Another Major Milestone

The Major Milestone story is one of several stories my father told from his brief and inglorious career at NASA (late 1966 to mid 1967). As with all his stories I have done all I can to fact-check them, and while most of the verifiable details do check out, many of the people involved in the stories are no longer with us and for years I’ve been trying to track down my father’s file in the complex myriad of NASA archives with no luck. One resource I was able to rely in was my father’s officemate at NASA, Bart Hacker, now at The Smithsonian, whose help has been invaluable. He looked at drafts of various stories and helped correct errors and omissions, but could not confirm or deny the stories themselves.

Orientation at NASA-MSC [Manned Space Center] was a big deal—hour after hour of government-produced news/publicity films. Expensively produced pseudo-documentaries ranging from the totally trivial (the dozens of test firings of all kinds of rockets) to the mundane (the development of a space pencil) to the dramatic (the Mercury flight films). It took dozens of test firings of all kinds of rockets—in a series of incremental stages—each of which was hailed in a dramatic and somber narrative voice, as “another major milestone” in space history. Even when lab animals failed to come back it was a milestone, an epoch-making event in NASA's history. My colleagues, Bart Hacker and Mary Louise Morse, joined me in the little movie theatre in Building #1 in watching a near-endless series of these semi-documentaries—for hours.

Our office was in the same building as the one to which tourists,VIPs and Congressmen were taken. It housed the museum, the library, the photo production and archives rooms, and our offices. The MSC Historian, Jim Grimwood, a serious Southerner whom Lloyd Swenson evaluated as “Not fit to be a graduate student” had his own spacious office. It was bigger than the one which Bart Hacker and I were obliged to share. Mary Louise shared an office down the hall with Ivan Ertel where they were both similarly employed on the Apollo Program. Ours and the neighboring offices were nearly identical—typical federal design. Not unlike the military, not only was every building numbered, but every office. This extended even to every door! Indeed a door (usually in a hallway) without a number on it, is like a sty in the eye of a government bureaucrat. “NS-105 Janitorial Room” was our local designation for broom closet!

After the first week, two items were left: a Security evaluation and interview; and the filling out of personnel forms.

The 12,000 odd MSC employees—including the astronauts themselves—were divided (I think, evenly) among some 50-odd security officers. The importance/sensitivity of the employee determined the rank/importance of his security officer. As Chief Historian of the Gemini Project I was assigned to Security Officer Rod Puffer whose specialty was vetting civilians who were to work in military or other secure installations. I was to provide one of the final straws to push the outer envelope of Puffer’s blood-pressure margin.

I could tell Puffer’s mind-set at first glance. He looked a bit like Maurice Minnifield, the retired astronaut on Northern Exposure. He was not a big man, about 5'7", with a no neck Marine stature and nearly shaved head. As expected, he held himself rigidly stiff and upright, even when projecting (supposedly) relaxed cordiality. He clearly did not have a sense of humor.

I had to listen to his flag-waving speech about national security, a near-threatening warning about the rigors and demands of security clearance and status. The whole time, I must confess, I had to restrain myself from laughing. This red-faced, red-necked career killer who looked like he was trying to burst free of the confines of his civilian suit took himself so seriously that he seemed instinctually hostile to me. The fact that my security resume listed such suspect countries as Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary—all visited within the past 14 months—under the guise of “tourism”—made me a prime candidate for a security leak. He commented that it would take the cooperative military intelligence arm at least 6-12 months to clear me—if ever! I volunteered that he should try the Defense Intelligence Agency—I hinted that that might speed things up. He picked up on that momentarily, then dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand and said the interview was over.

As I was leaving, his secretary reached into a drawer and handed me a form. I was told it was the personnel description form for the campus directory, the NASA-MSC directory of names, job descriptions, addresses, telephone extensions for the whole center. As I was walking back to my office, I noticed that I had been inadvertently given two blank personnel forms.

Returning to my desk, I looked over to my colleague, Bart, and asked him if he had gotten Puffer as his security officer. When he mumbled something about an Air Force Captain, I told him about Puffer and his luck at getting someone real. All the while I was filling in my personnel form, I looked over at the second form sitting on the desk next to the typewriter. And then a flash of inspiration! I knew I was going to have a ball with Puffer—and our relationship would perk up my spirits while at NASA—and God knew what else!

I was chuckling audibly as I typed in the details of the second form:

First Name:              Miles

Surname:                  Milestone

Rank:                        Major (USAF)

Job Description:       Rocketry and Guidance Systems Officer

And there it was! NASA was about to have another Major Milestone! A landmark for truth, freedom, and the American way. Now they could say, in truth—as they pointed to the NASA-MSC directory—that there was always a Major Milestone at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Although Bart informed me that the upper echelon would take a dim view of such levity, and that if Puffer was truly as I had described him, well . . . I dropped both forms in the inter-office Out box. Let the games begin!

I knew the day on which the latest MSC directory appeared because on that morning I arrived at my desk to find a note impaled on my desk pen. Four words: “Call Puffer— stat!"

I don't think that most people at NASA had noticed the new entry—although my colleague Bart thought it was hilarious and showed it to all his acquaintances. From the secretaries it reached Grimwood and probably, to hold off criticism from those higher up who shared his lack of humor, from him to Puffer.

You could almost feel Puffer restraining himself on his end of the phone. I was told to report to his office forthwith. Not fully appreciative of the limited sense of humor—although I had a clue—of government functionaries, I had no real apprehension of the shit I had stirred. It became clear when I entered Puffer's office and saw him beet-red behind his desk holding a copy of the MSC Directory. The only word he uttered was—“Why?”—his expression told the rest.

I explained that since I had seen dozens of hours of NASA documentaries showing—among others—various trivial events and referring to them as major milestones; and since I had been given, with no attached explanation not one but two personnel forms, I thought it would be a good opportunity to provide NASA with a real Major Milestone—even if only to be pointed to in the MSC directory.

Puffer was genuinely mystified as to why someone should do something like this. My wry smile and the fact that I seemed to be taking it all like a tempest-in-a-teacup, only incensed him the more. I could see the NASA manual on his desk and was sure he had been thumbing madly through it to see what charges he could bring me up on. Impersonating an officer? Surely not! Creating an officer? Was that covered in the book? I had made the Major a Rocketry and Guidance Systems expert—but, as a fiction, had this any material effect on the space program? I had, at worst, injected an error into the system. But were intentional typos covered in the rules? Perhaps I had cost NASA a miniscule printing cost for the additional entry; I had certainly caused a few laughs and, possibly, a modicum of embarrassment to some like Puffer . . . but where was the harm? Surely, when it got to Washington there would be some chuckles—surely (I hoped) the bigger the man the more likely he would be to appreciate a good joke!

Obviously, Puffer was stymied as to what he could do. He picked up a file folder on his desk—obviously mine—and, walking over to a large bank of file cabinets (four drawers high and about a dozen long) filling one side of his office and jerked open a drawer.

“I’m keeping a file on you!”—The ultimate Kafkaesque threat in a closed society! I beat a hasty retreat back to my office, where Grimwood—listed as my MSC liaison, but believing himself my boss—standing in his doorway, slyly puffing on his pipe, shot me his best “I told you so” glance.

It should be noted that Bart Hacker did not share my father’s assessment of Jim Grimwood. He felt that Grimwood “actively sought to deflect bureaucratic interference.”