History

When I was a kid, Wolfie’s in Cocoa Beach was in its Go-Go period: Apollo was reaching high gear, the Air Force was busy in its own right out on the Cape and when the work was done, there were legendary bars and restaurants awaiting locals and tourists alike. We were part of the locals.

One of my Dad’s favorites to take me out to eat was a sandwich shop by the Ramada Inn, Wolfie’s. It was kid-friendly, unlike a more adult establishment like The Mousetrap, The Surf or other infamous and legendary Cocoa Beach haunts. They’re all long gone now, as is the nature of restaurants in a resort town. Even the most successful ones fade out after a generation or two.

1960’s Era Advertisement for Wolfie’s
(provenance unknown)

Wolfie’s had a great kid’s menu, and they let you keep the menu if you cleaned your plate. I never had a problem with that (unless it was something I really didn’t like, like liver) so I had several of these. If you look closely, you can see the lines in it where you could punch out the nose and eye to make a mask. All of the kids’ menus I ever owned were worn out just that way.

Wearing one of course made you a steely-eyed astronaut ready for anything. Such was the imagination of a kid, especially one living on the Space Coast. After all, we saw rockets launch all the time, and many of us had parents and/or grandparents who worked “out at the Cape” in various space-related jobs.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Wolfie’s was a place where an episode of “much ado about nothing” had blasted off.

Wolfie’s Kids Menu from the 1960’s

Wolfie’s Really Was Out of This World

Wally Schirra

Wolfie’s was the same place that Wally Schirra picked up the infamous corned beef sandwich for John Young on Young’s Gemini-3 flight in March of1965.

The story goes like this: Wally Schirra, inveterate prankster (and one of my Dad’s buddies), was eating at Wolfie’s one day when he and the manager got into a discussion about how terrible the food sent up with the astronauts was. At the time, on-orbit meals were a pasty emulsion that had to be reconstituted with water before the astronauts could eat them. To say those meals were unpopular would be a terrible understatement.

Schirra and the manager, one Carl Ransom, then got a brilliant idea — they would send up a corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s on the next crewed mission, Gemini 3, that was to be flown by John Young and Gus Grissom. They made some drop tests to see if the bread could survive the G-forces of ascent, which were successful.

When it came time to ready for the launch on March 23, 1965, Schirra gave Young a wrapped corn beef sandwich, which Young hid in his spacesuit and smuggled it aboard the flight.  Later, in orbit, he pulled it out and shared it with Gus Grissom — something he no doubt enjoyed more than the toothpaste-like official meals.

Problem was, Grissom was supposed to be the “control” half of a food experiment where he didn’t eat. Grissom instead enjoyed a bite out of a corned beef sandwich from Wolfie’s.

Gemini-3 Crew – John Young (left) and Gus Grissom (right)
photo: NASA
The front of a 1960’s Postcard showing Wolfie’s exterior and seating area.
(click to enlarge.)
Provenance: Ramada Inn / Wolfie’s souvenir shop

Dinnertime In Space

From the Gemini 3 Transcript:

01 52 26 Gus Grissom: “What is it?”

01 52 27 John Young:”Corn beef sandwich.””

01 52 28 Gus Grissom: “Where did that come from?”

01 52 30 John Young: “I brought it with me. Let’s see how it tastes. Smells, doesn’t it?”

01 52 41 Gus Grissom: “Yes, it’s breaking up. I’m going to stick it in my pocket.”

01 52 43 John Young: “Is it?“

01 52 49 John Young: “It was a thought, anyways.”

01 52 51 Gus Grissom: “Yep.””

01 52 52 John Young: “Not a very good one.”

01 52 54 Gus Grissom: “Pretty good, though, if it would just hold together.”

01 53 13 John Young: “Want some chicken leg?”

01 53 15 Gus Grissom: “No, you can handle that.”

They might have gotten away with it, but Schirra and Ransom didn’t account for crumbs in a microgravity environment, and apparently Young and Grissom didn’t know any better. After a very short time, caraway seeds and breadcrumbs were floating everywhere in the capsule. Not a good thing to have, considering all the nooks and crannies filled with circuitry and electronics. A seed in the wrong place…well, some folks said that could have caused a disaster.

