GRUFF GUS

Had Gus Grissom lived longer, wrote Deke Slayton, he would have been the first man on the Moon. Slayton, who was grounded from flying throughout most of the Sixties, found himself in 1962 in charge of the selection and training of astronauts for the two-man Gemini and Moon-bound Apollo missions. It was Slayton who, after Grissom’s death in a spacecraft fire on the launch pad, chose Neil Armstrong to command the first manned lunar landing. Yet, he wrote, “had Gus been alive, as a Mercury astronaut, he would have taken that step. . . my first choice would have been Gus, which both Chris Kraft and Bob Gilruth seconded’’.

The man to whom Slayton, Kraft and Gilruth would have offered this honour was a small, tough fighter pilot, the first person to fly into space twice, the first astronaut to eat a corned beef sandwich whilst gazing down on Earth and a man who fiercely guarded his family’s privacy. “Betty and I run our lives as we please,’’ he

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once said. “We don’t care about fads or frills. We don’t give a damn about the Joneses.”

Virgil Ivan Grissom, America’s second man in space, was born in the Midwestern town of Mitchell, Indiana, on 3 April 1926. Small for his age, he was nicknamed ‘Greasy Grissom’ as a child and grew up with a determination to “prove I could do things as well as the big boys’’. His father worked for almost half a century on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and Grissom, too small to participate in school sports, eventually established himself as a Boy Scout, where he led the Honour Guard. Like Al Shepard, he delivered newspapers and, in the summer months, picked peaches and cherries for the local growers to earn enough money to date his school sweetheart, Betty Moore, whom he married in July 1945. By this time, he had left school – described by his principal as ‘‘an average, solid citizen, who studied just about enough to get a diploma’’ – and served a year as an aviation cadet. His hopes of joining the theatre of war evaporated a month later, when Japan surrendered.

Unwilling to fly a desk, Grissom left the Air Force and took a job installing doors on school buses, before deciding to study mechanical engineering at Purdue University. Whilst there, his wife worked as a long-distance operator and Grissom himself flipped burgers at a local diner. He received his degree in 1950, crediting Betty for making it possible, and eventually re-enlisted in the Air Force, finished cadet training and won his wings the following year. His completion of training coincided with the outbreak of war in Korea and Grissom soon found himself in the thick of the conflict for six months, flying a hundred combat missions in sleek F-86 Sabre jets as part of the 334th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron. An interesting tale surrounds his early days in Korea. Each morning, the pilots would ride an old school bus from the hangar to the flight line and only those who had been involved in air – to-air combat were permitted to sit. The uninitiated had to stand. Grissom stood only once; testament, perhaps, to the continued determination that had dogged him since boyhood, only now he planned to be even better than the big boys.

His first taste of war came as something of a surprise – ‘‘For a moment, I couldn’t figure out what those little red things were going by,’’ he said later, ‘‘then I realised I was being shot at!’’ – and he returned to the United States to be awarded both the Air Medal with a cluster and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Subsequent assignments, which he actually considered more dangerous than combat flying, included instructing new cadets at Bryan Air Force Base in Texas, studying aeronautical engineering at the Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and being chosen in October 1956 for the famous Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. By this time, Grissom had gained a reputation as one of the best ‘jet jockies’ in the service, with more than 3,000 hours of flight time, and was also father to two young boys, Scott and Mark. When the Soviets launched Sputnik, Grissom took notice, but was far too preoccupied with his job of wringing out new jets at Wright-Patterson to give much consideration to space travel. Then, a little over a year later, he received a teletype message, labelled ‘Top Secret’, which instructed him to go to Washington, DC, in civilian clothes for a classified briefing.

Mystified, Grissom found that he had been picked as one of 110 candidates for

Project Mercury and the events of 1959 would truly change his life. “I did not think my chances were very big when I saw some of the other men who were competing for the team,” he said later. “They were a good group and I had a lot of respect for them, but I decided to give it the old school try and take some of NASA’s tests.” Whilst at Wright-Patterson Aeromedical Laboratory, undergoing test after test, his run on the treadmill had to be stopped abruptly when his heart soared to almost 200 beats per minute. On the other hand, he endured the heat chamber perfectly, keeping cool by reading a dog-eared copy of Reader’s Digest, “to keep from getting bored’’.

He nearly flunked, however, when the physicians discovered he was a hay fever sufferer, but Grissom, without missing a beat, convinced them that the absence of ragweed pollen in space would not pose a problem. He viewed the psychological tests, too, as illogical. “I tried not to give the headshrinkers anything more than they were actually looking for,’’ he said. “I played it cool and tried not to talk myself into a hole.’’ Fortunately for Grissom, ‘talking’ was not one of his strengths. Astronauts and managers alike would recall that he rarely spoke unless he had something to say and during a visit to the Convair Corporation in San Diego, prime contractor for the Atlas rocket, he told the workers to ‘‘do good work’’. Ironically, those three words turned into a motto of incalculable value for the Convair workforce.

Even after his selection as one of the Mercury Seven, Grissom would privately question why he had volunteered to fly a bomb-carrying missile into space. The answer came instantly: ‘‘I happened to be a career officer in the military and, I think, a deeply patriotic one. If my country decided that I was one of the better-qualified people for this new mission, then I was proud and happy to help out.’’ However proud he might have been, one thing that Grissom despised was the moniker ‘astronaut’. In his mind, it had an irritating PR undertone. One day, he even announced: ‘‘I’m not ‘ass’ anything. I’m a pilot. Isn’t that good enough?’’