For Frank, however, these problems didn’t exist. His childhood in the warm desert country of the American Southwest was like being in heaven. He wandered the countryside, bringing home strange pets, from goats to tarantulas. He and his father built homemade model airplanes, some with wingspans as long as six feet, and each Sunday morning they took the planes out to the wide open windswept desert fields and flew them far and high.
Flying was an early obsession for the boy. When Frank was five, before his parents moved to Tucson, his father paid a barnstorming pilot five dollars so that he and Frank could ride in an old biplane. The boy sat in the front cockpit with his father, feeling the wind in his hair and the unbounded freedom of the open sky and far horizon.
As Frank grew so did his love for flying. At fifteen he decided flying model airplanes was no longer sufficient: he wanted to fly himself. Though his parents didn’t object, they insisted he pay the expenses on his own. Working three different partime jobs while attending high school, Frank earned enough each week to pay for one two-hour flying lesson each Saturday. Soon he was flying solo, having earned his pilot’s license while still a teenager.
One Saturday Frank was caught in a sudden thunderstorm as he was returning from one of his first solo flights. Fighting the howling wind and the turbulence, Borman suddenly felt great excitement and joy: he was going to bring that plane home no matter what. His mind cleared, his senses became sharp, and he focused his entire being on doing what had to be done to land safely. When that plane glided to a stop at the end of the runway, Borman found himself overwhelmed with an extraordinary feeling of accomplishment.
By his senior year of high school Frank Borman knew that he wanted to spend his life flying airplanes. He had also met and dated the one woman he would share that life with.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know this yet.
She did, however.
When seventeen-year-old Frank Borman first asked fifteen-year-old Susan Bugbee for a date, she knew that he was the man for her. Her father had died when she was thirteen, and she saw in Borman a stability and strength that few other teenagers had. She knew that he would be successful in whatever he did, and she fervently wanted to help him get there. Borman himself was strongly attracted to Susan. She was smart, articulate, and beautiful. By the end of high school they were going steady. Neither, however, had yet considered marriage.
Frank’s focus was instead on flying. Because Borman’s family was too poor to send him to any of the preeminent aeronautical schools, he was left with two choices: enlist and take advantage of the G.I. bill, or apply to West Point. Unfortunately, he hadn’t thought of West Point until well into his senior year of high school. It was now too late. There were too many applicants ahead of him.
Then, as Borman believes, fate intervened. The son of a local judge was in trouble, hanging out with the wrong people. Having heard that a certain high school student by the name of Borman had not only obtained his pilot’s license but also built and flew model airplanes, the judge asked Frank to work with his son. He even offered to buy all the model plane kits, regardless of cost.
For Borman this was a deal he couldn’t pass up. He and the boy became good friends as they assembled and flew some of the most expensive model planes available. In gratitude for straightening his son out, the judge pulled the right strings and got Borman on the applicants’ list to West Point. The day after he graduated high school Borman received a letter telling him to report to the academy. He was in.
Three years later, Frank was on his way to Europe. His standing at the military academy was high enough for him to be chosen as one of a dozen cadets to tour Europe.
Borman arrived in Berlin just as the yearlong Berlin Airlift was coming to an end. “We flew into West Berlin on sacks of coal,” he wrote later.30 During the previous eleven months, the Soviet military had barred all ground transportation from entering an already struggling West Berlin. Food shipments were stopped. Coal supplies were blocked. Electricity, which came from a power plant in East Berlin, was cut off. With stockpiles for, at most, one to two months, it appeared that the 2.5 million inhabitants of West Berlin faced starvation unless the Western powers abandoned them to the communists.
The Soviets began the blockade not merely to exert their power. They had a legitimate fear of a re-united Germany, and felt that dividing the country would prevent the Germans from mounting another war against Russia.31 They also wished to install a communist state in their East German zone. The presence of the capitalist island of West Berlin in the center of the communist zone made these goals difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.32 When, on June 18th, the three Western powers unilaterally introduced a new West German currency, the Soviets responded in kind, further declaring that their East German marks were the sole currency for all of Berlin. “Russian legislation must apply to all sectors of Berlin,”33 they proclaimed. The West answered this by bringing its new currency to West Berlin and announcing that both currencies would be legal tender there. General Lucius Clay, the United States Military Governor of Germany and Commander of the U.S. forces in Europe, told the Russian Military Governor: “I reject in toto the Soviet claims to the city of Berlin.” The Soviet reacted by cutting off West Berlin.
Clay’s response to the blockade was a daring airlift, dubbed “Operation Vittles.”34 For the next eleven months planes landed in West Berlin every two and a half minutes, unloading powdered milk, flour, and diesel fuel, as well as the sacks of coal that Frank Borman had been sitting on. In the process, the people of Berlin accepted severe deprivation and near-starvation in order to resist Soviet rule. A second airport was quickly built, and at its peak the airlift was shipping more than 10,000 tons of supplies each day, including endless tons of coal needed to keep the people of West Berlin from freezing in that brutal winter cold.35
After almost a year, the Soviets finally realized that force would not get their former allies to leave Berlin. Furthermore, the siege had been hurting their own zone, which needed the shipments of coal, steel and machine parts that West Germany supplied. In May, 1949 the Soviets finally lifted the blockade, re- opening the rail lines and highways leading to Berlin.