Somehow, pictures of crumbs on the Gemini capsule control panel made their way back to Earth, where they caught the eye of not only the flight controllers, but also a space-fascinated public.

NASA administrator James E. Webb was “not amused.” Much concern was raised about safety — the greasy bread crumbs were a serious threat to the safe operation of the spacecraft, according to some. The press had a field day.

The May 3, 1965 Orlando Sentinel had an opinion piece on The Corn Beef Sandwich.
Millions wasted, science on the ashes, they thought.
(click to enlarge)

That in turn got the attention of Congress. Politicians being what they are got upset that “millions of dollars were being wasted” by the astronauts ignoring the space food that had been sent up, and it even got to the point where the the House of Representatives appropriations committee convened a meeting to discuss the entire “incident.”

“Today the theater that took place inside the meeting room that day strikes me as totally comic, but I can assure you that those testifying for NASA at the time were not smiling.”

— John Young, Forever Young (University Press of Florida, 2012)

In the hearing, Grissom and Young’s boss, Bob Gilruth, told the panel that the whole stunt “was a foolish thing to do.” Gilruth did add that “these little things do help break up the strain [on the astronauts.]” NASA also promised this would never happen again.

Later, in the official history of the Gemini program, NASA noted: “What was not made clear, apparent to either the legislators or the press was that the official food was only there for evaluation of its taste, convenience, and reconstitution properties and had nothing to do with any scientific or medical objectives of the mission. No one expected to learn very much about the effects of space food on so short a flight.”

NASA specifically banned any outside food from being brought aboard one of their spacecraft. “Unauthorized sandwiches” were specifically banned. No more corned beef for lunch, toothpaste is back on the menu, boys. A spokesman said at the time that “NASA is not trying to crack down on humor or crack down on gaiety or quench anyone’s high spirits. We just want to stop, once and for all, any practices which might get out of hand and cause harm.”

I’ll leave it to you to interpret exactly what harm may have arisen, but it’s probably reasonable to think that the danger was just as high in Congress as it was aboard any spacecraft in orbit.

Afterwards

It didn’t take long for the Gemini 3 controversy to settle, but be sure that the Sandwich had left a rash on a few rear ends inside NASA. The extent of that, who’s to say, but for a while some would try to fan the dying embers.

The Cocoa Tribune, April 14, 1965
Local columnists were often gadflies and raconteurs. Cocoa’s Douglas Morgan Dederer certainly was one of those.
(click to enlarge)

A Just Dessert

Years later, in 1981, John Young commanded the first Space Shuttle mission, STS-1. And on the menu for the flight?

Corned beef sandwiches.

Corned Beef carried aboard Shuttle, STS-1 (NASA Photo: A19820157000).

Never let it be said that NASA doesn’t have a sense of humor.

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Here’s a quick Cold War story from 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis that few people know of: a single Soviet naval officer prevented a nuclear exchange.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis off of the coast of Cuba, on October 27, 1962, four Soviet submarines had been detected by the US Navy, and were being bombarded by non-lethal depth charges intended to make them surface. The Soviets did not know this, and thought they were under attack.

Soviet submarine B-59, forced to the surface by U.S. Naval forces in the Caribbean near Cuba. U.S. National Archives, Still Pictures Branch, Record Group 428, Item 428-N-711200.

Second-in-Command of Soviet submarine B-59, Brigade Chief of Staff  Vasili Arkhipov was the lone dissenter refusing to fire a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo during the Cuban Missile Crisis that would have surely destroyed its target, the USS Randolph, an aircraft carrier leading an American task group of multiple ships and submarines.

The submarine did not need Moscow’s permission to fire the torpedoes. The other submarines only required its captain and political officer to agree, however, on the B-59, three were required to agree: Captain Valentin Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov, and Chief Brigade Officer Arkhipov, who was equal in rank to Savitsky but the senior officer aboard B-59.

