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CHAPTER 1
October Sky
OCTOBER CAN BE LONELY on the plains of Montana. Temperatures might reach sixty degrees Fahrenheit during the day, but they fall fast at sunset, to freezing and below. The wind can be biting. And US Route 12 on the long eastbound stretch between Missoula and Helena is not the place you want to pull to the side of the road. Even during daylight, there's not much to see, except scrub, clusters of pines, low rounded hills. Unless you're looking at the sky.
It is Sunday, October 6, 1957, early evening. A 1955 Oldsmobile sits by the eastbound side of the highway. There are pockets of early snow on the darkened dirt to either side, but there's no traffic beyond the odd slow-moving semi or pickup truck. A young man leans against the driver's side, staring to the west. He is short and slim with dark hair and is wearing blue slacks and a Windbreaker. The clothing is not suited to the weather. His name is George Abbey; he is a first lieutenant in the US Air Force, a helicopter instructor at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio. He is driving back to Texas from his hometown of Seattle, where he was visiting family. It's a trip he's made from one starting point or another many times.
Just a few years earlier Abbey was a midshipman at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, coming off the summer cruise with thirty days' leave and three whole dollars a month spending money. In those days, his travel options were military transport (great if it was going where you wanted when you needed it) or family funds (not available). So Abbey and his roommate, Gordon Iver "Gordy" Dahl, another Seattle boy, found a third method: Knowing that car dealers in Detroit were eager to sell used vehicles in Seattle, the pair hitchhiked to Michigan, took a car, and headed out on US Route 12 to Chicago, then across Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, and Idaho into Washington State. Gas was covered; the trip was free, costing them only their time.
Now, three and a half years after graduating from Annapolis, Abbey is a married man with a car of his own. Between his basic officer's salary plus flight pay, he is pulling down $400 a month. Life is better.
But Seattle remains a frequent destination. Abbey's parents still live there, and so do two of his three brothers and a sister. Abbey has grown to love the long drive from Texas north to Wyoming, then west across Montana, and back. A fan of Western movies, especially John Ford's, Abbey likes the bleak scenery and the famous Big Sky. Especially on this particular evening. Tonight, Montana's Big Sky will allow Lieutenant Abbey a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — to see the flight of an astronomical object by the name of Sputnik, the Earth's first artificial orbiting satellite.
Abbey has always had an interest in space travel, the happy result of a youth spent reading Buck Rogers comics and watching Flash Gordon movie serials. He also knows that the United States is preparing to launch a small scientific satellite named Vanguard. But the news that broke the day before, as he was driving across western Washington State, has shocked him. The Soviet Union, the Red Communist enemy halfway around the world, fired a giant rocket from some mystery location in central Asia, putting Sputnik into orbit. As the miles passed, Abbey heard more details: Sputnik was a silvery sphere twenty-three inches in diameter and weighing 184 pounds, small enough to fit inside the trunk of his Olds — though the Soviet satellite is a giant compared to the planned three-pound Vanguard. Sputnik is circling the Earth every ninety-two minutes at an altitude ranging from a low point of 139 miles to a high of 900, flying as far north as Alaska and Greenland and as far south as Antarctica. It emits a beep that has been tracked all over the world.
Abbey knows what this accomplishment implies: the Soviets do indeed possess the giant rockets they bragged about earlier in the year, missiles capable of flinging H-bombs over the North Pole to blow up New York and Washington, DC. As a cold warrior, he's troubled. But, as a pilot and Buck Rogers fan, he's also fascinated. Hearing on the radio earlier this day that Sputnik might be visible to Montana residents this very night, Abbey has pulled off the road to see.
He glances at his watch —
And there's Sputnik, moving swiftly from northwest to southeast, a small, bright dot. Abbey has seen shooting stars before, but this is different. Shooting stars vanish in a second or less ... This light in the October sky remains steady. A satellite! He is stunned by the sight of it — and surprised by the depth of his reaction, feeling a bit like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. He has grown up with rockets, seen newsreel footage of German V-2s rising to incredible altitudes over New Mexico. He knows about the V-2's descendant, the Redstone, and its rival cousin, the Atlas. But it isn't until this moment that he connects them all — satellites, rockets, high-speed aircraft. The chance to see Earth from orbit, to walk on the Moon, to visit Mars. The Space Age is no longer that thing-to-come — it's here. If the navy and aviation are in George Abbey's blood, his bones are space and rocketry.
He gets back in his car. Texas is still many hours away.
CHAPTER 2
The Abbeys
ABBEY'S PARENTS, Sam and Brenta, met on a London double-decker bus during World War I. Sam, recovering from wounds suffered while serving with the Canadian Army at the Battle of St. Eloi Craters in April 1916, was a passenger; Brenta was the ticket taker.
