The Untimely Demise of a Snowman

My earliest memory is of riding on my father’s shoulders through a crowded street on a late afternoon. It was some kind of street fair—maybe Guy Fawkes Day. I could not have been much more than three years old. My father handed me a tuppence coin and had me reach up and put it in a copper kettle that was hanging above my head from a pole extended into the street from a shop front. As I dropped the coin in the kettle a man passed us on stilts and I marveled at this as he passed.

Most of my memories of early childhood are just fragments such as this. My general impression was of a drab and gray post-war England, almost Dickensian in its dreariness. I remember the eccentric people for which the country is so well-known. There was a man always hanging about the market who had a mouse that would run around the brim of his hat, an organ grinder always playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” and various lunatics standing on soap boxes in the park ranting about politics.

I remember one man on a soap box shouting that the world was flat and that it was heresy to think otherwise. This didn’t make sense even to a very young boy like me. I remember asking my dad on a weekend excursion to Brighton how anybody could believe the world was flat.

I remember going to the market almost every week with my mother and my younger brother. Often she would drag us hurriedly back home because she had heard the siren of a firetruck headed in the direction of our house on Windsor Road and was afraid she had forgotten the kettle on the stove or left the iron on or was in tears after seeing my father with one of his girlfriends on the back of his scooter.

On the corner of our street there was a small shop where my mother would stop to buy sundries and occasionally treat us to Kit Kat bars. There were the Friday nights my father would come home with a rolled-up bundle of newspaper, which he would put on the kitchen table and my mother would open to reveal a steaming pile of fish and chips.

There are other more extensive memories that have stayed with me, maybe because they were more traumatic. One such memory was of the time our pet rabbit escaped because my brother had left the door of the hutch open. I remember my father yelling at my brother, who was in tears, threatening to make him spend the night in the hutch. My brother at the time was actually small enough to fit in the hutch, but my mother interceded on his behalf.

Another memory was of a snowstorm in early January and the snowman my father, brother and I built. The snow had fallen steadily through the previous night and we woke to find half a foot of snow blanketing the ground. I remember the three of us rolling big balls of snow and my father stacking them on top of one another. We added lumps of coal for eyes and buttons, a scarf around his neck and we stuck one of my father’s pipes in his mouth. My father then wrote “HAPPY NEW YEAR” with India ink on him.

The snowman before his untimely demise.

We were so proud of that snowman. He was taller than my mother and father and we received many compliments on it from the neighbors. The sad part of the story comes later that evening when we were sitting around the dinner table and heard yelling, thuds and the clanging of metal against our iron fence. The whole family raced to the front window to find a man brandishing a snow shovel hacking apart our snowman screaming “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” My father chased him away but of course it was too late. The snowman was by then completely obliterated and my brother and I were sobbing uncontrollably and, again, my father tried to explain such lunacy.

The Summer of 1977

My father’s 8-page letter of July 26, 1977 needs a short introduction, aside from saying that it’s not the kind of letter a father would normally send to a son. I’ve also included a brief note at the end.

In the spring of 1977, when I was 18, my father and I planned to take trip together to France and Spain. We were to drive down from England, where he was spending the summer, over to France and then to Spain by car, and back again. He promised to cover my airfare from New York to London while I covered the rest of my expenses. After my spring semester at Temple in Philadelphia, I went to visit my mother in Michigan after which I would fly to New York and then on to London.

At the time, my father had three houses, the Wallace Street house in Philadelphia and two in the UK, one in Cambridge on Highworth Avenue and the other, south of the city, in the village of Pampisford. He told me of his intention to leave my stepmother and sisters at the house in Pampisford once they got to England and move into the Highworth Avenue house.

Sometime during the spring semester, my 40-year-old father, had begun an affair with one of his students, an attractive 21-year-old girl by the name of Lucy. I had met her when I attended one of my father’s lectures for the class in which she was a student. I knew of the affair and was even asked to cover for him at times. Without consulting me, my father decided to include her in our summer plans and clearly intended for her to spend the rest of the summer with us at the Highworth Avenue house.