As another captain in the brigade put it in an interview with PBS decades later: “I had a written order that I could release it,” says Ketov. “And if there was an order to fire the torpedo I would do it without a second thought. For the first time in life a commander of a submarine had a nuclear weapon and had the authority to fire the missile at his command.”
–– Soviet submarine commander Ryurik Ketov

Even though Arkhipov was second-in-command of the submarine B-59, he was in fact chief of staff of the entire submarine flotilla, including B-4, B-36 and B-130. He was also a hero of the Soviet Union, having helped save the Hotel-class K-19 ballistic missile submarine in 1961. That no doubt gave him great sway over the captain and political officer of B-59, both of whom were convinced they were in a wartime scenario and that all options were on the table.

The USS Randolph in 1955.

Had they launched the torpedo and had it damaged surface ships (which it surely would have) then the response from the US would have undoubtedly been a thermonuclear exchange.

You could say we are all here because of Arkhipov.

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One of the many great things to do on a visit to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center is to take a close look at some of the artifacts on display. Atlantis herself, of course, is a star attraction, but there are a lot of other things that are not as flashy as an entire Space Shuttle Orbiter but are incredibly interesting in their own right: for example, one of Atlantis’s hatches.

Note that the instructions are both right-side-up and upside down. After all, in orbit, there really is no “up” or “down” and that in mind, the instructions were to be easily read in any orientation.

Other things is the “Unlocked” indicator on the handle. This is a door that’s not made to be casually opened, and the bright red indicator makes it clear that’s possible in its current configuration.

Finally, the hatch locking mechanisms are lightweight, yet incredibly strong and durable.

All in all, this is a fine piece of engineering that one might overlook if they don’t take the time to give it a good look.

Space Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis’s hatch.
(click the photo to enlarge in a new tab)
Photo ©2022 Charles Boyer / Creative Commons-Attribution license
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Here’s a story in the Huntsville (Alabama) Times from 1958 talking about my grandfather and my uncle and their jobs with the space program. V.L. Pinson, my grandfather, was a senior engineer and manager with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, which was later merged into NASA in 1960.

George Pinson, my uncle, joined Boeing shortly after this article was written, and during his time there, he was an engineer, director and senior manager. When he retired, he had over 300 patents, some of which can be found here. One of the main projects he worked on was the Saturn V S-IC first stage, as well as military rocketry systems.

They were both very intelligent men, and literal rocket scientists who taught me a great deal — not the least of which was how to learn and how to go about solving problems.

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When an employee of NASA or one of its contractors participated in a major milestone, they were often sent a thank you letter from their manager. Here’s one my grandfather got from his boss, Dr. Kurt Debus.

In this case, my grandfather got a letter from his boss, Dr. Kurt Debus, congratulating him for his participation in helping to launch America’s first satellite, Explorer 1. The satellite was not only the first for the nation, it was also the first to carry scientific instruments designed to make measurements in the new frontier of outer space.

Explorer 1: Scientific Payload (courtesy NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory

One of the measurements that the satellite made was cosmic rays — a form of high-energy radiation that constantly bombards the Earth, and originates from outside our solar system. The expected count was thirty strikes per second on the instruments aboard Explorer 1, but periodically, it would drop to near zero. Analysis of this data showed that zero counts were occurring when Explorer 1 was at an altitude of 2,000 km above Earth, but it would rise to the expected level of thirty. This in turn led to more experimentation on later satellites, and as a result, the Van Allen Belt was discovered — a geomagnetic phenomena where highly changed particles are trapped in the magnetic fields surrounding the Earth.

Explorer 1 at LAunch Complex 26-A in Cape Canaveral prior to its launch (photo: NASA)

Debus’s letter to my grandfather:

Kurt Debus letter to V. L. Pinson Sr. (from Pinson’s archives)

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All That’s Left: there is one last piece of the Lassiter Mill Bridge left standing in a Raleigh city park. There’s but one wall of the old mill left, while the dam and the spillway across Crabtree Creek are still there.

The last remnant of Lassiter Mill Bridge in 2021

The bridge was 110 foot long and 15 foot wide, and stood 20 foot tall. It was a steel truss bridge, and it replaced an earlier wooden bridge.Originally spanning the Neuse River north of Raleigh, the bridge was relocated to the Mill site in 1920. Condemned and demolished in 1984, it is thought to have been the last remaining steel truss bridge in Wake County.

