Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (45 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

 

Page 246
public tour following the mission. "I look forward to the creation of an international outpost on the moon," he told an audience in Paris .
36
In Germany he said that space exploration "will teach us that we are first and foremost not Germans or Russians or Americans but earthmen."
37
Borman said this with the same cheerful goodwill that had led him to speak words in lunar orbit to include as many people as possible. Furthermore, he spoke in the conviction that somehow the Soviet dictatorship had to be defeated, and perhaps by offering a carrot instead of a stick he might help in that defeat.
Nonetheless, his words contributed to the idea that there was no qualitative difference between the free capitalist American vision and the state-run, communist vision, that the defense of individual freedom was less important than world peace and world cooperation. In the ensuing years this idea has grown so strong that it has almost become impermissible to be proud of our traditions, our unique freedoms and successes.
38
Instead, cultural pressure insists that we promote the idea that borders are unimportant and all souls and cultures must be merged into a single global village, as seen from Apollo 8.
39
And yet, does this "one world" vision accurately portray our earthbound existence? Or is human experience far more complex?
Less than two months after landing in the Pacific, Frank Borman and his family were touring Europe as representatives of the U.S. Government. They visited London, Paris, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. In Rome, Pope Paul VI sat and spoke with them for over an hour.
In West Berlin, Borman found a changed city from his last visit in 1949. The ruins were gone, the poverty and starvation forgotten. Instead he saw a vibrant city filled with skyscrapers and wealth.
And yet, the Cold War still dominated the view out his hotel window. Despite the vision of single, unified earth that Apollo 8 portrayed, here was illustrated a contrast that was as stark and plain as night and day.
One night the Borman family went for dinner in their hotel's penthouse restaurant. From their table they had a clear view over the city. To the west was a bright and glittering jewel, the lights of West Berlin twinkling gaily. To the east was darkness and stillness, the drab streets of East Berlin

 

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cloaked in gloom. And at the dividing line was a barbed wire and concrete wall, lit by guard towers and searchlights.
Despite its appearance as a single globe from the distance of the moon, up close that blue-and-white earth still held upon it some brutal differences.

 

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Chapter Fourteen
This Is Now
Family
On January 30, 1998 Jim and Marilyn Lovell joined their son Jay, now forty-two, for the groundbreaking of a new restaurant in the northern Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. Marilyn found the site, Jim financed the construction, and Jay would be the chef.
While Jim Lovell had always known what he wanted to do with his life, Jay Lovell had spent many years searching for something that would infuse his life with a similar joy. After graduating from the Houston Academy of Art he became an illustrator, working first at NASA, and then for the
Houston Chronicle
. Then he tried running his own graphic design company, but found the work unfulfilling, both financially and creatively.
He had always loved cooking, and one day decided he'd like to try doing this for a living. He applied and was accepted to the Culinary School at Kendall College in Evanston, Illinois. To his delight and pleasure he quickly found himself ranked first in his class. Soon he was an executive chef, winning awards at several different high-class restaurants in the Chicago area.

 

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Now he and his father were business partners. Their restaurant, "Lovell's Lake Forest Inn" opened in the fall of 1998, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the flight of Apollo 8. In it the Lovell family showcases Jim Lovell's space career and Jay Lovell's cooking talents. "This restaurant will be open for as long as I am alive," says Jay.
For Jim Lovell, the flight of Apollo 8 made remarkably little difference to his life. As soon as the parades and parties ended, Jim returned to the program.
Why stop now, after getting within seventy miles of the moon's surface?
he thought. He became a backup to Apollo 11, which put him in the ideal position to get the assignment as commander for Apollo 13, scheduled to land on the moon sometime in the next two years. He would then become the fifth man to walk on the surface of another world.
Unfortunately, halfway to the moon Apollo 13's oxygen tank exploded. To get the men home alive and unharmed demanded tremendous patience and technical skill, both by the astronauts themselves and their colleagues at NASA.
This meant, however, that Jim Lovell would never walk on the moon. In the 1970's the American space program was dying, and Jim could see that it might be years, if ever, that he would fly into space again. He decided it was time to leave NASA and try his hand in private enterprise. He went looking for something new to do with his life.
For four years he was president of a tugboat business in the Houston area. Then he became president of a telecommunications firm, selling business phone systems in the Southwest. Later, he was executive vice president for Cintol Corporation, which had purchased his Houston company. He and Marilyn moved back to the Midwest where they both had grown up, and built a home in the suburbs north of Chicago. As the years passed, the Lovells faded into the pleasant but obscure life of middle America. Once in a while a reporter would call to ask them about Jim's Apollo missions, but in general it seemed the country had lost interest in space. Jim and Marilyn watched their children grow up and go out on their own, becoming ordinary Americans in the never-ending, always changing American landscape.
Finally, Jim decided to sit down with writer Jeffrey Kluger and write
Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13
. Even if he couldn't fly again,