The airlift continued, however, for another two months. When Borman arrived in June the Allies were aggressively re-stocking West Berlin with supplies, just in case the Soviets once again changed their minds.
Borman’s European tour ended in Greece. There, a guerrilla army of communist rebels was trying (for the third time) to seize power by force. Knowing that they would certainly lose in the 1946 elections (some estimated they would only receive nine percent of the vote36), the communists abstained and declared war instead. Using bases in neighboring Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, they made repeated forays into Greece, attacking villages and killing hostages.37
When Borman arrived in the summer of 1949, the rebellion was on the verge of defeat. The rebels had lost the support of Yugoslavia, and were defending their last strongholds within Greece itself. Borman and the cadets were taken to the front lines, where both sides were preparing for what in mere weeks would be the war’s final battle.38 En route, one of their convoy trucks hit a land mine, and once at the front the cadets watched for several days as the two sides lobbed mortar shells back and forth at each other.
Still young and eager to prove his mettle in the world, Borman had stood witness to the start of what was to be a forty year “cold war,” a toe-to-toe stand- off which would dominate every aspect of the world’s politics and culture. With the development in the late 1940’s of the atomic bomb, the stakes rose to a frightening level, preventing outright war but forcing both sides to take actions that sometimes abrogated their own ideals. Machiavellian politics led to military dictators, the funding of terrorists, and indecisive military skirmishes throughout the world. In the end, however, the outcome of this stand-off determined whether the world’s entire population would live under a state-run communist system or the free and chaotic capitalist system.
/> That 1949 journey through the ruins of Europe radically changed Frank Borman’s perspective on life. His three years at West Point, dedicated to the motto of “Duty, Honor, Country,” forged in him a desire not merely to fly airplanes, but to do it in defense of his country. The devastation of Europe and the communist oppression he saw there further committed him to the deeper principles he felt his country stood for: freedom, democracy, and the right of any human soul to pursue his or her dreams.
* * *
As Susan Borman notes today, “Frank Borman is the most uncomplicated man I have ever known.” His passionate desire to dedicate his entire being to the military actually made him doubt the concept of marriage. To his straightforward mind, it had to be all or nothing. Only six months after arriving at West Point he wrote Susan a letter, explaining that he simply didn’t have time for her anymore. With naïve innocence he had decided that he was going to live an obsessed, almost monklike existence in devotion to the cause of freedom.
Susan Bugbee was heartbroken. Up until that moment Frank had been the only man in her life. After crying her eyes out she decided to try and put FrankBorman from her mind. She began dating other high school boys.
Susan Borman, 1946. Credit: Borman
Not more than three months later, Frank Borman realized how incredibly stupid he had been. He wrote Susan again, trying to repair their relationship. This time, however, she wasn’t going to be so easy to get. While she didn’t reject his offer outright, neither did she accept it. He had hurt her, and Susan had no intention of letting him hurt her again. Besides, she was now being wooed by a number of other boys.
For his sophomore and junior years at West Point Frank Borman did live like a monk, though not for his original reasons. He dated no one, and instead courted Susan by mail, sending her presents and gifts whenever he could. When he came back to Tucson during school breaks she was the first person he called. And though they dated, the relationship did not have its previous spark. Susan kept her distance. She wasn’t going to be fooled again.
By the time of Frank’s senior year in 1950 Susan was attending the University of Pennsylvania, studying dental hygiene. Several times he invited her to visit him at West Point, and she had gone. She still liked Frank despite everything, and could not make a clean break. Yet, she was also involved with another Pennsylvania student, and that relationship was starting to get serious.
Frank decided he simply didn’t have a chance with Susan. After trying for two years to change her mind he had failed. It was time to move on and start dating other women. He called up a woman he had known in high school and asked her to come to West Point for a date. Not long after he gave her a ring and arranged for their wedding at the West Point Chapel when he graduated in June.
It wasn’t right. In all the years at West Point he had not been able to get Susan out of his system. Within weeks he canceled the wedding, telling the woman that their fleeting engagement had been a big mistake. “I was a jerk,” he admits humbly. He wrote Susan to invite her to come to his graduation.
She meanwhile had broken up with the dentistry student. She too couldn’t get Frank Borman from her mind. Yet, when Frank asked her to come to his graduation but didn’t mention anything about marriage Susan had finally had enough. She decided to take a big gamble. She told him “No.” She went home to Tucson, hoping that by playing hard to get this last time she might at last get him. “I was terrified it wouldn’t work.”
Graduation at West Point was an important day in Frank Borman’s life. And yet, he was unsatisfied. All the other graduates seemed to have fiancées. He was alone.
He knew now how much he needed Susan. As he and his parents made the long drive back to Tucson, he decided that he wouldn’t take no for an answer, that merely getting together with Susan was insufficient. He was determined that she should be his wife.