Of Scottish descent, Sam had been born in 1890 in London but spent his early years with his father, who was working in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Sam recalled watching one of the battles of the Second Boer War from a hillside there. His father fell ill and returned to London in 1902, where Sam completed secondary school. He then became a professional soccer player in Amsterdam. Eventually, he moved to the United States to work on an uncle's farm near Boston. He followed the wheat harvest to western Canada, becoming, at one time or another, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a boxer, and a fireman.
In August 1914 Sam was working for the Canadian Pacific Railway in Kamloops, British Columbia. A train loaded with fellow workers from down track came through Kamloops. When asked where they were going, they said the war had started and they were bound for Vancouver to go fight the kaiser. Sam jumped on and, arriving in Vancouver, enlisted in the Canadian Army and was subsequently shipped to France.
Brenta, born Bridget Gibby in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, Wales, was four years younger. Her mother had died when she was ten, and Brenta had been left to take care of a younger sister, Edith, for several years. She also worked as a servant for a family in Carmarthen until moving to London in 1912, where she went to work for the bus company.
The two married in England and soon had a son, James Robert David, born October 8, 1917, in Cardigan, Wales, while Brenta was visiting an older sister. (Sam had been given only one name; to make up for that lack, all of Brenta and Sam's children would carry three given names.)
After Sam served a year in the army of occupation in Europe, the couple moved to Canada in 1919, where Sam enrolled at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, working his way through college as a farmer and salmon fisherman. In 1922, at the urging of friends in Washington State, the Abbeys moved to Seattle, where Sam joined the Continental Can Company, eventually becoming the company's transportation manager for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
The family expanded: A second son, John Lloyd Richard "Jack," followed on March 28, 1922. Then came Vincent Hugh Donald on July 10, 1923, and a fourth son on August 21, 1932, George William Samuel, born in the house at 505 North Seventy-First Street. A fifth child, Phyllis Gwendolyn Brenta, was born there on March 28, 1934.
The Abbeys had the typical first-generation immigrant virtues: work hard, study hard, become part of the community, vote for Democrats. Brenta made dinner for the family every Sunday (a practice George himself would continue well into his eighties). Her dishes tended to be traditional, like Yorkshire pudding. There were jokes, a lot of teasing and pranking. Also music: Brenta made sure there was a piano in the house. Sam had a fine singing voice and appeared in local operas. He also had an entrepreneurial side, investing in several cottages in the town of White Rock, on Semiahmoo Bay, a few miles north of the US-Canadian border. When school was out for the summer, George and Phyllis and Brenta could be found in White Rock, where the children spent long days on the beach, swimming, rafting, crabbing, and fishing — or visiting a nearby dairy farm in Milner that belonged to one of Sam's friends.
Unusual for Americans in those days, Sam was not a member of any church. In fact, he was openly critical of organized religions. Family members ascribed this to his experiences in the trenches, where he had been surrounded by the sudden and daily death of friends and companions. Agnostic or not, Sam Abbey had all kinds of rules for proper behavior, most of them easily summed up by three words: do what's right.
Brenta was Presbyterian and raised the children in that faith, though young George made his own religious conversion. In order to spend time with high school friends of Scandinavian descent, he began to attend their Lutheran church one block from the Abbey house — and would remain a regular Lutheran churchgoer for the rest of his life. One lure was the church's slate of activities — George joined the Boy Scout troop there, in order to go camping in the mountains. Another attraction was a youth choir "with several pretty blonde singers."
Sam lived a healthy life: no smoking, no drinking, no cursing. He was squarely built and remained fit into his eighties. He kept playing football — meaning soccer; he contemptuously referred to the American game as "carry ball." Immigrants from England, Wales, and Italy — football nations — kept their sporting traditions alive by forming teams centered around Pacific Northwest mining communities like Black Diamond and Ravensdale. George remembered watching his father playing for the Maple Leafs at Woodland Park during the 1930s, spending many a Sunday afternoon on damp fields with the cold seeping through the thin soles of his shoes. Sam and his Maple Leafs were repeat winners of the Washington State Championship.
When Sam got too old to play right wing or even goalie, he would referee matches, especially those involving sailors from the British battleship HMS Warspite, which had been severely damaged in a battle off Crete in May 1941 and sent through the Suez Canal, then across the Indian and Pacific Oceans for repairs at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
It was while watching Sam and the Warspite sailors on a cold Sunday, December 7, 1941, that nine-year-old George learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
* * *
George was also an athlete, playing American football in spite of his slight stature, though he preferred basketball, hockey, and — when he could find Seattle boys who wanted to play the game — soccer. He was pretty much a straight arrow like his father — not that he had much opportunity for mischief. Large families have their own means of discipline. In the Abbey family, in addition to father Sam, two of George's older brothers, Vince and Jack, often provided day-to-day authority. After Sam joined the US Army for World War II service, and with his brothers also away serving in the military, George inherited the responsibility of helping Brenta and Phyllis.
