Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program Read Online Free PDF Page B

the stress of the work in our comfortable offices. Stress? I could never muster any sympathy for the initiators of these discussions. I knew what my folks did for us. I could only guess what their parents and grandparents did for them. I wondered if they really understood and appreciated it.

Chapter Two: Leaving for The University and The Co-op Experience
     
    For finishing my last three years, the University of Detroit co-op program was a great way to earn the college degree. Besides the fine academic preparation, it was also a chance to experience the real world of aero engineering in the nation’s pre-eminent aeronautical research organization. Besides that, the NACA pay was just about enough to live on, and then pay for the upcoming school quarter of expenses. Based on the three-month rotation, I was only in Detroit in summer and winter. That was only three months during the regular University school year. As a result, we did not really attach to the University or its other institutions such as the sports teams or any other students outside of aero engineering.
    In attending several of my wife’s high school reunions, I was impressed by the closeness of so many of the men and women in her class. Also, Marilyn’s classmates lived very close to each other at the time, and walked to school, which was all in the same neighborhood as their homes. As a group, they were closer to each other than my Prep class because the Prep students came from a radius of up to thirty miles around the region. There was no common “place” except for extracurricular activities. These were relatively limited and not like living next door. In retrospect, it was the same scene at the University of Detroit, not really connected on the emotional level. It was almost more of a business relationship. The University provided a service and we paid for it. That is not a criticism; it was just the circumstance at the time. Detroit was about a fifteen-hour drive from the Scranton area, subject to car breakdowns. The southern route went via the Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes. The northern passage was around the north side of Lake Erie through Canada, a long way to home. I never realized how relatively disconnected I was from high school and college until I witnessed first-hand Marilyn’s class reunions and the experiences of our kids. All four of ours went to Texas A&M and rapidly developed far, far more of a lifelong emotional bond.
    Most of the guys, from the Scranton area, and those we met in Detroit were all in the same financial boat, working six months of the year to pay for twelve months of expenses. Nobody else from Detroit co-oped at NACA in Cleveland, although there were a number of other University co-ops represented. Money was tight for all of us. I had two experiences that were memorable in that regard. In my first few weeks in Cleveland, I simply ran out of cash. I had no checking account. Such a thing as credit cards did not exist, and it really wasn’t much of an option to call home. So I went three days without eating any food, just lots of water. Finally, on the fourth day, my landlady may well have guessed the situation and invited me to dinner, the first real food in too many days. Whatever the menu was that night, it was the absolute best and got me over the hump.
    In the last two quarters of school in the winter and spring of 1958, I had to stretch the funds to make it. It took a lot of dime hamburgers from the White Tower in Detroit for sustenance. I noticed that after that time, whenever I went close enough to smell the White Tower cooking, my stomach rolled over. People remember different things about college, and one of mine is about a few periods of hunger. While in Cleveland for some of my quarters, I also had a job at Seager’s Sunoco gas station at night and on weekends. That helped, too. Class work and study in my last three years had all the charm of class work and study. But it too passed. The grind of the study