The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story by Lily Koppel

Author:Lily Koppel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Adult, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781455503230
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-06-11T07:00:00+00:00

On March 23, 1965, Betty sat in her living room with the Mercury wives, old pros watching the countdown. Her boys and Sam the Dog, “a sad-eyed basset hound,” were watching with them. The Grissom boys munched on fried chicken, ham sandwiches, avocado salad, and chocolate cake, washed down with milk. Betty ate skimpily. Following Hello, Dolly! Gus had decided to name his Gemini capsule after another popular musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown. NASA absolutely hated the name, but after Gus threatened to rename it the Titanic, the space agency reluctantly agreed.

Over at her home in El Lago, Barbara Young was grateful for all the company she had during the first launch party starring a New Nine astronaut wife; the more the merrier. Her fellow New Nine wives were there to make sure their hostess didn’t have to lift a finger. Instead of keeping the press at bay as Betty Grissom did, Barbara brought out pots of coffee and home-baked goodies for the hungry journalists camped out under a lone tree on her property. She even offered to clear her cars out of the garage so they could have shelter.

Back inside, settled in front of her TV, Barbara began to chain-smoke, an occupational hazard of being an Astrowife. She was a former art student, and her old paintings hanging around the family room raised some eyebrows.

“John looks mean this morning,” said Barbara, setting down some napkins and lighting yet another cigarette, her big brown eyes glued to the television as her husband prepared to launch into space. Someone kept a flow of coffee on the burner and emptied the ashtray filled by the chain-smoking artiste. The special red emergency phone NASA installed in each astronaut’s home before he went up kept ringing and ringing, but every time Barbara picked it up she was met by eerie silence on the other end. Finally, halfway through the morning, the NASA repairman arrived to fix the phone. After it was rewired, Deke Slayton called from the Cape and assured Barbara that all systems were “Go.”

The reporter from Life magazine who had been assigned to cover Barbara’s launch party gave some of the wives the creeps. They thought his questions and comments were just plain weird, and overly focused on the dark side of things—the existential meaning of it all, which Barbara was currently too preoccupied with the possibility of John blowing up to consider.

Spotted red and white with chicken pox, Barbara’s six-year-old Johnny ran around screaming manically: “Daddy’s got a rocket ship! Daddy’s got a rocket ship!” She didn’t bother trying to control him. Dashing out the front door and into the crowd of well-caffeinated newsmen, Johnny soon returned to the living room and set loose a frog he’d caught from a tin can.

The house was abuzz. The New Nine wives were taking the launch party to a whole new level, with the kind of panache that made the old pro Betty Grissom say, “One thing that has always kind of bothered me: some of the other wives, as soon as their husband is in orbit, they had their champagne.

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