Lassiter Mill Bridge around 1974.

They’re just a feature of an Inside-The-Beltline neighborhood and part of a small city park that most people have no idea is even there.As kids, this spot was a swimming hole, and it was a rite of passage to shimmy up to the top of the bridge and dive in the creek below.

The only remaining wall of the old Lassiter Mill


The site of Lassiter Mill as seen from above. Left is where the bridge once stood. Right is the mill dam. Not seen to the right is the last remaining wall of the old mill structure.
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Most people in Raleigh have heard of Avent Ferry Road, maybe they’ve seen a road by the same name 15 miles south in Holly Springs, but few of them know where Avent’s Ferry actually was.

The ferry operated from1775 until 1926, and was vital for transportation and commerce in central North Carolina. The state replaced the ferry with a bridge in 1926, but roads heading south from Raleigh and through Holly Springs still bear its name.

Today, where NC-42 crosses the Cape Fear River, you’re driving across the bridge the replaced Avent Ferry.

Bridge over the Cape Fear River at NC-42, between Sanford and Corinth, NC
photo by the author, 3/20/2021
Avent’s Ferry Bridge as seen from the boat launch at the northern end of the bridge.
A historical sign denotes the location of the historic ferry.
The location of Avent’s Ferry relative to Raleigh.
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Personally, some of the best nights in my life were spent in the Village Subway, in Cameron Village, Raleigh, NC US of A. We were sure we were all almost famous, and funny thing, that’s exactly what some of us became. I personally didn’t, but I damn sure had a good time in my early 1920’s.

Imagine a 2,500 square foot club, hot and sweaty, packed to the gills; so tightly that dancing was basically jumping straight up and down. At any given times, there might be three, perhaps four other people pressing up against you, and undoubtedly you were doing the same to someone else. And, oh, the B-52’s playing on a tiny stage ten feet in front of you.

It was just another night at the Café Deja Vu, in beautiful Raleighwood North Carolina in the 1980’s.

I truly believe that The B-52’s have been underrated by a lot of rock historians. They were new, quirky, they were different, and they were silly a lot of the time, but they were also incredibly talented and incredibly fun. Seeing them once was enough to make someone be see them every time they came through town and listen to their records in between.

Without trying to sound like someone waxing about their lost youth, it was always a good time. So were the after-hours parties with Fred Schneider holding court, or maybe my roommate, Berklee graduate David Matos of The Snap showing off his ability to play anything by ear after hearing it once, and by play, I mean every single instrument.

I haven’t spoken to Fred or David in 30+ years now, and I doubt he remembers me, but I do enjoy knowing that my friend Neilan Tyree (whom I met through my wife Maggie) and Fred are good friends. For his part, David did a turn on Broadway as the lead guitarist in Motown The Musical, among many other things. He’s always had a solid career, and still does so far as I know They are all really good people, and it was fun knowing them, however slightly, before they got really famous.

For more, read Heather Leah’s fine piece on The Village Subway.

 

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Here’s a fun little thought experiment for the space enthusiast: suppose for a moment that NASA and the US had followed what the Soviets and later Roscosmos did with Soyuz: kept improving the existing system incrementally and kept the system flying while they did.

Instead of building a new booster stack for every new program – STS, now ISS, and later whatever we do with SLS when it finishes, we had kept the Saturn IB / Apollo CSM system in service and had iteratively improved it as technology improved? At least on the surface, the answer seems be a “yes.”

Soyuz launching the Soviet part of the ASTP mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in 1975. Alexei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov would later meet in space with Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Deke Slayton in orbit on the last spaceflight of the Saturn family.

photo: TASS, via NASA.

While it was hardly sexy, “Cluster’s Last Stand” had a great track record. Save for Apollo 13 (caused by human error) the same can be said for the CSM. I think the H-1 (later RS-27) engine would have evolved to something similar to the Merlin in performance terms (both are gas-generator engines) and the J2 engine on the S-IVB Saturn IB second stage had plenty of go (1,033.1 kN).

