_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [50]
Gus loved his buddy, but Alan’s appetite for fun had evaporated since Deke put him in the chief’s job. He was no longer the easygoing test pilot since his grounding from his inner-ear problem. Flying a desk here in Houston, he seemed to be “hot wired on pissed off,” with the incredible ability to switch moods at will. Alan could be hell on wheels in the morning and his old charming self in the afternoon.
Gus and the others were baffled as how to deal with him until Alan’s secretary, Gaye Alford, hit on a unique idea.
Each morning she would determine Alan’s mood and select one of two pictures she had mounted back to back in a single frame. She had hung the picture on the wall outside Alan’s office door. An astronaut being called before the chief would either see a photo of a scowling Alan Shepard or Gaye would flip it over to the one of him with a beaming smile.
Gus laughed. Those who walked past the scowl did so at their own risk.
It was good to laugh and to remember, even if it was for only a few minutes on the road. Gus was headed to the Apollo flight-simulator building. As he had for Gemini, Deke had given him the commander’s seat for the first Apollo, and he wasn’t at all pleased with the mission’s progress. Nothing seem to be working, and his wrath this day was focused on the flight simulator and on the operator charged with making sure the machine would fly as if it were Apollo 1 itself. The man on the hot seat was Riley McCafferty. He braced himself as Gus walked through the door.
“Let’s see if this thing will fly, Riley,” Gus said as he climbed inside with his crew, astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee.
Only a few minutes of the simulation had passed when the Apollo 1 commander began fuming. The simulator differed in so many significant ways from the actual spacecraft that Gus felt the machine was a waste of time.
“Damn it, Riley,” Grissom shouted, “this simulator is worthless! Why isn’t it up to speed?”
The defensive simulator operator explained that engineers had made hundreds of changes to the actual spacecraft and it took time…
“Bullshit,” Grissom interrupted. “It’s a piece of crap, Riley. Get it right and we’ll be back.”
Before leaving, Gus Grissom reached in his briefcase and brought out the fat lemon from his yard. He hung it tightly on the simulator’s hatch. “Leave it there,” he ordered, walking away from the sounds of polite laughter.
Despite Gus and his crewmates’ problems, Apollo was coming. So were the big network stars. Huntley, Brinkley, and Cronkite wanted to be part of man’s first landing on the moon, and so did their New York handlers. The lunar landings were being sold to such big advertisers as Gulf Oil, and these corporate giants wanted to see Chet Huntley and David Brinkley sitting on camera in front of their logo.
Many have asked me if it didn’t piss me off to spoon-feed information to the New York stars. My answer was simple. Hell, no! That was my job. A person from my background had a slim-to-none chance of getting on national television, and I was damn happy to be the exception to the rule.
I was grateful, and more important, I knew my limitations. How could I not be pleased living and working in paradise? I had long ago recognized a solid fact: I did not have the background to be a Chet Huntley or a Walter Cronkite, and I simply did not want to be. NBC was very fair. I not only had been blessed with a wonderful wife and children, I had a job that was one of the most exciting in the country, and I had cultivated solid sources. They were filling me in on all the bits and pieces of Apollo, including the growing tension between Gus Grissom and the Apollo managers. And I was aware of another fact: No outside reporter could compete with me on my turf.
The Apollo astronauts were in their jets commuting almost daily between their homes in Houston and the Cape, and that evening Gus was at Wolfie’s Nightclub in Cocoa Beach. The club featured a popular folk singer named Trish,