Falling to Earth (2 page)

I was angry with myself. I had been involved in something wrong and I knew it. But I was also mad at the world. I had ended up at this low point simply because I had nodded my head at a social evening and agreed to go along with a plan that I had no part in creating. All I had done, I fumed to myself, was trust my colleagues. I had been far too naïve, and now I was an outcast.

That day in the summer of 1972 was the beginning of a long journey for me. As I clawed my way back to self-respect and the understanding of my peers, a sense of duty kept me from telling my painful story of disgrace and redemption. Recently, however, my feelings have changed. If I don’t tell this story myself, completely and with raw honesty, then all anyone will know about me will be an incomplete story told only by others. What really happened to me and why? It’s time for me to explain.

I’m nearing eighty and, like most aviators, I think I’ll live forever. Yet I am told I won’t. It is time for me to set the record straight. Along the way, I’ll share some adventure stories with you. Flying to the moon is one of the most incredible things that could happen to anyone. I am lucky it happened to me.

CHAPTER 1
FARMER

O
nly twenty-four humans have left Earth orbit and journeyed to the moon. I’m one of them. It’s an exclusive club, so small that I am still surprised they let me in. After all, hundreds of people have traveled into space. Yet most spacefarers have never strayed beyond low Earth orbit. Our little group traveled a great deal farther—more than a thousand times farther.

The size of our group hasn’t grown because no one has returned to the moon. In fact, our number has dwindled to eighteen as my friends and colleagues pass away. I sometimes think we will all be gone by the time humans return there.

We went to the moon in an exceedingly brief span of four hurried years, four decades ago. As time passes, I realize more than ever just how special our experience was. Yet we were not particularly extraordinary people. We just happened to have the right flying and engineering skills when NASA needed to get to the moon. In short, we were lucky.

Even if I had known that there would one day be astronauts, and that I might wish to become one, when I was growing up there was no way of learning how. In fact, when I was born, there were no such people as astronauts, nor rockets able to reach into space. I grew up in a place that was about as far away from that high-tech world as it is possible to imagine: a rural childhood in 1930s Michigan.

My earliest memories are of our tiny farmhouse just outside of the city of Jackson. My older sister, Sally, arrived first in 1931. I was the first son, born within a year. Carolyn, my little sister, came along less than two years after me. For about seven years it was just us three. I think my parents, Merrill and Helen, thought they were done. Then, to our surprise, they produced three kid brothers for us, Jim, Jerry, and Peter, and our big, cozy family was complete.

I was born into a farming family. My mother’s parents, Fred and Frances Crowell, lived on their own farm outside of the small town of East Jordan, hundreds of miles closer to the northern tip of the state. I spent so much time there as well as on our own farm that both of them felt like home to me. The weather at my grandparents’ farm was much colder and more extreme than at our farm in Jackson, and yet we would journey there every time I was out of school. I remember, when I was very young, my parents drove our Chevrolet sedan north to try to reach the farm in the middle of winter. What a mistake. With no heat in the car, we kids were bundled up in the back seat under a thick pile of blankets. We made it as far as two miles out of East Jordan before the snowdrifts became too high. We had to retreat to town and stay with an aunt until the snowplows could clear the roads.

I learned a lot of family stories when we stayed with my grandparents. Economic times had forced my folks to live on that farm for a couple of seasons. They had married in the late 1920s right as the Great Depression hit. When I was born, money and jobs were scarce in Jackson so my parents moved to East Jordan. I doubt my mother minded the move. She had grown up on her parents’ farm and loved it. She was very much like her mother, and I recall them working side by side every day in the fruit and vegetable gardens. White-haired, heavyset, tough as nails, Grandma Frances was dark skinned from working in the sun all day. She told everyone what to do; she ruled the roost.

But as hard as my mother and grandmother worked, neither of them kept up with my Grandpa Fred, who loved his farm like nothing else in life. Born in Canada, in his youth he worked as a lumberjack, one of the toughest, most physically demanding jobs there is. He might have stayed a lumberjack if a huge tree hadn’t fallen the wrong way and crushed his ankle. Although the injury eventually healed, it ended that career.

My grandfather was still in his teens, so he walked over the Canadian border to the northern part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to stake out and homestead 160 acres of land. He never took out citizenship papers and never dared to revisit Canada, worried he might not be allowed back to the States. But people vouched for him, so he obtained a Social Security number, a driver’s license, and everything else he needed, without ever getting caught. He even married the daughter of a German-American family from a farm just down the road. Nevertheless, Grandpa Fred was an illegal immigrant.

Grandpa looked exactly how I imagined Santa Claus would, except without a beard. White-haired with blue eyes and rosy cheeks, he dressed in overalls and smoked a pipe. He had a particular farm smell about him, even when he’d cleaned up after a hard day’s work. Warm hay, a dusting of manure, and the heavy odor of fresh milk were all bound together with fragrant pipe smoke. I loved that smell, because I loved him.

