same casual clothes she had been wearing the day before, but it was an opportunity to check on our home, so she agreed. No vehicles were allowed on the Pacific Coast Highway except those of firefighters and reporters. Once they entered Emerald Bay, to her great relief Lois saw that our home was still standing, with only a bit of roof damage. The two houses next to ours were burned down completely, but our home, with the rest of my Apollo 11 moon paraphernalia inside, was intact.

I arrived back in California the following evening, and met Stone Philips and Lois at our home. He wanted to film me being greeted by Lois with the good news that the house was okay. Our home had been saved, we learned, because the Emerald Bay fire chief had stood on the roof with a garden hose, watering it down to battle the flames. As
deeply grateful as we were to him, we were commensurately saddened for our friends who had lost so much—more than sixty homes had been destroyed in Emerald Bay alone, with nearly four hundred lost in surrounding Laguna Beach.

Furniture, clothes, even the house itself could be replaced, but those envelopes and other Apollo 11 items could never be duplicated. One of our first stops the following day was at the bank, where we deposited my moon memorabilia in a safe deposit box.

For once, it felt good to simply stay at home.

Shortly thereafter, I completed my book
Encounter with Tiber
, a science fiction novel of epic proportions involving space travel to the stars. I had been ruminating about the story line and characters since the mid-seventies. In
Encounter with Tiber
, I included in fictional form many of my ideas for space travel in the next millenium. The futuristic spaceships I envisioned, that flew by solar winds close to the speed of light, were actually based on the science as we understood it at the time. No warp-speeding through wormholes. My story line in
Tiber
was what I like to call “science-fact-fiction,” incorporating full appreciation for the physical laws of the universe, combined with a healthy dose of imagination. I grew up on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon stories that seemed outlandish when I first read them, but today might seem terribly blasé. If our minds can conceive it, the possibility exists that we can do it.

L
OIS WAS COMMITTED
to keeping her promise to me, to learn how to scuba dive. On one of our first scuba-diving trips together, she and I were in Australia on Hamilton Island, where she took a five-day scuba-diving course. For her initial dive, we weren’t far off Hamilton Island, but it was at night. I thought,
Well, Lois is doing great, and she’s a fast learner, and we do have some time, so why not go for a dive?
Lois had never before had on scuba gear outside of a swimming pool or just off the beach, certainly never out in the open sea. But I had confidence in her, and felt she could do it.

We went out on the boat just after sundown, as the moon was coming up. We plunged into the water in the dark with our only light coming from the moon, our flashlights, and some floodlights shining down off the boat.

Lois started out courageously, but under the surface in the darkness she became disoriented. Floundering around for a few minutes was enough for her. Within a short time, she signaled me that she was returning to the boat. It wasn’t the longest dive, but it was a great first effort on her part.

On another of Lois’s early dives, we were in the Caribbean off the coast of Florida with Jimmy Johnson, former coach of the Dallas Cowboys, and about twenty other people who were treasure-recovery specialists. The group was dredging for rare coins and gold bullion. On one of the days while the others were treasure-hunting, Lois and I went for a dive alone. We dove in a shallow area only about twenty-five feet deep, but the currents were brisk.

We were underwater for about forty-five minutes when Lois looked up and couldn’t see our boat. She poked my arm and nodded toward the surface. We both surfaced, and when I looked up, much to my dismay, I saw that the boat was about a mile away. We had drifted in the current during our dive, and hadn’t even been aware of it. We tried to get somebody’s attention aboard the boat, but with the whitecaps rising higher at the end of the day, our efforts were in vain.

“We’re going to have to swim for it, Lois,” I said.

“What?” I wasn’t sure if it was surprise or sheer horror in her voice, but time was of the essence.

“No time to explain,” I said, “but I think we can make better time swimming underwater.” We put on our masks, and dove below the surface, swimming as hard as we could, trying to catch the boat. Swimming against the current was extremely tiring. Then our air ran out, and we had to swim on the surface, making it even more difficult. My heart was pounding, and I’m sure Lois’s was, too. Our energy was dissipating rapidly. Finally somebody aboard the boat saw us, and realized that we were in trouble. The boat swung around hard, and within a few
minutes we were clambering on board. That ended Lois’s interest in scuba diving for a while.

When she finally consented to give it another try, we were on a Sea Space Symposium dive off the Mexican coast of Baja, California, in which the guys were off on one dive and the women were on a supposedly tamer version of it. Lois, in her zebra-striped wetsuit, was trying desperately to follow the directions of the divemaster in the heavy seas. They dropped a rope line to the bottom as the women made their way down to where they were going to begin exploring underwater. As Lois and the women were waiting at the bottom, they suddenly saw a school of about ten hammerhead sharks passing by just a few feet away. The divemaster signaled to be still, and the lady divers froze. The moment the sharks passed by, the women made a beeline back up the rope and tumbled into the boat.

When the men returned, I told Lois, “We barely saw a thing.”

Lois had seen all she needed to see. Over time, however, she developed a love for scuba diving and became my best diving buddy.