by Jay Barbree
I took Dixon’s editorial job and was then suddenly all smiles when NBC News added a career-saving assignment.
Up the road in 1976, Jimmy Carter was getting ready to run for President, and NBC decided one Georgia peanut farmer should cover another. I packed up, took my magazine-editing job on the road with me, and began tagging along with the Carter campaign.
The author is seen here with Dixon Gannett, frequent lender of money needed to secure the federal debt. (Gannett Collection).
We went all over the country covering one Jimmy Carter political rally after another, traipsing through farm fields from state to state. But as one Georgia plowboy to another, it was obvious the presidential candidate preferred them “old cotton fields back home” as a place to kick back and trade a few boyhood yarns.
I certainly didn’t consider myself Mr. Carter’s equal, but as farm boys in southwest Georgia we’d traveled down many of the same roads. The war years were a time of rationing stamps and going without, but also a time when folks in Georgia believed, devoutly, in Jesus Christ, Santa Claus, Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and most important, their own mule.
The presidential candidate laughed when I explained his family was better than ours. They owned two mules, and my family had to rent one. And Mr. Carter added, “We had two cars on blocks in the front yard.”
There certainly was no disagreement that if you didn’t have a mule in the 1940s, you most likely went without. Anyone who lived on Southern farms in those days knew there was a bond between the farmer and his mule. The one was necessary for the survival of the other. It was important to have a mule that would obey and had a good gait. There was something pleasing about man and mule moving down a cotton row in unison in tune with the commands of “Gee” and “Haw” and “Whoa.” It was simple: If you didn’t have a mule pulling the plow, then you were doing the pulling.
That’s why those of us without a mule were left with one choice: If you wanted cash in your pocket, you got on your knees and picked the cotton from sunup until sundown. And if you were a sissy, forget about it. Especially in a hot August sun with 100-degrees-plus temperatures, crawling on your knees and pulling a heavy sack, moving your bloodied fingers as fast as you could, trying to pick one hundred pounds of cotton every day. Why? Because we were paid one cent per pound picked, and if you wanted to make a dollar, then you had to pick one hundred pounds. The future President said that must have been where the old saying “Another day, another dollar” came from.
Well, as a boy of twelve, I failed again and again, and it was beginning to look like I would never make a dollar, no matter how fast I worked. I was at the point of giving up when two of my black friends, J. W. and George, took pity. They pulled me aside and told me to pack my early-morning dew-drenched cotton very tightly in the bottom of my picking sack, and secondly, when I went to the bushes during the day, to make sure I urinated inside my picking sack to keep the cotton wet and heavy. Water spilled from the drinking jug into the sack helped, too.
I smiled. I had been introduced to the world of science. This explained cotton’s unique smell and color. And what about the cheating? In the broiling sun and with the nightly aches, it was easy to convince yourself it was justified. Daily, I walked from the cotton fields a little less honest, but with a dollar tightly in my fist.
Jimmy Carter was elected President, and we went off to the Georgia coast where the President-elect holed up a few days on Sea Island to unwind. Here he told the media that once while fishing in a cypress hole in a small, one-man bateau, his fishing was interrupted by a swamp rabbit swimming across his bow. Most reporters had never seen a one-man bateau let alone a cypress hole plentiful with good eating bream, and they sure as hell didn’t have anything else to write about. The television and radio folks got out their chuckles and microphones and the newspapers writers grabbed their supply of ridicule. They had a field day.
“President-Elect fends off an attack rabbit with his paddle,” the stories appeared in bold print, and while the ill informed heehawed, we country boys had our own good laugh. Earth’s surface is 71 percent water or thereabout, and in swamps and marshes and other areas with little solid land, swimming and slithering animals and reptiles were nothing new. When meat on your table was hard to come by, we country boys chased swimming wild hogs, rabbits, and even an occasional gator. It was obvious most of my colleagues in the media were strangers to hard times.