 

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The Lovell family, 1997. Jim and Marilyn Lovell are in the back 
row, on the left. Barbara Lovell stands in front of Marilyn, with 
Jay Lovell to the right in the center of the picture. Susan Lovell 
is in front of Jay wearing vest, and Jeffrey Lovell is directly 
behind Susan in the black shirt. Credit: Lovell
perhaps in telling a new generation the thrilling story of his last flight to the moon he could generate some new interest in space exploration.
The book became a movie,
Apollo 13,
and eventually sold over a million copies. Though Jim Lovell would certainly not take full credit for the recent renewal in American space exploration, he surely has the right to claim some of the accolades.
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For Lovell, the flight of Apollo 8 did little to change his religious beliefs. ''Going to the moon to me was not a religious event," he explains. To him, if you believed in God you could find Him anywhere, either on earth or in a tiny capsule floating in the darkness of space. Two hundred forty thousand miles was "just a drop in the bucket" for an entity that had created the entire universe.
To Bill Anders, however, his journey to the moon radically changed his outlook on life and religion. Ironically, while the world was celebrating the astronauts' affirmation of spirituality, the flight had undercut Anders' own faith in Catholicism. The vast emptiness of space made the Catholic rituals he had obeyed faithfully since childhood seem insufficient to him. "We're like ants on a log," he explained. "How could any earth-centered religious ritual know what God's truth is?"
His doubt made it impossible for him to perform these rituals with his same past sincerity. Consequently, he simply stopped doing them. He ceased attending church.
This change caused some family problems, though fewer than might have been expected. Valerie herself had had increasing doubts about their religion, even before the flight. She disagreed with the Catholic Church's opposition to contraception. Even more disturbing to her was her knowledge of women who had been able to shop around and find a Catholic priest who would sanction their use of birth control pills. Such arrangements made Valerie doubt the Church's sincerity.
Yet she also wondered how she as a parent could raise her children without some greater guiding principles for explaining right and wrong. "Without religion you lose the security of a church helping you raise a child. You're left on your own, trying to explain a lot of difficult ideas without support."
Valerie worried that Bill's abandonment of religion might alter the sanctity of their marriage. They had been married in accordance with the Church's rules, "until death do us part" as it were. Would those rules still hold if they no longer believed in Catholicism?
They talked about it at length. Finally they decided that they could still lead an upright, virtuous life, even if they did so without the Catholic Church. Bill would honor their marriage, regardless, Valerie knew. As

 

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The Anders family 1995. Left to right, Glen Anders is second on the left, standing 
with Valerie to his right holding grandchild. To her right wearing white hat is Greg 
Anders. Diana Anders wears ten gallon hat in center. Bill Anders, in white hat 
and vest stands with Alan Anders to his left behind him and Gayle Anders to 
his right wearing white hat. Eric Anders is on far right.Credit: Anders
astronaut Walt Cunningham had written, Anders belonged (as did Frank Borman) to the "end of the spectrum [of] guys so straight that you didn't know whether to admire them or have them stuffed and shipped to the Smithsonian Institution as the last of a vanishing species."
1
When their last child, Diana, was born in 1972, they raised her outside any organized religion, dealing with the problems this caused as they came up. "Diana would wonder why her friends were going to church, and we weren't," Valerie explained. She told her daughter that just as Valerie's parents had allowed her to choose her faith, the Anderses were allowing Diana to do the same.
While Bill Anders very much wanted to walk on the moon like Jim Lovell, the likelihood of his doing so was slimmer. After Apollo 8 he was assigned to the position of command module pilot, working backup for Apollo 11 and prime crew on Apollo 13. This assignment meant, however,

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