I guess he had expended so much time and effort getting this mistress to England that he had either forgotten about my ticket or had not followed up on it. The day before I was to fly there I called the travel agent in New York where my ticket to London was supposedly waiting for me. They didn’t have anything for me and, in fact, knew nothing about it. I called my father in England and he said he would “straighten it out,” but that I should at least get to New York. I heard nothing back from him before my scheduled flight and, knowing not to trust my father, and having only a one-way ticket to New York, I stayed in Michigan.

No letter I received from my father better sums up by example the mistakes my father made in his life. He sabotaged a marriage to a beautiful woman—for the second time in his life—alienated himself from his two daughters and completely lost what little trust any of us had left in him.

Tuesday, July 26th, 1977

Dear Jeff,

Well, there’s really no short version of the summer of ‘77. Suffice it to say it was a natural disaster – only Jimmy Carter won’t be sending me any federal funds. I’ll give it to you in rough factual outlines, like a historian.

May 8 arrived. We settled into Pampisford and I contacted Spicer to start work immediately on Highworth Avenue genuinely believing a 50-50 chance that Lucy might come as early as the following Thursday, but not likely to be much later than the 28th.

May 10 I realized that Lucy would not be coming at least until the 8th. May 12: work commenced on putting Highworth Ave. right. Bev knows generally that Lucy is coming sometime in the summer and perhaps with someone and possibly as part of a general ‘touring around’. May 23: I have phoned Lucy three times (talked to her), she has yet to write or call, though she has promised to call. My social life is busy but I am constantly thinking of Lucy. May 25: a strange letter from Lucy in which she refers to having met several interesting men, in which she shaves down her sense of commitment to me, talks of not possibly thinking of a liaison that will extend beyond the summer, and that I can cancel ‘our’ plans if I like. I call and write and said I’ll play it like it lies – besides I’ve nothing better cooking, really.

June 2nd: House is ready; Lucy says on the phone that she feels ‘pressured’ by my insistences .. especially to get her here sooner rather than later. June 3rd: Lucy says she’s coming on the ‘6th, 7th, or 8th’ – the 9th being her 22nd birthday and the first day of a new non-youth fare pricing for her trip. I push for the 6th, reminding her I have theatre tix and that the 7th is Jubilee Day here. June 7th: Lucy arrives. Bev has been told the magnitude and details of Lucy’s stay – i.e., to actually move in with me here for the summer – the day before. She is incredulous and says she’ll “never forgive me” but otherwise unteared and unbowed. June l0th: Lucy is enjoying herself but is uneasy about my trips to Pampisford to mow the lawn, see the kids, she has gone on outing with the kids and is really great with them -­ they like her so much that they ask Bev why can’t they have Lucy round to the house. June 12th: We decide to take a week’s vacation to Tangiers, Lucy will pay her own fare, our relationship has become a little strained because clearly Lucy doesn’t feel as deeply as I and I am still emotionally puzzled over how she can feel so firmly about an ending (she must return August 4 to go on an all-family outing and prepare for her job in September) yet claim to love me, etc. June 15-22 in Tangiers. Fantastic time .. sun, swim, eat, and loving 3-4 times a day .. like a honeymoon, but still undertones of emotional limitations on her part. Is it that I’m moving too fast and asking too much too soon over someone who’s only just turned 22? Or is it that she just simply “knows” that, for various and sundry reasons, it just “can never be” with us? I am deeply disturbed and try – somewhat unsuccessfully – not to let it show. We return & try to sort out what has become of you. I am beginning to feel that I cannot have all 3 of us go down to Pamplona together when I have such a feeling of a half-formed relationship with Lucy. Clive and Linda are going, with two others, and have offered to take you, Lucy and I to meet you either in St. Jean or Pamplona .. I figuring that 2-3 more days in semi-isolation travelling should consolidate things so that, abdicating heavy emotional considerations during the Fiesta, we  can all have a good time when we meet down South.