The reporters born during or on the latter side of the Great Depression were falling by the wayside, and I was most grateful looks weren’t a requirement for my generation. NBC executives agreed I had the perfect face for radio, and retiring was the farthest thing from my mind.
Jimmy Carter was arguably the most gentlemanly and good-natured President ever, and no one enjoyed a good laugh more. Many times, he bent over grabbing his stomach in hysterics, laughing at my lack of ability to umpire his softball games.
The President was a pretty fair country ball player, and he would field a team with his Secret Service detail. His brother Billy and the inept media would be called out to play them, and because I was hands-down the worst player on the field, I had to be the umpire. Billy, who spent the day downing his short-lived Billy Beer, thought his team would benefit from favoritism by this Georgia boy.
Well, he did get favoritism, because there was a major problem. The President and the Secret Service were good players. Billy was drunk before the third inning, and the reporters on his team were plain rotten. If we were ever to complete a game, I had to call any pitch or play in favor of the media team or we would have been at it all night. Ever hear of a game called because of sunup?
To this day I hope the President understood, because Mr. Carter would stand there rolling his eyes at my called strikes. Some of them I called strikes even if Billy just managed to roll the ball across the plate. It was a hell of a fix to be in, and I still can’t believe I stood there and argued a strike call with the President. Just where did I get the nerve to overrule the Chief Executive of the United States?
Despite his taste for beer, the President’s brother was a great guy, as were all members of President Carter’s family, and I was most grateful for the assignment and for the Carters’ hospitality. The NBC News Desk made sure I received most of President Carter’s vacation and down-home assignments and before you knew it, it was election time again, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan won the White House, and I came home to Cape Canaveral, where the launch team was working full speed ahead to get Columbia, the first Space Shuttle, into orbit.
As a journalist, I have always taken pride in being apolitical, but hanging out with the Carters was fun. There’s something to be said about the fresh wind of naiveté, and Jimmy Carter had it. There’s also something about the stink on a professional politician that’s hard to abide. President Carter never paid his dues in that club, and I must admit, returning to my first love—the space story—felt like walking in my favorite pair of shoes.
TWENTY
The Space Shuttle Era
Nothing like it had ever flown before.
It was a winged spaceship the size of a jetliner.
It stood on end on a rocket’s launch pad strapped to two towering solid rocket boosters and a huge tank filled with more than 500,000 gallons of super-cold fuels. Those engineers who should know about such things said it would blast off like a rocket, perform all kinds of useful maneuvers in space, and return to land on an airport runway.
While I was in and out of town on other assignments, NASA engineers spent five years solving the problems that beset the revolutionary spaceship. The high-tech machine was called the Space Shuttle, and it was pushing the technological envelope with main engines and booster rockets and fragile thermal tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon panels needed to protect it and its crew through the volcanic heat of reentry.
Slowly the problems were overcome, and NASA set about its job of building four of these revolutionary fliers. The agency named them after historic sailing
ships: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis.
Columbia was the first rolled out, and the media horde returned, settling on the press site only three miles from the Shuttle’s launch pad. Most major news organization, as did NBC, had their own building on the six-acre mound along with trailers, television trucks, bleachers, high viewing stands, camera mounts, and a blizzard of antennas.
My friend Dixon Gannett had the latest in RV comfort and we managed to outfox security. We parked his recreational vehicle on the press site near the NBC building. When the security guards weren’t looking, we enjoyed “not permitted on federal property” libations. Our on-air performance was noticeably improved.
Speaking about not permitted, all accredited members of the media had the freedom of driving through the security gate directly to the press site, where we were to remain with a couple of exceptions. We had the freedom of moving about the press mound and permission to drive to the nearby cafeteria, but nowhere else. Anyone caught elsewhere on the federal complex would be jailed. Some out-of-town coworkers had to test it. They felt the urge to leave the mound for a close-up look at an Apollo Saturn V rocket display. They were having a good time crawling all over the huge moon rocket when they were arrested. They were thrown behind bars and, crying for help, they called our executive producer, Joe Angotti.
