_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [87]
America’s oldest space rookie looked down and there it was, the beginning of life, its present and its end; and coming from a farm, Deke had no doubt that the bounty of the precious planet was finite. Its supply of energy, foodstuffs, clean atmosphere, pristine waters—all were finite. And whatever age to come was being shortened by the myopic uncaring of mankind.
If Deke, and the other astronauts before him and those who would follow, were successful, then Homo sapiens had taken their first faltering steps not merely to other worlds close by, but to far distant stars and worlds revolving about those alien suns. Deke continued looking down with a mixture of hope and sadness, knowing one day this good Earth below would pass into history.
The hope was, Deke knew, that if humans one day were successful in journeying to distant stars, and populating those faraway planets, then the human race would be safe. A star might go nova, obliterate an entire solar system, but if the human species populated many solar systems…life would go on.
That was the gift to the future of Deke Slayton’s generation of astronauts, but it was also a time for members of the space family to worry. The long string of missions named Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo was ending. Thousands of people would be losing their jobs. There was a high probability I would be one of them. I could not imagine NBC keeping me on the payroll for four to six years waiting for the Space Shuttle to fly. As the last Apollo returned safely, I packed up my microphone and flew home from Houston’s Mission Control to my family.
At the end of our street, Jo and my eldest child, Alicia, stood waiting as they had hundreds of times before. Alicia leapt in my lap, slid under the steering wheel, and finished the drive home. Despite the dark clouds on the horizon, my family was a smiley bunch. The possible loss of my job wasn’t all that frightening. “Don’t worry, Daddy,” Karla, the youngest one said, “I’ll just sell more cookies.”
NINETEEN
Down Home with Jimmy Carter
During the second half of the 1970s, NASA busied itself with getting the first Space Shuttle ready to fly, and I busied myself setting my family’s house in order.
Despite the space-flight hiatus, NBC had asked me to stay on the job with a cut in pay, promising they would use me on stories elsewhere. My wife expressed her dislike for starvation and went back to her old job at our bank. Friend Dixon Gannett, the son of the founder of Gannett Newspapers, the publishers of USA Today, Florida Today, and a few dozen more fish wrappers, threw a few coins my way. He offered me the job of editor of one of his magazines. He said he couldn’t stand to see me on the public dole. I thanked him, and asked if instead I could have a paper route because it paid more. Old Dix smiled and said, “Hell no! Every person had to starve in the editorial pits before they could get a shot at the big money.”
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,