My money situation is a bit tense and Bev, after Morocco, is threatening all sorts of retribution in the law, divorce, etc. Your trip, as it was, would have cost me about $650-$700, there was no way I could remotely consider another $300 or more .. that was the way it had to be .. a loan with you taking over the payments against my credit card, that was marginally acceptable – but I knew you wanted to come so, well. But you weren’t having it and you sounded just like your mother when you went into that sulk, etc. I certainly wouldn’t have left you high and dry in N.Y., you know that. But never mind. I was partly relieved as, by the 27th I was beginning seriously to think of sending Lucy back and forgetting about everything. She was writing too many letters to men, and to ‘Ralph’ the fellow she dated the two evening’s just before she flew to me .. and her heart clearly was not ‘involved’ with me. I could try to accept the ‘now’ of our relationship, but it was fucking difficult. If I could only evince a ‘now’-like sense of commitment, but her commitment to ending it in August infected both (a) her ability to really give of herself emotionally ‘now’ and (b) my ability to simply take each day as it came – if she hadn’t told me, and re-told me, about it ending in August – well, who knows but that I might have gotten tired of her or whatever and ended it myself! But the loving was fantastic – she clearly had a libido to match my own, she was so beautiful and as she tanned she got more so. We drank, we went places, we did things and we loved almightily! So we left on June 29th, in the Jag, for the South. Two and a half lovely days in Paris; one night on the road, 3 days in St. Jean.

On the morning of the last day in St. Jean I went for a postcard from the envelope containing the new unwritten cards (I had been sending one a day to the girls) while she was in the bath and I came upon one she had written the night before, when I was asleep, to Ralph. We’d been walking on the promenade at sunset by the sea; she’d written “Here’s another sunset for you, my darling. I think of you always and wish that you were here with me. I miss you so and I can’t wait until I am with you. Think of me. All my love. Lucy.” What a blow! I went into the bath and told her that she had misplaced this card among the blank ones, I told her I couldn’t help reading it, and walked back into the room to pack my bag. She came out in a few minutes and pleaded with me not to end it. She said she didn’t feel that strongly about him, it was just what she thought he wanted to hear. Besides, she loved me, – she said she was with me, wasn’t she? What more could I want? Besides, he was for the fall, and I was for now. Well, we wound up making mad passionate love and on we went to Pamplona. We arrived, as planned, about noon on the 5th. There’d been a slight fuck-up on the rooms but we did stay in the Bearan, where we planned, but a bad room in that the paper was peeling etc. No roaches, but it looked like a roach pit. Lucy was not charmed by it .. but she loved the atmosphere. Party that night and then off at noon for the Grand Opening of the Fiesta .. many old friends, etc. But Lucy was hardly what I wanted and it was growing worse, or my sensitivity was growing greater. She turned her back on me during our 2:30-4:30 p.m. siesta on the 6th and I packed up our bags and we left Pamplona. We hit St. Jean at 8:30 p.m. and as it was raining I stopped for the night there. No words, no loving, nothing. Up early and on the road. 14 hours of silence, just the tape machine. We reached Dieppe on the English Channel at 10 p.m. We decided on one last great French meal. We talked. Lucy asked what I intended doing with her. I said I’d take her to a London hotel, pay a couple of nights in advance, leave her there, go up to Cambridge, pick up her bag and things and bring them down the following day. I told her I wanted it over. Well, she made mad passionate love to me and I began to think, what the hell, we were in London or rather England now and I could send her back any day I wanted to, here, only hours from Heathrow, I could play it truly day by day .. why cut off my nose to spite my face? Besides, I loved her.

We stopped with Helen Lipton (the woman who had arranged your flight with John, so we thought) and then had dinner in London. We motelled it only 5 miles outside of London .. very nice again. Back in Dieppe she insisted on coming back to Cambridge, at least to pick up her developed films of Morocco and pick up her own luggage. I suspected that she wanted to pick up her mail as well. When we came in the door at 11 a.m. there was mail .. she reached down and quickly took up hers. It was in a way and with a motion that made me very suspicious. And a few minutes later as we stood at the dining room table reading our mail, I reached over and flipped down the upper left corner of the bottom letter and saw Ralph’s name and return address. If was fit to be tied because I thought she’d ended their lover’s exchange when she tore up the postcard in St. Jean. Well, I decided that it was only my love for her and the physical enjoyment of her that kept me hanging on, and that I was a bloody fool. So I went in and hauled out her remaining stuff and told her it was time we parted. She called a cab, I loaned her some money and we sat in silence and packing busy-ness for 30 minutes longer. She offered no protestations, no requests for an explanation, no pleas, nothing. Finally, she asked one thing of me. “What?” I said hoping for an opening to reverse everything. “Can I have those plates you bought at the Antique Fair?” (I was hunting for antique plates and she found a beautiful pair which I bought – for myself “After all,” she said, “I found them.” Wow! What chutzpah! “Sit on it” said I. And that was it.