Frank Borman was genuinely surprised how easy it was to convince Susan to change her mind and marry him. She only smiled slyly and said yes. She knew that the convincing had really been done by her.
July 20, 1950. Frank and Susan Borman on their wedding day,
Tucson, Arizona. Credit: Borman
On July 20th, 1950, in a church in Tucson, Frank Borman and Susan Bugbee became husband and wife, forming a partnership that was to last for the rest of their lives.
LOVELL
The waters of the western Pacific were cold and dark, and the night sky was black. At 1,500 feet, Jim Lovell had no idea where he was, and had no way of finding out. The instrument lights on his cockpit dashboard had failed and his radio homing beacon wasn’t working. Somewhere in that blackness was his landing field, a tiny aircraft carrier only a few hundred feet long. If Lovell failed to find this target, he’d have to ditch his plane and parachute into the bone- chilling waters of the Pacific.
The year was 1955, and Jim Lovell was making his first nighttime landing on an aircraft carrier over foreign waters.
As a child Lovell had been captivated by space and rockets. He would read the comic books of his time, showing Superman and Captain Marvel doing fantastic deeds, and he would draw his own imagined rockets and planes. He was mesmerized by Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Jules Verne. And he would listen enthralled as his uncle, a navy pilot who had fought in World War I, told him stories of dogfights over the fields of France.
Fascinated with astronomy and space, young Lovell studied the stars and constellations. He read how astronomers had only recently discovered that the universe was much vaster than they had thought, comprised of endless numbers of grand galaxies.
Like Frank Borman, Jim Lovell’s family was poor and struggling. His father, James Lovell, Sr., had been a coal furnace salesman in Philadelphia. When his father was killed in a car accident, Blanch Lovell suddenly became a poor widow with a twelve-year-old son and no means of support. She moved to Milwaukee to work as a secretary for her brother, who sold and marketed the same furnaces there. She and Jim settled into a tiny one-room apartment. The kitchen was in a closet, the beds folded up against the walls, and the bathroom was down the hall and shared by all the tenants.
Though they didn’t have much, Blanch Lovell made sure that Jim had everything necessary to become whatever he wanted to be. By the time Lovell was seventeen, he had graduated from comics and books and was building his own model airplanes, flying them in an empty lot across the street from his apartment house. He and some high school friends even tried to build a homemade rocket. They had started out trying to construct a liquid-fueled engine, then switched to a dry-fueled solid rocket because it was easier and cheaper. They purchased gunpowder, packed it inside a cardboard tube so that it would burn instead of explode. For a fuse they used a soda straw filled with gunpowder and inserted into the rocket’s tail end.
On launch day his mother watched from their apartment window, feeling both fear and pride. She could see her son and his friends in the lot across the street. She saw Jim prop the rocket against a rock, crouch down to light the fuse, then run for cover behind some nearby rocks. Seconds later the missile ignited, hurling itself high into the air with a high-pitched whistle and a bright flash. Then it exploded with a bang.
Also watching from Jim’s apartment was fourteen-year-old Marilyn Gerlach. Earlier that year Jim, the sophisticated high school junior, had noticed this bright eyed thoughtful girl in the school cafeteria. Several times he had asked her if she would go on a date with him, but she had always said no. Though Marilyn thought Jim was good-looking and was very impressed that one of the school track stars was asking her for a date, he was so much older.
Near the end of the school year, Jim Lovell tried again. He had no date for his junior prom, and he wanted Marilyn to go with him.
Once again she equivocated. “Well, I don’t know how to dance.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll teach you.”
For the next several weeks Jim brought records over to Marilyn’s home and the two practiced dancing in her living room. Before long t
hey were going steady.
At the same time that Jim Lovell was getting to know Marilyn Gerlach, he was also discovering that his fascination with rocketry might actually lead to his life’s work. World War II had just ended, and a local museum had exhibited the V1 and V2 rockets of the just-defeated Germans. Staring at those formidable weapons built by engineers and scientists, Lovell suddenly realized that he would gladly spend his life building rockets.
He wrote a letter to the American Rocket Society, asking how he could become a rocket engineer. The society’s president responded, explaining that “the whole field of rockets and jet propulsion is still so new that we do not know clearly what preparation is best for it.” He suggested that Lovell get as thorough an education as he could, especially in fields such as thermodynamics or aerodynamics.
Now Lovell faced the same problem as Frank Borman. His mother didn’t have the money to send him to college. He had applied to Annapolis but had been chosen as a third alternate, leaving him little chance of getting in.
Undeterred, Lovell took advantage of Navy program called the Holloway Plan. The Navy would pay for him to get a two year engineering degree, after which he would take fourteen months of flight training followed by six months at sea as an aviation midshipman. He would then begin a military career as a regular naval officer. Though this wasn’t quite the same as a rocket engineering, the idea of flying advanced military airplanes appealed to Lovell almost as much.
Jim Lovell and Marilyn Gerlach on board the U.S. Navy sailboat, Freedom, 1950.
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