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With several drinks already in me, I looked at Dave impishly and said, “Two? Who’s the other one?”

“Princess Margaret.”

“Oh, I know her,” I said. “I met her on the world tour after the Apollo 11 moon landing. I’d like to see her.”

“Well, she’s leaving in a day or two, so I doubt that would be possible,” Dave said.

“Of course, it’s possible,” I replied. I had an idea. Somewhere around midnight, I started calling the Minnesota governor’s mansion, trying to get someone who could set up a meeting with Princess Margaret. The next morning I was doing a television interview at 8:00 a.m., and while I was on the set, Bill received a telephone call from the governor’s office, informing us that the Princess would see me. We met with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden at 11:00 a.m. that morning, and it became a big story in Minneapolis. Bill was duly impressed.

Bill knew that I could perform in front of a crowd. “It’s like you’re a refrigerator, and when you open the door the light comes on,” he said. “You’re always ready to go!” Bill usually wrote some general remarks for me to include in my talks, carefully guiding me away from any technical areas of mental health, since I was not an expert. All I really knew was derived from my own personal experience, so I talked freely about my depression, how I went from being on top of the world and landing on the moon, to plunging into an abyss after I returned to Earth.

Bill and I were a good team—until I started missing scheduled events. The first time I failed to show up at an NAMH event, Bill did his best to cover for me. More than eight thousand people had gathered in Indianapolis for an NAMH annual meeting, when I called Bill on Sunday afternoon to inform him that I wasn’t feeling well, and that I couldn’t make it. I wasn’t lying to him; I wasn’t feeling well, but my condition was not a physical sickness so much as mental and emotional.

“Don’t worry about it, Buzz. I’ll figure out something,” Bill said. He frantically called Percy Knauth, a former Time-Life reporter from Magic Bay, Connecticut, and asked him to pinch hit for me. Percy consented and did a fantastic job, but Bill’s hosts were not happy that I was not with him when he got off the plane in Indiana.

After that first no-show, it became easier for me to back out of meetings when I got down on myself. With increasing frequency I gave in to the depression. I’d contact Bill and inform him that I would not be making it to a scheduled event. Once, I had already arrived at the hotel, and I still called Bill and told him that I could not do the event. Bill never got angry, but I could tell that he was extremely disappointed in me, and embarrassed for me. Percy Knauth was a good speaker, and he got quite a workout filling in at events for me.

On the other hand, when I was on, I enjoyed being with Bill and his fellow mental health workers, and found many of them to be intellectually stimulating. For instance, one night after an event in Chicago, Bill Rice, a vice president with NAMH, and I sat up all night long talking through the theory of relativity! Rice was a bright mathematician from Salt Lake City, and we talked the night away, as I downed one drink after another.

On another occasion we were in Florida, where we met Richard Bach, author of the huge bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Bach was a pilot, so we sat up trading airplane stories, playing a game of “Can you top this?”

“Have you ever flown a Tiger Moth?” Richard asked.

“No, but I’d like to.”

“Well, I have one.”

The next day we went out to the private airport where Bach kept his planes. He gave me a quick overview of the Tiger Moth, and said, “Take it up and see how it flies.” I climbed in the cockpit, and Bach took the copilot’s seat. He flew with me for the first lap around the area, then let me take the controls. I put the plane through its paces, and when I landed the Tiger Moth, I looked at Bach with a grin and said, “What else ya got?”

Perhaps one of the worst disappointments to Bill was the time I scrubbed a scheduled speech