_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [111]
The longer I lay in the hospital bed connected to the heart monitors, the clearer my thoughts grew. I was coming to realize just how fortunate I was.
I had being moving through life with the goal of pleasing everyone I met, most of all that beautiful woman sitting in my room’s corner chair.
“You are in a good mood today,” Jo smiled. “It’s good to see you laugh.”
I looked at Jo, watched as she rubbed a shoulder muscle, knew her neck must ache from sitting in the hospital chair for the past three days.
Some spend their lives searching for a mate. Some are looking for love. Some are looking for devotion. Others are looking for a friend. Most are looking for beauty. Well, I grinned, I found them all July 4, 1958.
That was seventeen days before I went to work for NBC, and I was working for local radio station WEZY. I had been assigned to cover the Miss Brevard County beauty pageant, an annual celebration with plenty of food, bands, speeches, and a bevy of beauties dressed in all-white bathing suits to accent their Florida tans, moving gracefully across a stage before the judges, and when the contest was over, I was having difficulty pronouncing the winner’s name, Jo Reisinger.
She was a raven-haired beauty cut from the same bolt of cloth as Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner, and her first name was no problem.
“It’s pronounced rye, like rye bread—rye-singer,” another reporter told me, and I went on the air without the slightest hint I had just filed a report on my future wife.
The coming months would find me covering other beauty contests—Miss Space, Miss Orbit, Miss whatever—and Jo Reisinger kept winning, but not with just her looks and her figure. She was winning with personality and fairness to others, and when it came time for the senior class to elect a homecoming queen, Jo was elected.
Jo and I dated for a couple of years, long enough to know we were a solid fit, and on September 3, 1960, she got me drunk, drove me across the state line to Georgia, and married me before I could sober up. Well, that’s the lie I tell. I’ve never gotten the first person to believe it.
Three weeks passed and finally we were back home, on the road to recovery.
Mrs. Jay Barbree, Mrs. Alan Shepard, and Mrs. Deke Slayton are seen here plotting against their husbands. (Barbree Collection).
NASA was still in the middle of redesigning the space shuttles’ boosters, but a crew had been selected to fly the all-important “Return-to-Flight” mission.
NASA managers were hitting on all cylinders. They had selected as commander of the first post-Challenger flight Frederick H. “Rick” Hauck, a Space Shuttle veteran who was not only a seasoned naval test pilot; his skills as a gentleman were on equal par.
Years before as a naval test pilot, Hauck had flown a jet that blew up underneath him. The jet was an RA–5C Vigilante. The objective of the test flight on July 23, 1973, was simple: Verify the Vigilante’s response to commands sent by an automated carrier-landing system on the ground. Shortly after takeoff from the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, Hauck climbed to twelve hundred feet and turned downwind. He was ready. He set himself up for a hands-off approach. It was one of those lazy summer days with haze, with no definable horizon, and as you looked straight down, you could barely see the ripples on the surface of the Chesapeake Bay. Shortly after lowering the landing gear and flaps, Hauck heard and felt an ominous shudder. Seconds later, he heard another shuddering sound. The Vigilante shook, and on his cockpit panel he saw a “RAMPS” warning light flash on, then off. This confused him. The light indicated that the engine inlets were somehow out of configuration, but at subsonic speed, the inlet ramps should not be moving at all. Then the left-engine rpm gauge started unwinding rapidly, signaling a flameout.
Hauck looked up. The Vigilante’s nose had pitched down. The Chesapeake Bay waters were racing toward him, and the surface waves were in sharp focus. Hauck grabbed his seat’s ejection handle