Great story... thanks for sharing...
Back in about 2004 my wife Betty and I went on a short vacation in New Mexico... sounds like a quick trip til you realize that the New Mexico border is as far from our home here near Houston as Nashville, Tennessee is! I love New Mexico although I've only been there a handful of times in my life... and I was looking forward to doing some things I'd never had the chance to do. Betty got to see Carlsbad Caverns, which is THE single most beautiful set of caverns on the planet IMHO, and then we drove to Cloudcroft and off the escarpment down into the Tularosa Basin. We visited White Sands National Monument, and the next day the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Alamogordo... Well, I spent most of the day there-- Betty I think would have been satisfied in about an hour or two at most... While there, in the museum, we happened upon the latter part of a talk being given by a dignified older gentleman, about the space shuttle and space exploration, and he was showing shuttle tiles to the kids and stuff... pretty interesting, so we stayed for the last of the presentation. Afterwards I got to talking with him, and turns out he was a UDT that did a lot of the recoveries of the capsules... He was actually in the water, either first or later, on many of the NASA splashdowns... he took pride in being "shown" in Apollo 13, the frogman banging on the hatch from outside and getting a big thumbs up from Tom Hanks... "that was me" he said-- "that was my job; I was the one that really did that-- they used an actor in the movie of course" he said... We talked for probably 20-30 minutes; I was enthralled hearing about the history that this man had lived... we talked about the future a little bit... and about various folks he knew... The subject turned to Joe Kittinger, the guy who dove off a balloon from 20 miles up just before the space age... I had to laugh inside when he commented how badly Joe had "let himself go" (get fat) and that he'd just seen Joe at a (then) recent ceremony at the Astronaut Hall of Fame there about a month or so earlier... It seemed amusing to me that here's this guy, in his late 70's at the time, and he's still worried about staying fit and trim, and chastising Joe Kittinger for "letting himself go"... (course I bet he REALLY had a laugh at my expense, being a fatboy myself). Once a Navy guy, always a Navy guy I guess... (UDT's are basically SEALS IIRC, so I guess they take exceptional pride in keeping their "edge", even in their late 70's). It was really interesting and just the last thing you'd expect from this wiry, bookish little old fellow with his cardigan and slacks... It was a hoot and talking to him was really the highlight of the day... I've never forgotten it...
The next day we went up to the Malpais Lava Beds at Corrizozo, just east of the Jornada del Muerto and Trinity Site, where the world's first atomic bomb was exploded in 1945, and then to the Smokey the Bear museum further north, on our way to Albuquerque where we spent the night before touring the National Atomic Museum the next day, where again I spent most of the day while Betty would have been done in an hour or two... but I took her shopping afterwards in the neat little downtown shopping district thingy they have there... we drove south and spent the night, drove back across the north end of White Sands Missile Range past Trinity Site (which they only take tourists out to once or twice a year, and I had missed it by a few weeks, darnit!) We went to the WSMR museum that afternoon, again for several hours, and then spent the night on the west side of the Tularosa Basin... then we went back to Texas via El Paso and down to Big Bend...
It was a fun trip... I still get a kick thinking about talking with that fellow about his experiences on the space program recovery forces though... it was cool.
Later! OL JR