The cab came, she got in, I tossed the luggage in the boot and it drove off .. no words. The date was July 9th: she had been with me 33 days – constantly. I thought she might call from Heathrow .. she would be unable to actually fly out until 11 a.m. the following day. I stayed by the phone .. nothing. And that was it. I have done veritably nothing since that day.

I finally broke down and wrote her a love letter on Friday the 22nd; allowing the average time for mail she had been home fully a week without writing a word to me.

Actually; I left out a vital – and slightly funny – part. On the Monday following her departure a letter came from Ralph .. the 4th so far! I opened it. What a nerd .. he is exactly the same kind of Jesus freak as Susan Jenden our last mother’s help! Apparently he must be tall dark and handsome and didn’t reveal the magnitude of his weirdness in religious matters (and Lucy is a fairly devout Catholic!) It was pure chemistry on those two dates I suspect. Well, he is a 31-year-old Quaker wood-carver .. a simple kind of man .. in every way. His letter was weird. He burns candles to her memory. She apparently slept with him as he made a reference to “holding you in my arms again all night” .. this must, giving her benefit of the doubt, have been the 2nd of their two dates, or in other words, the day before she flew to me .. no wonder her heart was never in it with me!! Anyway, he asks her to send “another” lock of her hair AS HE CHEWED UP THE FIRST AND TAPED THE REMAINDER TO THE DASHBOARD OF HIS CAR! [Whatever happened to plastic Jesuses?!?] Well, if I wasn’t so torn up over her I would have been rolling in aching sides and tears on the floor. I sent her the letter with a 3 line typed note, no salutation, no signature .. saying how I thought they were made for each other and how I knew she had to have the letter as he had her hair on his dash so might she want to hang the letter as a pendant round her neck. She got it the following Thursday.

On the following Saturday, here in Cambridge, the 23rd, I got a letter from Lucy, mailed the previous Wednesday. This was quite a surprise. She missed me, she realized how much she loved me, she wished she’d said something to prevent me sending her away, she said we both had been silly, etc., etc. It was all ‘on’ again. And so my spirits soared even though the rational part of me knew that she hadn’t really changed. But she probably at least found out what a nerd Religious Ralph was and thus had finally put ‘finis’ to what had been open on the day she left. I was going to tell her .. this was to be at a call made 11:30 a.m. here, 6:30 a.m. there .. that there was a flight she could take (she having paid for her own flight over the first time – and spent and additional $500 while she was here) that would actually get her here 9 p.m. the same evening!

I got through. Her mother answered. Said Lucy couldn’t come to the phone. I thought that was very strange, asked if she’d be calling me back (I sensed hostility in the mother’s tone) .. she said “I doubt it”. So I hung up and sat for an hour and a half thinking. Then I called back; her mother was now really irritated .. tried to be both polite and diplomatic but, after all, I’m sitting holding this avowal of love in my hand and the mother says she doesn’t want to talk to me. Said that I’d like to hear it from her own lips. She said she’d hang up. I said politely, how do I know that it’s not you standing between us .. how will I know?  She hung up.  I called a woman friend in Philly and asked her to call a few hours later for Lucy and see if she would merely inform Lucy that I wanted to hear from her. I also found a return address from a girlfriend of Lucy’s who’d written to her here earlier. I knew that if I got ahold of her that neither parents nor Lucy would know that I knew her.

