A hurried move to California

Early on Friday, 15 November, Rosalie, our two children Barbara and Sharon, and I headed west from Iowa City. The trunk and backseat of our black-and-white 1956 Mercury sedan were bulging with the prototype instrument package, my laboratory notebooks, a myriad of components and tooling for the flight units, meager clothing for the family, and a few kitchen items. Rosalie and I fitted five-year-old Barbara and four-year-old Sharon into “cockpits” formed among our belongings on the backseat. Rosalie, now more than six months pregnant, made herself as comfortable as possible for the more than 1600 mile trip, and we were off.

Interestingly, that was just two days after one of those major decadal life passages, my thirtieth birthday. To celebrate it, I was setting off on another great adventure, full of grand expectations and supreme confidence.

It was a time before modern interstate highways. Our path took us along old U. S. Highway 6 through Iowa, Nebraska, and Colorado into Utah, down central Utah on Highway 89, and along Highway 91 through southern Nevada and California to Pasadena. Passing through Denver on Colfax Avenue, we approached the Rockies. Climbing to the top of the continental divide, we paused just long enough to admire the windswept snow and to take a picture of a shivering Rosalie in front of the sign marking 11,988 foot high Loveland Pass. In Utah, we made a slight detour to drive through Zion National Park. Without pausing to invest in Las Vegas’ chief industry, we descended from Cajon Pass north of San Bernardino in the early Monday afternoon of 18 November. Slightly ahead of schedule, we decided to take what appeared on our map to be a scenic shortcut from Cajon Junction, along Angeles Crest Highway through the San Gabriel Mountains, to La Canada, just outside the JPL gates. That turned out to be a big mistake—we learned to beware of shortcuts! We wound along that tortuous mountain road for hours, finally arriving in La Canada about sundown. It was too late to check in at JPL, so we had a late dinner and settled down in a motel for the night.

OPENING SPACE RESEARCH

Our California adventure began with a thud in the middle of the night. Sharon fell out of bed! Not surprisingly, she started crying, but no amount of consoling seemed to quiet her. We finally took her in our bed, but her whimpering continued. On a whim, I started feeling her shoulder, where her pain seemed to be centered, and discovered a knot on her collarbone. Realizing that it was probably broken, we did our best during the night to keep her comfortable. Upon rising, our first task was to locate a doctor. After reading the X-rays, he confirmed the broken collarbone diagnosis, took the simple step of binding her shoulder, and we went on our way.

Our next task was to locate a place to stay until we could find rental housing. We finally located a motel that was willing to rent on a day-to-day basis, but at a weekly rate if we stayed as long as one week. It was located on Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard, about a mile east of the downtown area, and an easy commute to JPL.

I finally entered the JPL gatehouse on early Tuesday afternoon, 19 November. I met immediately with several of the JPL managers and engineers, including Bill Pickering. In addition to being JPL’s director, Bill had also been one of Van Allen’s colleagues from their days of launching instruments on V-2s at White Sands, had a strong interest in the possibilities of research via satellite, and took a strong personal interest in our cosmic ray instrument preparations. We agreed that the most pressing task for me was to turn over all the information and equipment that I had brought from Iowa.

In spite of the press of work at JPL, finding longer-term housing for the family could not be deferred. With help from the JPL housing office, we were lucky to quickly locate a furnished house at 371 Claremont Avenue in north Pasadena. Our landlady, Mrs. Copeland, lived on the upstairs floor. We settled into the main level, with the furniture and kitchen items provided with the house, the few belongings we had brought with us, and the small shipment that was delivered by the moving company soon thereafter.

With my working days and evenings at the laboratory, Rosalie carried most of the burden of setting up housekeeping in Pasadena. After enrolling Barbara in her new kindergarten, she proceeded to organize the house and take care of the family. As mentioned earlier, she was in her third trimester of pregnancy. In spite of growing discomfort, she accomplished miracles and complained very little.

The house worked out well, with the main problem being its lack of adequate heat. Its sole heat source was a gas-fired convection heater in one wall of the main room. That may have been adequate for a normal Pasadena winter, but the 1957-1958 winter was unusually cold. We shivered in sweaters throughout the entire winter, and Rosalie and I worried constantly about the children (especially newly born George during the latter months) as they crawled around on the perpetually cold floor. Nevertheless, we all survived without significant illness.

CHAPTER 8 • GO! JUPITER C, JUNO, AND DEAL I FIGURE 8.3 Aerial view of JPL as it appeared in January 1959. The main road running nearly bottom to top in the picture was later named Explorer Road. The main entrance gatehouse can be seen near the bottom (west end) of that road. The long white-roofed building on the imme­diate right of Explorer Road (Building 111) was the engineering and administration building and contained Director Bill Pickering’s office. Henry Richter’s office (and my desk) was in Building 122, another white-roofed building above and to the right of Building 111 in this view. (Courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute ofTechnology.)

The location was ideal, being only a 10 minute drive from JPL, an even shorter distance from downtown Pasadena, and within walking distance from Barbara’s school.

The JPL, in late 1957 and early 1958, was a closely packed facility containing a combination of old wooden structures and a few newer, more permanent laboratory buildings. It was located at the foot of the mountains at the north end of the Arroyo Seco, about two and a half miles north of Pasadena’s Rose Bowl. Figure 8.3 shows the laboratory as it existed at about that time.

A desk, phone, and several file drawers in Henry Richter’s office served as my laboratory home away from home during my five month stay. In addition to his duties as supervisor of the JPL New Circuit Elements and Stable Oscillator Research Group, Henry served as my direct supervisor and primary interface at JPL. Throughout my stay, he helped me with outstanding competence and diligence, and we became fast friends. Although I sometimes suspected that one of his unspoken duties was to “keep that Iowa scientist out of the rest of the organization’s hair,” his role served everyone well, as he provided a well-defined conduit for my interaction with everyone at JPL.

OPENING SPACE RESEARCH

His attention to my needs certainly helped in avoiding any confusion that might have resulted, had I been trying to make demands directly upon the many parts of the JPL organization.

I immediately set about turning over the components and equipment that I had brought in the trunk of our car. There was, of course, the operating prototype of the complete University of Iowa Vanguard cosmic ray instrument. Not only was that package studied carefully by the JPL engineers, but it also accompanied Pickering and others for showings at several press conferences and technical meetings.

Included among the components turned over to JPL were flight-worthy parts that I had procured and pretested at Iowa, including various transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, relays, tuning forks, and high-voltage regulator tubes. The equipment even included drilling templates that we had made for fabricating the electronic circuit boards and molds for encapsulating the completed circuits in expanded polyurethane foam.

By 22 November, I was up to speed. Van Allen had returned to the Iowa campus from New Zealand, and I was finally able to brief him on the full chain of events that had occurred since the Sputnik launch. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when he was able to resume his normal responsibilities for coordinating the University of Iowa activities.

It was not until 26 November, eight days after my arrival, that I took time off to go through the normal processing as a new employee. By that time, the Personnel Office had become so insistent that I do so that I had to steal a few hours from work to attend to those formalities.