Good Evening, Foxhole
Great space thread. Hope everyone's Labor Day was a good one.
Posted on 09/05/2004 10:29:03 PM PDT by SAMWolf
Anoreth is 13-1/2. She's pretty cranky, but compared to other girls at 13 (me, for instance) she's not too bad. My mother regularly says, "She really reminds me of you ..."
Thanks Snippy.
Your dad was in Blimps?? Cool!!!
This one applied a lot to one place I worked.
I wonder if someone got confused and mixed up Mr. Rogers with Bob Keeshan Captain Kangaroo. He was in the Marines in WWII.
Victor Belenko. In the late 80's ,I was on weekend duty when word came of a VIP flying into the base, needing his T-38 refueled ASAP. I was waiting at the transient alert ramp when he came in. I was able to see him, but didn't get to meet him. ;-(
Hiya Sam
Howdy ma'am
Cool!
#86
Another story I had forgotten about. Darn, I've gotta get this stuff written down!
Greeting Tax-chic, did you dad ever mention the blimp with the metal skin? Many Moon ago read about this one off critter. I seem to recall that the designation was 1-ZN or maybe ZN-1.
Have played around on Google some but no luck, yet.
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
It's amazing what you remember when your memory gets jogged, isn't it?
See, told ya so! Write this stuff down somewhere. :-)
You are correct that Bob Keeshan was a Marine and that there are lots of rumors out there.
Besides the Mr. Rogers rumor, there is a rumor about Lee Marvin and Bob Keeshan at Iwo Jima receiving the Navy Cross.
We know Rogers never served.
As for the other two, the truth is both Marvin and Keeshan were Marines. Neither were at Iwo Jima. Neither received the Navy Cross.
From what I've found, Captain Kangaroo signed up too late to see action and Marvin was in the Pacific, hurt in Saipan and received the Purple Heart.
Of course without further research even I could be wrong.
:-)
Good Evening, Foxhole
Great space thread. Hope everyone's Labor Day was a good one.
Thanks tomball. It was very restive.
Evening tomball.
Had a busy Labor Day. I thought it was supposed to be a day off. ;-)
Grissom feels America forgot 1st NASA tragedy
Unlike Challenger and Columbia, NASA swept Apollo 1 deaths in 1967 aside, widow says.
By Mary Beth Schneider
Published: February 2, 2003
Betty Grissom has a wish for the families of space shuttle Columbia's lost crew.
She hopes they get answers.
She hopes that someday they know what happened.
Because on Jan. 27, 1967, her husband, Hoosier Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, and two other astronauts were killed when a deadly fire swept their command module as they trained for what would have been the first Apollo space mission.
"I've waited 35 years for somebody to come by my home and explain to me about the Apollo 1 fire," Grissom said. "I'm still waiting."
Saturday was a hard day for Grissom. Everyone in America, and in many corners of the world, was grieving for the seven crew members killed in the Columbia disaster. She is one of the few who knows just how the pain feels.
"Right now, my sympathies go to the families. Hopefully, NASA will do a better job of keeping them informed. It doesn't pay to be first."
Just as Gus Grissom was among the first astronauts to risk his life, Betty Grissom was among the first to know the price those risks entail.
Betty Grissom and her two sons, then 16 and 13, were in Houston, not at Cape Canaveral, in 1967 as Gus Grissom prepared for his mission. On Jan. 27, 1967, things went horribly wrong.
To Betty Grissom, so did what happened afterward.
Unlike Jan. 28, 1986, when space shuttle Challenger exploded, the survivors of the Apollo 1 tragedy weren't wrapped in the embrace of a nation.
Almost from the moment the family left Arlington National Cemetery, where Grissom is buried, "we were cut off," his widow said. "I never heard from anybody."
Saturday, an emotional President Bush called the families of the Columbia from the Oval Office, telling them, "I wish I was there to hug and cry and comfort you right now."
But in 1967, there was no comforting phone call from President Lyndon B. Johnson. No offers of counseling. No funds created to put her boys through college.
They went, all right. Both Scott and Mark followed their dad's footsteps to Purdue University, and both became pilots. But it took a lawsuit against NASA to get the money that paid those bills; she received a $350,000 settlement, 40 percent of which went to attorneys.
NASA's attitude, Grissom said, was to talk as little as possible about the disaster, in hopes the public would just forget about it and any hint of controversy would fade away. Officials even stopped referring to her husband's mission by its rightful name, Apollo 1, and called it "204" instead.
"It's because if you say 204, nobody knows what you're talking about."
It hurts Grissom and her sons that Apollo 1 is so forgotten. Last week, they held a memorial service at Pad 34 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the place where Grissom and fellow astronauts Edward White and Roger Chaffee died.
It went unnoticed by almost everyone, including the media. The next day, though, the 17th anniversary of the Challenger tragedy got the attention that they didn't.
Scott Grissom, now a pilot for Federal Express whose own dreams of becoming an astronaut were cut short by imperfect eyesight, was riveted by Saturday's news like most Americans.
"We feel terrible for the families. We've been there and done that," Scott Grissom said. "An accident like this is devastating to thousands of people. The whole effort to get one of these things in space and back -- lots of people have their hearts and soul in it."
His dad did, he said, and he knows his father would want the space program to go on.
"I think that my father pretty much captured it when he said that the exploration of space is worth the risk of life."
Grissom is less certain. "We were the ones that got left behind."
A pure oxygen environment with a thousand electrical components, cold o-rings, "greener" lox insulation--
And John Glenn who protected Clinton's Chinagate treason was rewarded with a space ride.
There is no upper limit on temperature. The center of the sun is 18,000,000 degrees Centigrade.
Clinton, Glenn and Kerry to the center of the sun in Jules Verne's Karmic Rocketry Illustrated.
"I've waited 35 years for somebody to come by my home and explain to me about the Apollo 1 fire," Grissom said. "I'm still waiting."
A pure oxygen environment with a thousand electrical components, cold o-rings, "greener" lox insulation--
And John Glenn who protected Clinton's Chinagate treason was rewarded with a space ride.
Sometimes our government and the bureaucracy it's created drive me up a wall.
Where's Godzilla when you really need him?
Thank you Phil for the story on Mrs. Grissom, very tragic.
All the names in your post, Johnson, Glenn, Clinton, Kerry (spit).
All of them in politics for all the wrong reasons.
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