Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (8 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

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

 

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person he called. And though they dated, the relationship did not have its previous spark. Susan kept her distance. She wasn't going to be fooled again.
By the time of Frank's senior year in 1950 Susan was attending the University of Pennsylvania, studying dental hygiene. Several times he invited her to visit him at West Point, and she had gone. She still liked Frank despite everything, and could not make a clean break. Yet, she was also involved with another Pennsylvania student, and that relationship was starting to get serious.
Frank decided he simply didn't have a chance with Susan. After trying for two years to change her mind he had failed. It was time to move on and start dating other women. He called up a woman he had known in high school and asked her to come to West Point for a date. Not long after he gave her a ring and arranged for their wedding at the West Point Chapel when he graduated in June.
It wasn't right. In all the years at West Point he had not been able to get Susan out of his system. Within weeks he canceled the wedding, telling the woman that their fleeting engagement had been a big mistake. ''I was a jerk," he admits humbly. He wrote Susan to invite her to come to his graduation.
She meanwhile had broken up with the dentistry student. She too couldn't get Frank Borman from her mind. Yet, when Frank asked her to come to his graduation but didn't mention anything about marriage Susan had finally had enough. She decided to take a big gamble. She told him "No." She went home to Tucson, hoping that by playing hard to get this last time she might at last get
him
. "I was terrified it wouldn't work."
Graduation at West Point was an important day in Frank Borman's life. And yet, he was unsatisfied. All the other graduates seemed to have fiancées. He was alone.
He knew now how much he needed Susan. As he and his parents made the long drive back to Tucson, he decided that he wouldn't take no for an answer, that merely getting together with Susan was insufficient. He was determined that she should be his wife.
Frank Borman was genuinely surprised how easy it was to convince Susan to change her mind and marry him. She only smiled slyly and said yes. She knew that the convincing had really been done by her.

 

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July 20, 1950. Frank and Susan Borman on their wedding 
day, Tucson, Arizona. 
Credit: Borman
On July 20th, 1950, in a church in Tucson, Frank Borman and Susan Bugbee became husband and wife, forming a partnership that was to last for the rest of their lives.
Lovell
The waters of the western Pacific were cold and dark, and the night sky was black. At 1,500 feet, Jim Lovell had no idea where he was, and had no way of finding out. The instrument lights on his cockpit dashboard had failed and his radio homing beacon wasn't working. Somewhere in that blackness was his landing field, a tiny aircraft carrier only a few hundred feet long. If

 

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Lovell failed to find this target, he'd have to ditch his plane and parachute into the bone-chilling waters of the Pacific.
The year was 1955, and Jim Lovell was making his first nighttime landing on an aircraft carrier over foreign waters.
As a child Lovell had been captivated by space and rockets. He would read the comic books of his time, showing Superman and Captain Marvel doing fantastic deeds, and he would draw his own imagined rockets and planes. He was mesmerized by Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Jules Verne. And he would listen enthralled as his uncle, a navy pilot who had fought in World War I, told him stories of dogfights over the fields of France.
Fascinated with astronomy and space, young Lovell studied the stars and constellations. He read how astronomers had only recently discovered that the universe was much vaster than they had thought, comprised of endless numbers of grand galaxies.
Like Frank Borman, Jim Lovell's family was poor and struggling. His father, James Lovell, Sr., had been a coal furnace salesman in Philadelphia. When his father was killed in a car accident, Blanch Lovell suddenly became a poor widow with a twelve-year-old son and no means of support. She moved to Milwaukee to work as a secretary for her brother, who sold and marketed the same furnaces there. She and Jim settled into a tiny one-room apartment. The kitchen was in a closet, the beds folded up against the walls, and the bathroom was down the hall and shared by all the tenants.
Though they didn't have much, Blanch Lovell made sure that Jim had everything necessary to become whatever he wanted to be. By the time Lovell was seventeen, he had graduated from comics and books and was building his own model airplanes, flying them in an empty lot across the street from his apartment house. He and some high school friends even tried to build a homemade rocket. They had started out trying to construct a liquid-fueled engine, then switched to a dry-fueled solid rocket because it was easier and cheaper. They purchased gunpowder, packed it inside a cardboard tube so that it would burn instead of explode. For a fuse they used a soda straw filled with gunpowder and inserted into the rocket's tail end.
On launch day his mother watched from their apartment window, feeling both feat and pride. She could see her son and his friends in the lot

 