And that particular ploy worked. 20 minutes after I spoke to the girl (around 1 p.m. on Saturday) Lucy called me. I couldn’t believe my ears .. she was spewing venom. Said she, no matter what she may have written, no matter what she may have ever felt for me, it was all over now, How could I have opened a letter to her??!! What a violation of faith. What total lack of integrity, etc., etc. She would never, never, ever be able to forgive me for doing that, etc., etc. I was in a state of shock. This adolescent clearly hasn’t got the slightest conception of love if she can profess love on the one hand and then turn it off on the other .. at least based on opening a letter from her ‘lover’. It didn’t come into the forefront of my mind while talking to her that 2/3rds of her anger might be because the content of the letter revealed that she had been cruelly deceiving me with regard to her real relationship towards RR .. her protestations that he meant nothing to her, that they had merely two innocuous dates before she left, etc. But I told her that while I knew it had been wrong in one sense, I had also felt emotionally justified .. I had, after all, been literally offering her my life up to that point: I had to know to what extent I was a fool (i.e., to have sent her away, or to have kept her as long as I did and feel the way I did). She sallied back and forth, not quite rationally .. she alternated by asking how I was, by cruelly telling me how slim and brown and beautiful she was and what fun she was having, by saying that if anyone came to anyone now it would be me that would have to come to her .. my analysis is that she still feels something .. certainly not any serious love .. that she is spoiled and selfish but that she knows I have touched her deeply as well as vice-versa ..  she wants to be in control, yet she hasn’t the slightest respect for anyone she can control .. clearly needs a few more years of growing up. And so it is over. Oh sure, I know what will happen in the fall, we discussed it as far back as Morocco when I told her that I certainly wouldn’t bother seeing her or doing anything with her in the fall.

She will pursue me .. not like a teeny-bopper .. but she will leave notes, presents, a little flower, etc. She won’t be able to reach me directly by phone, so I can ignore her there. I’m not holding open public lectures or normal classes (Freshman Interdisciplinary Seminars only); but I do have to keep office hours, and she knows this. So .. she’ll come ‘round to my office. And I’ll fuck her there, for sure .. but that will be it. I will be in control. We did it before, so we can do it again. She knows me so well that she knows that if I don’t make love to her that I’ll be hurting .. so if I can just make love to her and matter-of-factly show her the door and say “That was nice, we must do that again someday”, well, revenge is sweet when you have tasted such doled-out bitterness.

So, there you have it .. a real adolescent tale .. better than Love Story though. Having lived to 40 now I can say that I have learned very little, non-rationally that is, since 18 .. still the same mistakes. I’ll probably make them again, though of course not the same kind .. and certainly not while the present pain lingers on.

Bev has, at this point, invited us both back to Wallace Street for the fall. Clearly, she realizes that if she leaves at mid-December she is unnecessarily inconveniencing us by spinning us off on our own for 3 1/2 months. I shall probably stay in the house only as long as it takes me to move some things into David Dickstein’s .. for I want no symbolic attachment to her in the eyes of any 3rd party – particularly any women in my life.   I might borrow Hal Leventhal’s pad for a while, as he is about 200 yards away directly opposite the 7-11 in the Philadelphian on Fairmount .. or some similar arrangement. Thus, except for overnight I can use the Wallace St. facilities. She was quite warm & quite genuine when she said you were quite welcome to your old room, etc. regardless of whatever I decided to do.  To add bait to your considerations: we have a really first-class mother’s help .. I believe the best we’ve ever had. She is attractive, sincere, great sense of humor, great personality, good body, 18 1/2 yrs., we’ve only had her 3 days but I am very impressed. If you and I had a place of our own – or from mid-December, she would be perfect as a housekeeper, etc. She sews on buttons, mends, cleans, cooks .. great arrangement, eh?

Did you write to Colgan and get your grades? He hasn’t forwarded much .. I haven’t heard from the Law School yet.

We’ve sold both houses here .. but there are some knotty problems yet to come. In England she would only get l/3rd of what I have; all monies and goods in England and not covered by any court judgements in the states .. thus if I held everything .. money and goods .. here in England she would (a) have to get a separate English court judgment governing them here and (b) probably get only l/3rd. I will keep at least the monies here (ca. $30,000) to hold as a negotiating point .. when one subtracts all the debts, mortgages, etc., it won’t amount to much anyway.

So, drop me a line and let me know what you’ve been up to. It will be quite an experience, just the two of us, come December. If Bev doesn’t go to Temple for any reason and the divorce business gets too hot and sticky and her presence is not required in Philadelphia, she might well go sooner.

