Letters from New Jersey
by Bob Button
JS: My old friend Bob Button, of Jersey City, NJ, is a retired journalist and former public affairs officer for such outfits as NASA, TRW and Grumman. An active pilot, he flies his airplane chiefly for his own amazement, but also as part of the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Bob keeps in frequent touch by email and some of his 'memories and musings'about days he and I shared are so interesting that I thought they deserved to be read by others. Working in Public Affairs (corporate and govenment PR), he had the kind of inside access to some of the 20th century's most fantastic events that the best of us in the writing and broadcast media would have given our eyeteeth for. As you will see, Bob usually had a real good time getting the job done. That's why I hope we'll see a lot of his memoirs in this these.."Letters from New Jersey."
NASA has had some scrapes that set its people back on their heels. It was people like Bob and those he recalls in this story who always got them up and going again:
The Kick-in-the-Ass Anniversary Party
Bob Button: Got a call from Art Hill, IBM (Ret.), April 6th telling me that Space Shuttle Discovery was atop the big crawler, makin' its way from the VAB to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. Said it was on NASA's closed-circuit TV - sorta like watchin' grass grow, he said. Art was with the Houston Chronicle back when I was with NASA during the Apollo program.
Photo courtesy NASA/KSC.
What this meant was that America was literally crawlin' - at just under 1 mile an hour - back into space after a hiatus caused by Columbia's disintegration during re-entry February 1, 2003. You may recall that the Columbia disaster happened 17 years, nearly to the day, after we lost Challenger and its crew in mid-launch on January 28, 1986 ... and 36 years -- again, nearly to the day -- after the deadly Apollo 1 fire that occurred during flgiht rehearsals atop a Saturn 1B at Pad 34, January 27, 1967. That fire killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, the guys slated to fly the very first Apollo mission, an earth-orbital check-out of the Command Module.
When the Apollo 1 fire broke out I was a few miles away in Cocoa Beach at the Cape Colony motel with Joe Shea, head of NASA's Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. I was the PAO (Public Affairs Officer) assigned to Joe that month. Ironically, we were in a top secret meeting with a crew from Time magazine. Joe was gonna be on the cover of Time to coincide with the launch of Apollo 1. Of course, it never happened. In fact, Joe took most of the heat after the investigation of that fire. After all, he was in charge, and in his own words (and Harry Truman's),"The buck stops here."
The Apollo 1 fire hit us all very hard..
The folks at NASA simply didn't know how to deal with failure. It wasn't supposed to happen. Unthinkable! We were staggered by it. Chins were draggin' the ground all over the agency and among our many contractors. Some lamented we might have to cancel the man-in-space program despite President Kennedy's promise to land a man on the moon in this decade. Protestors were sayin' all along that we oughta spend that money on poor people. Weak-kneed politicians were losing their enthusiasm for this great adventure. Morale at NASA had never been lower.
So about a year after the fire Jim Schefter and I went to see Al Shepard, who was then head of the astronaut office in Houston. Schefter was president of our little Escape Velocity Press Club and I was now the NASA PAO assigned to the astronaut office. Al had been sayin' it's time folks stopped whining about Apollo 1. "Enough is enough,"
he told us ... "we've gotta get our spirit back and get our asses back in space."
We proposed a party with Shepard's "Freedom 7" flight as the hinge. The 6th anniversary of that flight was comin' up May 5, a great excuse to party. Al agreed: "these folks need a kick in the ass," he said. He'd endure such a party if it would help. 
Al Shepard at the dais (right). When he got up to speak, everybody else at the head table got up and walked off. It got a great laugh, including from Al, who then made one helluva kick-ass speech, saying it was time to stop moping and get back to space.
You've gotta know, Jim, Al was not exactly a big friend of the press corps (Ed: No kidding..) -- this would be one helluva concession on his part. He said he'd do it only because it might help pull the manned space program outta the doldrums.
Well, that party sorta got outta hand..
We reserved the biggest room they had at the Nassau Bay Hotel across the street from the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center. It held 300 people, but more than 500 wanted to come once the word got out so Schefter and I were left to be the bad guys. You should know some of the big names we turned away to our everlasting agony ... entertainers, captains of industry, state and local politicians, friends of astronauts, etc.
But it was one helluva party. Our audio-visual folks made a movie of Al's supposed life, a bogus biography full of plane crashes dating back to 1918. A quartet of singing astronauts entertained with a specially written song about Al called "I've Got Money" (Al had recently been named to the board of a local bank and was on his way to becoming a millionaire). 
Those off-key singers were Dick Gordon, Pete Conrad, John Young and Tom Stafford - a pretty classy group. (Left)
Jim Schefter was emcee. The head table featured Bob Gilruth, director of MSC (now Johnson Space Center), and all six of the surviving original seven astronauts. The widows of Gus, Ed and Roger sat at special tables up front. I was Pat White's escort. My boss, Paul Haney, escorted Betty Grissom. Wernher Von Braun sat with us, escorted by my ex-wife Peggy.
(Right) Betty Grissom acknowledges her introduction. That's me at left, then Jim Schefter, Von Braun in the background seated next to my ex, Peggy.
While the party was supposed to be an anniversary celebration of Al's Freedom 7 flight, the fact is it came off more like a roasting of Alan B. Shepard ... and he loved it. We all did!
Von Braun takes a bow. That's John Glenn at far right at the head table.
Trust me..
This was the social event of the decade at MSC, and people left that place full of new energy and enthusiasm for getting America back into space and enroute to the moon. The hiatus was officially over.
And so it is again...
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For another story by Bob Button, Click Here.
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