_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [89]
The President was a pretty fair country ball player, and he would field a team with his Secret Service detail. His brother Billy and the inept media would be called out to play them, and because I was hands-down the worst player on the field, I had to be the umpire. Billy, who spent the day downing his short-lived Billy Beer, thought his team would benefit from favoritism by this Georgia boy.
Well, he did get favoritism, because there was a major problem. The President and the Secret Service were good players. Billy was drunk before the third inning, and the reporters on his team were plain rotten. If we were ever to complete a game, I had to call any pitch or play in favor of the media team or we would have been at it all night. Ever hear of a game called because of sunup?
To this day I hope the President understood, because Mr. Carter would stand there rolling his eyes at my called strikes. Some of them I called strikes even if Billy just managed to roll the ball across the plate. It was a hell of a fix to be in, and I still can’t believe I stood there and argued a strike call with the President. Just where did I get the nerve to overrule the Chief Executive of the United States?
Despite his taste for beer, the President’s brother was a great guy, as were all members of President Carter’s family, and I was most grateful for the assignment and for the Carters’ hospitality. The NBC News Desk made sure I received most of President Carter’s vacation and down-home assignments and before you knew it, it was election time again, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan won the White House, and I came home to Cape Canaveral, where the launch team was working full speed ahead to get Columbia, the first Space Shuttle, into orbit.
As a journalist, I have always taken pride in being apolitical, but hanging out with the Carters was fun. There’s something to be said about the fresh wind of naiveté, and Jimmy Carter had it. There’s also something about the stink on a professional politician that’s hard to abide. President Carter never paid his dues in that club, and I must admit, returning to my first love—the space story—felt like walking in my favorite pair of shoes.
TWENTY
The Space Shuttle Era
Nothing like it had ever flown before.
It was a winged spaceship the size of a jetliner.
It stood on end on a rocket’s launch pad strapped to two towering solid rocket boosters and a huge tank filled with more than 500,000 gallons of super-cold fuels. Those engineers who should know about such things said it would blast off like a rocket, perform all kinds of useful maneuvers in space, and return to land on an airport runway.
While I was in and out of town on other assignments, NASA engineers spent five years solving the problems that beset the revolutionary spaceship. The high-tech machine was called the Space Shuttle, and it was pushing the technological envelope with main engines and booster rockets and fragile thermal tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon panels needed to protect it and its crew through the volcanic heat of reentry.
Slowly the problems were overcome, and NASA set about its job of building four of these revolutionary fliers. The agency named them after historic sailing ships: Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, and Atlantis.
Columbia was the first rolled out, and the media horde returned, settling on the press site only three miles from the Shuttle’s launch pad. Most major news organization, as did NBC, had their own building on the six-acre mound along with trailers, television trucks, bleachers, high viewing stands, camera mounts, and a blizzard of antennas.
My friend Dixon Gannett had the latest in RV comfort and we managed to outfox security. We parked his recreational vehicle on the press site near the NBC building. When the security guards weren’t looking, we enjoyed “not permitted on federal property” libations. Our on-air performance was noticeably improved.
Speaking about not permitted, all accredited members of the media had the freedom of