We won’t be able to go back sooner, I think, than 26 August, and probably around the 29-30th, I guess. Colgan has a contract to Sept. 1, but said he might go out a week early.  We will give over Pampisford sometime between 25-28 August .. hopefully Highworth Ave., only a day or two later. I am now anxious to get back and get busy again. The weather here is lousy; the bird life rather pre-adolescent – and I still hurt a bit. I hope everything has gone well with you over the summer and that you are quite the opposite from my state. The girls are fine and speak with thick English accents, this time, because [Jennie] is in school, Jessie as well.

Let’s hear from you,

What my father doesn’t say in the letter about the au pair girl other than: “attractive, sincere, great sense of humor, great personality, good body, 18 1/2 yrs” is the fact he had had sex with her sometime within the three days prior to writing the letter, a fact and the circumstances of which I wouldn’t know for another three months. At some point within those three days Beverly had sent her over to do some housekeeping at the Highworth Avenue house. When my father walked in on her making his bed, he apparently liked what he saw and said, “Why don’t we unmake that bed?” 

Within three and a half months my stepmother left my father with my two sisters. My sisters were the same age my brother and I were when my own mother left my father.

A PDF of the original letter can be found here:

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.”

FBI FOIPA Request

The reply to FOIPA (Freedom of Information and Privacy Act) request came within 6 months from the FBI, but getting my father’s NASA file has been a twenty-year-long bureaucratic nightmare. The files seem to be moving target.

Granny in a Box

In the spring of 1977, it became clear that my grandmother couldn’t take care of herself living across the country from the rest of her family in Philadelphia. She was moved from Seattle to Philadelphia and within weeks they had her in a retirement community. There was a variety of assisted-living options at the facility in Germantown where we put her, from hospital-type daily care to individual apartments where somebody would look in on her. It was the latter option we chose for my grandmother.

The place actually had the appearance of a low-security correctional facility, with its high fence of iron bars. My father jokingly referred to it as the granny lock-up. She would spend the last eight years of her life there. In the end when she was in the hospital and it was clear she was dying, my father told me that I should go and say goodbye to her. When I got out to see her that Saturday she didn’t seem to be conscious of anybody in the room, even with glassy eyes open. I held her hand for a few hours and then left when visiting hours were over. Two days later, on Monday, March 18, she was dead.

My father made arrangements with his undertaker friend, Billy Phillips, to have my grandmother cremated, though not much else was done. No funeral or memorial service of any kind. There was talk of buying an urn for her ashes or at least scattering them somewhere, but nothing ever came of it. When the ashes arrived from the mortuary in a cardboard box, it sat on the kitchen table for a couple of days until my father decided to store her on the shelf in the first floor coat closet. She would spend the next ten years there.

My father would occasionally trot out the box, so her grandchildren could pay their respects. We reminded my father on more than one of these occasions that they made urns for the interment of remains. The reality was my father was just too cheap to pay for an urn and perhaps had grown fond of having his mother around. I’m not sure what my aunt’s take was on her mother’s ashes remaining in the cardboard box in my father’s closet.

There were also Thanksgiving dinners at which my father would make a place for the box at the table. My father’s friends and family seemed to pass it off as yet another of my father’s eccentricities. One day I went over to his house to find the cardboard box open on the coffee table and my father sifting through the ashes in the plastic bag within.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him.

“The sons of bitches took the gold teeth!”

“You’re not serious,” I said, but knowing full well that no one in his right mind opens a box of human ashes unless he is serious. “Gold would practically vaporize at the temperatures used in cremation.”

“Well, Billy said they sometimes remove the gold teeth beforehand and then toss them in with the ashes.”

I just shook my head. Not only was my father trying to save a few bucks by not buying an urn, he thought he could actually make a few bucks by selling my grandmother’s gold teeth.

My grandmother’s ashes were finally put to rest after my father’s death. In his will my father requested that his ashes be mixed with his mother’s and dumped into the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. My stepmother took a portion of his ashes, mixed them with his mother’s and dumped them unceremoniously into the river. For the dispensation of the rest of my father’s ashes see “Rocket’s Red Glare: Launching the Ashes of The Living Legend”.