Bob Button:Howdy, Jim:

Sorry it took so long to get back to you, but I've been readin' up a storm these past few weeks...Astronaut books mostly. There's a bunch of 'em out lately. Just finished Pete Conrad's biography by his widow Nancy and her collaborator Howard Klausner. They did a great job.

The book, Rocketman, is a true reflection of Pete - full of accomplishments, of course, but accompanied by lots of good humor. Ol' Pete enjoyed a good laugh nearly as much as ridin' hot jets and big rockets. Those who knew Pete still see that gap-toothed grin...It was infectious. Life was one glorious ride for that guy, and it didn't matter where he was goin'.

For your young readers, I should mention that Pete Conrad, all 5 foot 6-1/2 inches of him, flew two Gemini missions, led the second Apollo lunar landing in 1969 and was the third guy to step down onto the moon. He later repaired and commanded a damaged Skylab space station, racking up more time in space by far than anybody back then, and was, in the words of his friend Alan B. Shepard, the best damned stick (pilot) on the planet.

Well, Jim...that didn't stop this under-achiever from searchin' for parallels between us as I read about Pete's life. We grew up less than 50 miles apart, for instance--me in New Jersey, him down the road near Philadelphia. I was 11 months older than Pete. His first love-and mine-was a brutish, roarin', belchin' Indian motorcycle. While he rode his big Indian around Pennsylvania, I rode mine up around Boston and points north. We both washed airplanes to earn flyin' lessons. He started flying a year or two sooner than I did--and, of course, Pete flew hot Navy jets way up there while to this very day I'm flyin' low and slow, with tree tops scrapin' my Musketeer's belly. A Patsy Cline song could make either of us cry.

The one time we flew together was when I checked him out in a Waco UPF-7, a glorious ol' biplane owned, as I recall, by a dentist in La Porte, TX. Big radial engine, two-holer. When I mentioned that Pete admired hell out of his airplane, the dentist said he'd be proud for Pete to fly it. Insurance required that Pete get a check-out, astronaut or no astronaut, so off we went, me and Pete. No way would I dare tell him how to fly that old bird. We just had us a grand old time (I never touched the stick) -- flew over the Houston space center, did a little playful stuff over Clear Lake.

Pete had the landing. You've gotta know that the Waco's landing gear is about nine yards long... gets to the ground long before the pilot's ready to land..so..we bounced like crazy. Pete turned around and gave me that gap-tooth grin of his, started laughin' like crazy, and we did another circuit. Perfect landing this time, of course, and I was sworn to secrecy about that first one (until now).

I've never met Pete's widow, Nancy. He was married to Jane when we knew him back in Houston. But this lady certainly captured the essence of Pete Conrad. Neither she nor Howard, her co-author, are pilots, but they did their homework and handled the flyin' scenes and technical stuff (there's precious little of it in this book) beautifully.

The thread that leads you through Rocketman is a 1996 record-setting, 'round-the-world flight in Learjet N10DB--Pete is one of its four pilots. The record--49 hours, 21 minutes and 8 seconds-- still stands. Sadly, the book ends--as does Pete's life--with Pete tumbling off his Harley near Ojai, CA on July 8th, 1999--the worst birthday of my life.

Walt Cunningham (Apollo 7) wrote The All-American Boys, a no-holds-barred, in-your-face book about man-in-space, warts and all.

Two things stand out:
1) Walt is one helluva good writer, and 2) Walt doesn't really care who he pisses off with his view of the space community, its leaders and some of its more famous inhabitants.

Walt was a scientist-astronaut, technically a civilian, from the Rand think tank in California. But he was also a very hot Marine fighter pilot who could hold his own with the mostly test-pilot astronauts of that era. Apollo 7 was the first manned Apollo mission, an earth-orbital checkout of the Command and Service Modules. Walt describes it as a less-than-perfect flight with a few malfunctions, including human failings. In a nutshell, this is by far the best wrap-up of the man-in-space program ever written.

Alan Shepard's biography, Light This Candle, was written by Neal Thompson, a journalist who worked long and hard to find segments of Al's life few people know about. He did an excellent job. Neal's not a pilot so there are sections of this book involving flight that might perplex, maybe amuse, people close to aviation. But that's nit-pickin'--this is a great story about a terrific guy-America's first man in space.

I was a little disappointed to read Gus Grissom, The Lost Astronaut, by a guy named Ray E. Boomhower. In fact I couldn't really get into it. The book is well intentioned but it's not a pilot's book, it doesn't have cajones! In a word, it's 'quaint'--the kind of biography you'd write for ordinary folks, and Gus was no ordinary guy. Gus's real story still needs to be told. And I'm still trying to get into Gordon Cooper's biography, Leap of Faith.

My ol' friend Butch Voris, founder and first leader of The Blue Angels back in 1945 when they were just Navy Flight Demonstration Team, was a fighter ace in WWII (7 confirmed kills, probably more, and all of them, Zeroes--the hottest Japanese fighter in the sky). His book, First Blue, is a really good read about "the boss," his life and the history of "The Blues." There will only be one "First Blue." When Butch retired from the Navy, he came to work at Grumman where I was running PR. Butch was senior to me by a long shot, so I too got to call him "boss." I treasure that honor.

Neil Armstrong's authorized biography is in the works by an Auburn University historian named James R. Hansen. This is the one book I would love to have written...getting Neil to talk about himself is probably the toughest job Hansen will ever face. Neil is one private man. Hard to believe he's actually gonna do it.

Speakin' of authors and pilots,we lost a good one awhile ago when Gordon Baxter died down in Texas. He wrote a column for Flying magazine for nearly 30 years... lived out around Beaumont so we got to see him at the Johnson Space Center in Houston now and again. I've still got a collection of his columns, published as The Bax Seat. Gordon was my kind of pilot--VFR: "If you can't see out, what's the use of flyin'?" was his watchword.

'Be talkin' to ya'.

Bob

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