He spent his life clearing his farmland. It was not very fertile; tens of thousands of years earlier, glaciers had scraped away the rich topsoil, leaving weak rubble-filled dirt in their wake. But Grandpa was persistent; it was him versus the rocks in his fields. I would help him with his team of horses as they pulled a low, flat trailer with skids called a stone boat. With it, he methodically picked up rocks and stones, slowly improving the land.

My Grandpa Fred, a lifelong farmer

A gentle soul, Fred greeted the world with a jolly smile. People can sense a nice person; so can cows. He had all of his dairy herd named, and when he called Bessie, Hazel, and Mabel, they would eagerly come to him. He always had a little treat in his pocket for them, and for his horses, too. Even the feral cats loved him. Wild and wary, they were only tolerated because they caught rats. But when Grandpa milked a cow, the cats would approach him mewling, and he’d squirt milk right from the teat into their mouths.

Grandpa was part of a community of poor but supportive farmers. At harvesttime, if another farmer was shorthanded when the time came to thresh wheat and oats or to raise a new barn, he could count on Grandpa. I wanted to be just like my grandfather when I grew up. He had no money to speak of, but acted as though he was a rich man. And he was. Rich in contentment, he was happy with who he was and what he did. I especially admired his independence. He was very social and loved by everyone, but he didn’t
need
anyone else to be happy. He just—was.

I loved being with Grandpa. My own father had a more difficult time on the farm. Living on that farm was his idea of hell. I later learned how depressed he’d been by the forced move. He hated farm work, and it showed. My grandparents noticed, and grew increasingly unimpressed with his rejection of their farming life. I was sad to hear stories of my father so out of his element and unhappy. Circumstances had parachuted him into my mother’s family without any support. They had grown up with one set of rules in life. His were entirely different.

My father looked typically Dutch—pale, with white-blond hair in a brush cut. He was six feet tall and chubby all his life. The whole town of Jackson knew him, and what did they call him? Tiny. It was a loving tease. He was unremarkable, the kind of man who could blend into a crowd: pleasant to everybody and comfortable to be around. This softhearted, jovial guy always had a twinkle in his large blue eyes.

Orphaned at the age of four when his parents died in a car accident, my dad was raised by his gruff Uncle Dick on a pig and apple farm in northern Michigan. He’d had enough of farm life by the time I was born. Growing up, I saw him as a gentleman farmer, the type who owns a farm but never works on it. Dad was more technically oriented; his life revolved around electronics. He owned a small repair shop in Jackson and was good at fixing radios. In fact, my dad built the town’s first radio station, and worked for a while as the late-night talk host. He was curious to see how far he could boost the radio signal from the station, and had his answer one day when he received a postcard from a listener—in Australia.

My father’s electrical work earned the family a little money, and he enjoyed his machines and the slow, careful work of repairing. A bit of a dreamer, he had lots of ideas that he wanted to develop. He even designed and built a tape recorder and player long before they were commercially available, but because he tinkered away by himself, nothing ever came of it.

Before I was born, Dad had helped to install the projectors and sound system in Jackson’s big movie theater downtown. While he worked as the projectionist, my parents lived in an apartment over the theater. This was the kind of life he enjoyed: studying electronics and taking exams. After he spooled up a projection reel, he had a precious half hour of undisturbed study time before he needed to change it over. But then came the Depression. People in Jackson gave up luxuries like movies. To my father’s despair, the movie theater shut down for many years, forcing him back into farming.

My father didn’t ask too much of us kids. He would discipline me on occasion, but it wasn’t his nature. My mother was the strict one. She ran the family, while Dad worked in town. Short and dark-haired, she was a loving, supportive parent. Yet she could also be sharp edged, sharp tongued, and demanding. This wasn’t a bad thing. She had high expectations and she pushed us kids hard. When her dark eyes fixed on me, I immediately thought about what I might have done wrong.

Considering her tough upbringing, I could hardly blame her. She was a farm girl, reared in the country with no modern amenities. She grew up a hardy pioneer. The Depression was just another kick in the teeth. No matter how much her life improved after that time, she always thought, dressed, and acted the same. Her hair was tied back or cut short, her clothes practical, and she met the world head on. Life is hard, she would tell us—it takes a lot of work to get someplace in life, and you kids will start
right now
.

My mother was working in Jackson as a secretary when she met my father. I’m told my father was kind of a dandy. He strutted around in white suits and changed his shirt about three times a day. Why that pretty young woman chose him, I’ll never understand. I do know my mother thought she could change him into a hardworking farmer, pitching hay ten hours a day. That never happened because he never stopped being a city guy.

When the movie theater reopened at long last and my father had steady paid work again, he gave his paycheck right to my mother. She took care of all the money. That arrangement worked well; otherwise he’d fritter it away on electronic playthings. She, on the other hand, squeezed every penny until it was paper, and we did very well by it.

She’d frequently be annoyed when Dad wouldn’t do farm work and other chores. But he just breezed through it in his easygoing way and rarely lost his temper. Over time, however, the nitpicking would wear at him until he’d had enough, so about once a year he’d blow sky high. That blowup would end the nitpicking for six months or so. They never seemed like a particularly romantic couple; their marriage felt more like a business arrangement. But then again, those six kids had to come from somewhere.