Now Joe is definitely a great newsperson and a great boss. He’s also definitely a gentleman. But he’s just a little bit stupid. “I’ll come over and get you out,” he said, and proceeded to drive to the rescue of his crew. Joe had forgotten one minor detail: He wasn’t permitted to leave the press mound either. He introduced himself to the gendarmes, and they in turn introduced him to their jail.
Sitting behind bars, a light glowed. Should I call someone who would know what to do? Yep Joe, I would say that would be a good idea. We sent official NASA escorts to haul the red-faced culprits back to the permitted area about the time John Chancellor arrived.
Chancellor, anchor of NBC Nightly News, would host our launch coverage. Naturally we were all concerned about John’s well-being and comfort. Not that he demanded it; such a gentleman never would. But Chancellor deserved it. So we moved him into Dixon Gannett’s RV. It was a happy union. The largest stockholder in the Gannett newspaper chain was fully stocked with whatever he wanted, and when it came to beer, Dixon wanted Coors. Coors in those days could not be bought east of the Mississippi River because of its brewer’s discipline of constantly refrigerating his Rocky Mountain brew. Coors just happened to be John Chancellor’s favorite, and he found instant happiness in Gannett’s home on wheels. Only work forced him to leave.
Dixon Gannett and John Chancellor. Who has the Coors? (Gannett Collection).
Veteran moonwalker and NASA’s most experienced astronaut, John Young, had been assigned the command of Columbia’s maiden flight—the same John Young who’d carried a corned beef sandwich on board the first Gemini with Gus Grissom. The same John Young who would later fly twice to the moon, nearly wrecking his moon buggy in a lunar rock field. And, keeping with “the good old boy” spirit, NASA managers told the son of an east Texas roughneck to join Young for the Space Shuttle’s first launch. The rookie’s name was Robert “Crip” Crippen, and true to his east Texas roots, he drove a pickup truck with about a square foot of metal that hadn’t been dented.
NASA officials patted themselves on their decision-making backs. They knew in Crippen they had picked an outstanding test pilot, and they also knew they had selected an outstanding “Space Shuttle shakedown crew.” But on April 12, 1981, no one really thought the first Space Shuttle would lift off on only its second countdown. The machine was too complicated. Too testy, too damn many parts…over a million of them that had to work before the computers would cut the space plane loose.
The first countdown had been scrubbed two days earlier by a computer glitch. No harm; it had been expected. Launch-team members and astronauts alike were sure it was only the first of many. They even bought tickets for a cash-up-front pool on how many countdowns it would take to get the sophisticated, complicated tangle of high-tech mess into orbit.
Nevertheless, John Young and Robert Crippen sat fat and happy atop their 500,000 gallons of high explosives. They waited for the rich combustible liquid to ignite in the chambers of Columbia’s three main rocket engines. That should be a kick in the pants within itself, but the firing of the twin solid booster rockets should be something else. Talk about a kick! The power of the Saturn V moon rocket would be booting them into orbit, and I told our NBC audience, “Astronauts Young and Crippen are strapped in their ejection seats, and if there should be an emergency the two pilots could eject themselves safely away from any disaster.”
My radio colleague Steve Porter and I were broadcasting from the NBC building’s porch three miles away. We couldn’t believe the countdown was actually moving closer and closer to a liftoff.
Suddenly on board Columbia there was belief too, and Crip turned to John and said, “I think we might just do it!”
Young, the most experienced astronaut in NASA, was widely known for his sense of humor. “Did you lock your pickup?”
Then something never before seen happened. Ignition began in a swift rippling fashion, a savage fire birth as three liquid-fuel engines ignited one after the other, creating a blizzard, a swirling ice storm shaken from the flanks of the Shuttle’s fifteen-story-tall super-cold external tank, and I could not believe what I was seeing. I shouted into my microphone, “They’re going to do it. They’re going to launch.”
