<p>Add me in. My dad started work at Johnson Space Center in 1965. He had no college degree but was a radar operator trained in the Army. During the Gemini program he often spent missions “deployed” to a remote tracking station. Sometimes he was in Western Australia and sometimes on a Navy ship in the Pacific. </p>
<p>During the Apollo program, he ended up on a team monitoring the electrical systems on the Lunar Module (which they affectionately called “the Lem”). He was not in the main mission control room, but they had satellite control rooms outside the main one, and he worked in one of those during missions.</p>
<p>I don’t remember him being there when Mom got us up in the middle of the night to watch the landing. I’ll have to ask him if he was at Mission Control that night. I was 11 too, so I may not be remembering it right. :)</p>
<p>Dad moved into administrative management in the astronaut office and retired from NASA after 30 years of service. Pretty good for a guy with no degree! That would never happen these days.</p>
<p>But there’s more! My H got a job with NASA after leaving the Army 20 years ago. (Ok, yes…Dad did put in a good word for him there) H works in the Flight Operations Division and is a flight engineer on 2 of NASA’s aircraft.</p>
<p>I like to say that I am 2nd generation NASA!</p>
<p>“Funny that there are so many children of Apollo project people posting here.”</p>
<p>My dad fixed the teeth of the people who worked on the Apollo project. Does that count?? :D</p>
<p>It seems like most of the folks here are from Texas, but for those of the Cocoa Beach era…
There was a documentary I saw on TV some years ago, “Growing Up With Rockets”, didn’t win any Academy Awards or anything. For those who grew up in the space coast area, it’s kind of fun to watch- IF you can get your hands on it!</p>
<p>This is one of my favorite memories of my grandmother … she cried about the whole event. I asked why … she explained. </p>
<p>I was a child before there were jets, planes, or even cars … and I lived in such a remote section of the old country I never saw a train as a child just the donkees we used for transportation. Now as an old women I am watching a man walk on the moon … it’s unbelievable to think what has happened in my lifetime.</p>
<p>The Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs were responsible for me heading off to engineering school. Complex variable-plane calculus et alia were responsible for me heading out of engineering school at considerable velocity.</p>
<p>Ah Moon Day. How lucky for me. I was working for IBM that summer and wanted a day off to play in a golf tournament. Because I was a summer employee, my boss would not give it to me even though it would be unpaid. Well the Moon Day was announced and I offered to work on a skeleton shift that day and was able to play in the tourney.</p>
<p>I remember it as a rather steamy day out in the countrified burbs of Philadelphia. Watched the landing with the entire extended family, the kids running in and out, slamming screen doors and dripping orange popsicles on the floor. After the eagle landed safely, my tense, moved step father, an engineer who had an insight into the enormity of this moment, took off his glasses and wiped his eyes in relief… and maybe a bit in tears too.</p>
<p>In my 2nd grade Cocoa Beach (Freedom 7 Elementary SChool) class, we were divided up into “reading groups”, and that’s how the desks were arranged within the classroom. There were three reading groups- “Mercury”, “Gemini” and “Apollo”. I can’t remember now, but I believe the Mercury group were the <em>slow</em> readers, and Apollo the best readers.</p>
<p>The teachers and students made no bones about the fact that there was a visible, public reading hierarchy.</p>
<p>Other stuff we did that would never be allowed now:</p>
<p>Dodge Ball (the kind where you form a circle, and a group of kids stand in the middle and get pegged by flying balls)</p>
<p>Smear the Queer (a bastardized form of tackle football)</p>
<p>Archery during PE class (using real bows and arrows and straw targets) :eek:</p>
<p>Canoeing during PE- the school had a boathouse with about a dozen or so canoes and we’d go out 2-3 to a boat, toodling around the “thousand islands”. Invariably someone would end up falling out of their canoe, at the very least several kids would end up in ankle deep water somewhere along the way. Can anyone say “alligators and water moccasins?”</p>