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across the street. She saw Jim prop the rocket against a rock, crouch down to light the fuse, then run for cover behind some nearby rocks. Seconds later the missile ignited, hurling itself high into the air with a high-pitched whistle and a bright flash. Then it exploded with a bang.
Also watching from Jim's apartment was fourteen-year-old Marilyn Gerlach. Earlier that year Jim, the sophisticated high school junior, had noticed this bright eyed thoughtful girl in the school cafeteria. Several times he had asked her if she would go on a date with him, but she had always said no. Though Marilyn thought Jim was good-looking and was very impressed that one of the school track stars was asking her for a date, he was so much older.
Near the end of the school year, Jim Lovell tried again. He had no date for his junior prom, and he wanted Marilyn to go with him.
Once again she equivocated. "Well, I don't know how to dance."
"Don't worry," he said. "I'll teach you."
For the next several weeks Jim brought records over to Marilyn's home and the two practiced dancing in her living room. Before long they were going steady.
At the same time that Jim Lovell was getting to know Marilyn Gerlach, he was also discovering that his fascination with rocketry might actually lead to his life's work. World War II had just ended, and a local museum had exhibited the V1 and V2 rockets of the just-defeated Germans. Staring at those formidable weapons built by engineers and scientists, Lovell suddenly realized that he would gladly spend his life building rockets.
He wrote a letter to the American Rocket Society, asking how he could become a rocket engineer. The society's president responded, explaining that "the whole field of rockets and jet propulsion is still so new that we do not know clearly what preparation is best for it." He suggested that Lovell get as thorough an education as he could, especially in fields such as thermodynamics or aerodynamics.
Now Lovell faced the same problem as Frank Borman. His mother didn't have the money to send him to college. He had applied to Annapolis but had been chosen as a third alternate, leaving him little chance of getting in.
Undeterred, Lovell took advantage of a Navy program called the Holloway Plan. The Navy would pay for him to get a two year engineering

 

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Jim Lovell and Marilyn Gerlach on board the U.S. Navy 
sailboat 
Freedom,
 1950.
Credit: Lovell
degree, after which he would take fourteen months of flight training followed by six months at sea as an aviation midshipman. He would then begin a military career as a regular naval officer. Though this wasn't quite the same as a rocket engineering, the idea off flying advanced military airplanes appealed to Lovell almost as much.
For the next two years Lovell studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, renting a room in a nearby family's house. And each weekend, Marilyn came by bus from Milwaukee to visit, staying in Jim's room while he moved to a YMCA near the campus.
At his mother's insistence, however, Jim applied a second time to the Naval Academy. She was afraid that when he went overseas as a midshipmen after his second year of college he would get caught in an overseas military action, and be unable to return to school for years afterward. He took her advice, and to his surprise this time he was accepted.
Blanch's foresight was almost clairvoyant. All of Jim's Holloway classmates ended up in Korea. Years would pass before they could complete their educations.
Lovell moved east, starting college all over again at Annapolis. By this time Marilyn was also going to college on a scholarship at Milwaukee State

 

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Teachers College. When Jim headed to Maryland, he asked her to come east as well.
Marilyn had no doubt what she wanted to do. She gave up her scholarship, transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and got a part time job in an up-scale department store in Washington, selling woman's clothing.
She also typed Jim's school papers, including an astonishing twenty four-page term paper on "The Development of the Liquid-Fuel Rocket." In this essay Jim described the early history of rocketry in the United States and Germany. He concluded enthusiastically that "The big day for rockets is still coming the day when science will have advanced to the stage when flight into space is a reality and not a dream."
13
As she typed, Marilyn couldn't help feeling amused. "It seemed so farfetched,'' she later said.
They spent as much of their free time as possible together. Every Friday she traveled down to Annapolis, stayed with a local family, and joined Jim for the weekend socials.
And yet, while they had talked about marriage, Jim hadn't yet proposed, nor had they made any detailed plans about their future.
At the end of junior year the Academy held what was called the Ring Dance. At this formal ritual, the midshipmen received their class ring with the crests of both the Navel Academy and their graduating class embossed upon it. Should a midshipman be engaged at the time, his fiancee would be given a miniature of the ring at the same dance. During most of the dance the husband-to-be kept her ring in his pocket, while she wore his on a blue and gold ribbon around her neck.
At the center of the dance floor a short ramp led to a giant replica of the class ring, big enough for a couple to stand under. As the young couples danced, one-by-one they picked the moment to exchange rings. The couples dipped their engagement rings in a large bowl containing water from the seven seas, then walked together up the ramp and under the ring. There they placed the rings on each other's fingers, kissed, and thus became officially engaged.
By June of Jim's sophomore year he needed to pick out the style of ring he wanted. One weekend, Marilyn and Jim went to a jewelry store to

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