 A Saturn IB lifts off from Kennedy Space Center in the 1970’s. Seen below the rocket’s plume is the distinctive pedestal used to match the relatively diminutive IB to the launch tower.

photo: NASA

On the top, literally, an Apollo capsule with even the second generation Shuttle avionics much less CST-100 or Orion avionics would have been something to behold, plus whatever improvements to another 40 years of development and manufacturing would have brought. Would the Apollo CSM have evolved to something reusable? Maybe.

Did we quit flying every time we built a new kind of airplane? No. But that’s what the US has effectively done with its space program: nothing launched from US soil during the development of the next program. This happened in the 1970’s between Apollo and the Space Shuttle and it has been since 2011 and the end of the Shuttle program that US astronauts have gone to space on an American rocket. It seems illogical, but that’s what has happened.

Ironically, the US and NASA depend on the venerable Soyuz workhorse to ferry astronauts to ISS. Soyuz has been in service since 1967, and its replacement is only now in advanced development in Russia.

One thing is certain: the US would have never had the launch gap in the 1970’s between ASTP and STS, nor would we have one now. The Russians have never had a flight gap since Soyuz entered service in the late 1960’s, save for the short periods following incident investigations. And even today, they can continue to use the venerable Soyuz while RKK Energia works through the issues with their new Federation spacecraft (its maiden launch is expected to slip from 2022 to 2024.)

A breakdown of the Saturn IB flight stack. 

Source: NASA msfc-71-pm 1100-29

Meanwhile, our *three* human spaceflight programs all have their own issues. At the time of this writing in May, 2019, SpaceX is piecing together the data and the remains of its first Crew Dragon capsule after it exploded during a test, Boeing is working through its own issues with its onboard launch escape system engines on the CST-100 and SLS continues to plod through development and testing (and is years behind schedule.)

Perhaps we should have kept the old uprated Saturn I system. It would be interesting to have seen what we could have done in space had we kept the old bird flying.

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A quick story for y’all: for years I had this crazy memory, but one that really seemed like it really happened. Thing is, memories from that age seem more like dreams from long ago but still remembered than they do things that actually happened. This one actually did happen. My date with Morgan Fairchild? Well, no, that was definitely a dream. The other memory? It might have been even more far-fetched.

The memory is this: I vividly remembered my Dad, an astronaut and me riding around in Dad’s car in Cocoa Beach, and then Dad drove the car into the Indian River and took us for a ride on the water — still in the car — to look at a Saturn V off in the distance at the Cape. When we were done, Dad drove us all home in that same car.

Sunbeam Amphicar at Downtown Disney

Crazy. It bugged me for a long time — it just seemed so real but the whole idea of my Dad, some astronaut and me riding around in a car is just too crazy to be true.

A few years before he passed on, my Dad and I were sharing a drink and not really watching the game on TV so I asked Dad about it, and also asked him not to laugh if it was something I’d dreamt up: was I just remembering something that I imagined, or did it possibly really happen?

Dad looked at me, grinned and launched excitedly into a story about this car he had “before I met your mother and for a while after” and how this car was also a boat, and that yes, positively that had happened, in his Sunbeam Amphicar.

The astronaut was Wally Schirra (Apollo 7), he was there to see the pad procedures that were being developed for the coming Apollo launches. He didn’t say much to other than a kind hello, because I was pretty young in 1966: I didn’t turn five until Thanksgiving week. It was pretty easy to ignore me while I was strapped down in the back seat. I was just along for the ride. No worries, I still had fun.

Dad added that later on when he got married to Mom and “had us kids” that Mom told him he had to sell it to get a station wagon for all of us. He always added immediately, and laughed, “I already knew the secret to a happy marriage: just say ‘Yes, Dear’ and get it over with.”

Unfortunately, my Dad passed away on March 18, 2010, after a sudden illness. He never emphasized his contribution to the space program—he said he was a tiny cog in a huge machine and left that to be that, except the times he said, “Mongo only pawn in game of NASA” with a roaring laugh that told you he found that as funny in 2005 as he did in the 1970s after he saw “Blazing Saddles” for the first time. He did say he enjoyed what he did and that he’d never trade the experience.

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