During the 1940s, the skies of Seattle were filled with Boeing B-17 and B-29 bombers — as many as 350 rolled out of the plant each month during peak production — inspiring a whole generation of fliers and engineers, including George Abbey.
But Seattle was also a navy town, home to the Pacific Fleet. George would remember Sam taking the family to Elliott Bay to see the big battleships anchored there. George was fond of Clear for Action!, a 1940 novel by Stephen Meader dealing with the adventures of a young midshipman aboard the USS Constitution in the War of 1812. He also read H. Irving Hancock's two series about a cadet at West Point and a midshipman at Annapolis, and was a fan of C. S. Forester's Hornblower stories in the Saturday Evening Post.
When Sam volunteered for duty with the US Army in World War II, he shaved ten years off his actual age in order to enlist. (Years later, he would volunteer for Korea and Vietnam. "If there was a war," his granddaughter Suzanne said, "he wanted to fight in it.") After being commissioned a captain in the Transportation Corps, Sam arrived in Antwerp, Belgium, in October 1944, just as the Germans began shelling the port city with V-1 and V-2 rockets — the V-2s were in fact the brainchild of George's future NASA associate Wernher von Braun.
London was a famous target for the V-2, but Antwerp was hit by more missiles. Belgian fatalities numbered over thirty-seven hundred, with six thousand wounded, during the V-weapon blitz, which lasted into March 1945. There were over six hundred American casualties, too, and Sam Abbey came close to joining that list. His office was in the city's King's Cross, which took at least two direct hits and suffered several near misses. While Sam was away searching for replacement windows, another V-2 struck. He returned to his office to find it destroyed.
His last assignment in Europe was overseeing freed Soviet prisoners of war who had been used as slave laborers by the Nazis. With the European war ending in May, Sam returned to the United States in late June with orders to the Pacific to fight the Japanese. The announcement of the Japanese surrender on August 14, 1945, found him on leave in Seattle before his departure for his Pacific assignment.
The entire family served in the military or in support of it. George's older brothers Jim and Jack had been in military service even before the start of World War II — Jim as a navy warrant officer, Jack as a lieutenant junior grade in the US Naval Reserve assigned to the merchant marine, seeing combat during most of the island landings in the Pacific, and at Kiska and Attu in the Aleutians. Vince had enlisted in the army when the United States entered the war in December 1941. And Brenta worked on a Boeing assembly line during the course of the war.
When George graduated from Lincoln High in 1950, it was only logical that he would want to follow the family tradition — in his case, to become a naval aviator. (The navy had "pilots," but they guided surface ships, not aircraft.) This in spite of the fact that the closest he had come to flying was seeing a Ford Trimotor up close at Boeing Field when he was six. George was enrolled at the University of Washington as a US Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps (NROTC) student when Vince decided to "help" him out.
The Abbeys lived within walking distance of UW — Sam had moved them there from North Seventy-First while Jack and Vince were students at the university. George hoped to live at home and have an easy commute. But Vince, now at law school in Washington, DC, felt that George ought to be away from home — it would be good for him, and he would be less of a burden to Sam and Brenta. So Vince looked into appointments to the service academies and discovered that West Point's quota was already filled — but not the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
Vince sent George's grades and NROTC information to the appropriate political powers, and suddenly George found himself scheduled to take the Annapolis exams — for which he was completely unprepared. (Refusing his brother was not an option.) He reported to the Federal Building in downtown Seattle on the appointed date for a miserable experience, failing to complete two of the five sections and guessing at the answers to far too many questions.
But when he received his grades shortly thereafter, he found he had passed — barely. A quick redo of his NROTC physical followed at Fort Lawton, and he was off to Annapolis to be sworn in on June 17, 1950 — a little more than one week before the outbreak of the Korean War — for four years of sometimes unhappy schooling and indoctrination.
Years later, when running the astronaut office and later the Johnson Space Center, George Abbey would be criticized for rearranging people's lives and careers; he had been the victim of the same sort of paternalistic manipulation himself.
CHAPTER 3
Annapolis
PARTLY BECAUSE OF THE circumstances of his enrollment, partly to Annapolis's awful climate, but mostly due to hazing at the hands of upperclassmen and general Naval Academy discipline, Abbey quickly concluded that he had made a huge mistake, envying friends who had gone to UW or other civilian universities. "I don't know anyone who enjoyed his plebe year," he would say later.
He was assigned to a room in Bancroft Hall with two roommates — Gordy Dahl and another prep school athlete, Dave McGinnis. Dahl and McGinnis immediately landed on the plebe football team — and McGinnis later started for the academy baseball team. The trio would become lifelong friends despite some early misunderstandings. "You faced an exam every day in every class," Abbey recalled. "Dahl and McGinnis told me that there was no way you could study for them, since the subject would always be a surprise. You either knew the answer or you didn't. I followed that advice for a month, and it was disastrous. So I began studying and did better."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Astronaut Maker"
by .
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