And when eight seconds had passed, the three main engines were up and screaming, waiting for the computers to sense all were running and ready to fly, and new flame raged. The giant solid boosters had ignited with six million pounds of thrust instantly growing into two large pillows of fire and steam. The boosters were alive, pushing against concrete, steel, and a Niagara of water flowing through the launch pad’s flame trench. Columbia was suddenly climbing from its insanity of fire—fire that was growing fiercer, then brighter, two legs of rocket thrust pounding into the Shuttle’s launch pad…determined to lift the mighty spaceship from Earth…both pillars of fire stretching longer than two football fields…shattering the quiet of Florida’s spacecoast with earsplitting thunder, thunder never before heard even from the mighty Saturn moon rockets…thunder rolling across water and earth and marsh to pound our chests, to physically move our skin and our clothes, to shake our teeth and bodies.
I looked at Steve Porter; he couldn’t seem to say anything. The all-new Space Shuttle glistened in the morning sun, muscling itself from the grip of gravity, slowly pounding its way skyward. Porter was clearly mesmerized by all the fire and thunder rising before us, so I did my best to tell our NBC audience what we were seeing, what we were hearing, as Columbia blazed its way deeper and deeper into a bright Florida sky.
Some fifty thousand had wormed their way onto the space center itself while three-quarters of a million crowded the fences, the causeways, the thickets, the beaches, anywhere they could to watch this unbelievable new space machine climb toward orbit. It was thunder that never stopped thundering, fire that never stop burning, and when two minutes had passed, Columbia kicked its towering burnt-out solid boosters to each side and sped out of our view, flying like a homesick angel into Earth orbit.
The new space plane shut its main engines down, and Young and Crippen, the gutsy fools, grinned at each other. Crippen savored the joys of weightlessness and told Mission Control, “You’re missing one fantastic sight.”
Then, the astronauts opened the clamshell-like doors covering the Shuttle’s sixty-foot-long cargo bay. The operation was critical. The inside surfaces of the doors were the Space Shuttle’s radiators, and without them the ship could stay in space only hours. Equally important, the doors had to be closed tightly during reentry. Otherwise, the Shuttle would go out of control and tear itself apart.
But mission planners weren’t having any of that. No troubles, thank you. They were keep
ing this first flight short—only fifty-four hours. They wanted safety margins as wide as possible. Young and Crippen spent the next two days shaking down Columbia’s systems and then headed to the wide-open dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The astronauts wanted all the room they could possibly use for the first Space Shuttle landing.
While flying backward, Young had fired the Shuttle’s twin maneuvering rockets over the Indian Ocean. The braking thrust slowed Columbia’s orbital speed. The new spaceship’s reinforced carbon-carbon wing panels and fragile thermal protection tiles handled the three-thousand-degree fires of reentry. The two fliers glided their new space plane to a perfect touchdown on California’s high Mojave Desert. There, more than 200,000 space fans riding all-terrain vehicles, dirt bikes, sport-utility vehicles, and RVs chased Columbia across the hard desert.
“Welcome home, Columbia,” Mission Control radioed. “Just beautiful, beautiful.”
Seven months to the day after the first Space Shuttle launched from Cape Canaveral, Columbia became the first spaceship to return to orbit. At the controls was a pair of space rookies: Joe Engle, who had been bumped from his ride to the moon on Apollo 17 to make room for scientist Jack Schmitt, and Richard Truly, a learned gentleman who would later become the boss of NASA. They were followed by shuttle crews sending spinning satellites out of Columbia’s cargo bay and by premiere spacewalker Dr. Story Musgrave. Musgrave opened the space repair business by testing new spacesuits and tools, every tool you could imagine that would be needed in weightless orbit.
Columbia put America into the space transportation business and the next Space Shuttle, Challenger, stepped to the plate and made its debut two years later. It carried the $135 million tracking and data relay satellite (TDRS) into orbit, and then NASA officials turned their attention to a thorn in the agency’s side since its birth: female astronauts.
