Armstrong accepted the post at Lewis laboratory. It did not hurt that the job kept him in Ohio, because by this time Neil was seriously considering marrying his college sweetheart, Janet Shearon, who herself was a midwestern girl, from suburban Chicago.
Assigned originally to the lab’s Free-Flight Propulsion Section, Armstrong’s official job title was Aeronautical Research Pilot, responsible, as he noted on a naval reserve questionnaire, for “Piloting of aircraft for research projects and for transportation, and engineering in free flight rocket missile section.” His first test flight at Lewis came on March 1, 1955. For civil service purposes, the NACA labeled Armstrong a “research scientist.” Yet, as with most NACA employees, his work served the organization’s legislated mission, “the scientific study of the problems of flight, with a view to their practical solutions.”
The chief test pilot at Lewis was William V. “Eb” Gough Jr. Like Armstrong, Eb Gough had earned an engineering degree (Kansas State University, 1937) and became a naval aviator facing Japanese Zeroes in World War II. Reaching the rank of lieutenant commander, Gough was the fourth navy pilot ever to qualify in helicopters, the thirty-fifth to qualify in jets. When the war ended, Gough became a test pilot for the NACA.
Gough’s older brother by ten years, Melvin N. Gough (born 1906), epitomized the NACA research pilot. In 1926, the twenty-year-old Johns Hopkins–trained engineer struggled to convince one of NACA Langley’s senior test pilots of some results he had obtained in the lab’s new Propeller Research Tunnel, then the world’s largest. The pilot stared down the young engineer, “Son, have you ever flown an airplane?” According to Gough, “I started taking ground school instruction the next year.”
Mel Gough trained at the navy’s flight school in Pensacola. He returned in the spring of 1929 to NACA Langley as a fully qualified naval aviator, proving the adage that it was much easier to make a pilot out of an engineer than it was to make an engineer out of a pilot. As chief, since 1943, of Langley’s Flight Research Division, Mel Gough directed a team of a half dozen talented engineer-pilot hybrids, including John P. “Jack” Reeder, Robert A. Champine, John M. Elliot, John A. Harper, and James V. Whitten. Still today, Neil regards Reeder as “the best test pilot I ever knew.”
When Armstrong joined the NACA in February 1955, most of its research pilots were trained engineers. Yet as most of the NACA’s flight research took place at Langley, at the High-Speed Flight Station colocated at Edwards Air Force Base, or at the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in Northern California, outside of San Francisco, at Lewis Armstrong numbered one of just four test pilots, with Eb Gough, William Swann, and Joseph S. Algranti, future chief of the Aircraft Operations Division at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
Armstrong stayed at Lewis for less than five months, investigating new anti-icing systems for aircraft, for many years a special focus of Lewis laboratory. More significant to Armstrong’s future proved his work at Lewis in his very first space-related flight program, studying high Mach number heat transfer.
In early tests, various air-launched models descended at speeds reaching Mach 1.8. On March 17, 1953, a T40 rocket air-launched by a Lewis test pilot achieved the hypersonic speed of Mach 5.18, the first time that the “NACA flew successfully an instrumented vehicle to greater than Mach 5.”
On May 6, 1955, Algranti and Armstrong flew the forty-fifth test in this series. The pilots steered their P-82, North American’s Twin Mustang, over the Atlantic Ocean beyond the NACA’s Pilotless Aircraft Research Station at Wallops Island, off Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Attached to the belly of the P-82 was a solid-rocket model designated ERM-5. A conventional ballistic shape with a sharp nose, slender body, and tail fins, the ERM-5 was equipped with a T-40RKT rocket motor that had been developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Reaching the optimum altitude, Algranti released the model, designed to test heat transfer characteristics and boundary-layer transition at high Reynolds numbers.* The ERM-5 reached a hypersonic speed of Mach 5.02 and an acceleration rate of 34 g.†
Armstrong “did a lot of analyzing data; designing components for advanced versions of the rockets, and doing calculations, and drawings for them.” The proactive identity of the engineering test pilot that was fostered by the NACA—and by its successor, NASA—fit Armstrong perfectly. Neil has always felt that even though the NACA position was the lowest-paying job he was offered coming out of college, “it was the right one.”
“The only product of the NACA was research reports and papers,” Neil has explained. “So when you prepared something for publication, you had to face the technical and grammatical ‘Inquisition.’…The system was so precise, so demanding. It assured that anything that was graphical would be readable and understandable, and if it were to be projected on to a screen, there wouldn’t be any letters that were too small to read by the audience. They [female editorial authorities trained as English teachers or librarians] just went into that kind of detail…. That is what NASA needstoday.”
Neil’s last test flight in Cleveland occurred on June 30, 1955. A week or so earlier, Abe Silverstein, Lewis’s deputy director, had called. “I walked over to his office,” Armstrong recalls, “and he said he had gotten a letter from Edwards and would I still like to transfer out there. I would have been very pleased to continue at Lewis if that was the only thing available to me.” But Edwards was a test pilot’s Shangri-La, the place where the sound barrier had been broken, and where the newest and most revolutionary experimental aircraft—the X-1A, X-1E, X-3, X-5, Douglas D-558-2, YRF-84F, F-100A, and YF-102—were being piloted to speeds of Mach 2 and beyond.
In early July 1955, after a brief visit with his family in Wapakoneta, Armstrong took off in his car for Southern California. Cross-country automobile trips were not new to Neil. When he returned from Korea, he still did not own a car. To get back home to Ohio, he rode with VF-51 mate and Wisconsin native Hal Schwan. According to Schwan, “One of us would drive and the other one sleep, and we would just keep pounding along—San Diego to Chicago in less than forty-eight hours.”
On that earlier military leave in Wapak, Neil had purchased his first car, a brand-new 1952 Oldsmobile, the same make his father then owned. That two-door Olds 88 cost him just over $2,000 cash. Ken Kramer remembers Neil’s effort, long before the popularity of vanity license plates, to secure his initials “NAA.” The closest Neil got was Ohio plate “N4A.” “We all expected him to use a black marker and extend the slanted line in the ‘4,’” Kramer jokes, “but he never did.” Dean Armstrong had come out to California in the summer of 1952 following Neil’s return from Korea. The brothers took the new Olds sightseeing from Mexico to Canada before heading home. They visited ten national parks, mostly camping out, and hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
So it was really Neil’s fourth cross-country automobile trip that took him to his new job at Edwards in July 1955. On the way Armstrong planned to make one important stop. That was in Wisconsin, to visit his wife-to-be, Janet Shearon.
CHAPTER 12
Above the High Desert
Gazing northward on a clear day from her little cabin’s 5,000-foot-high perch upon the side of the San Gabriel Mountains that separates the Antelope Valley from Los Angeles, Janet Armstrong could see for 150 miles. Far to the northwest, she perused the Tehachapi Mountains, tracing a spectacular pass from the Mojave Desert floor to the fertile green fields of California’s central San Joaquin Valley. To the northeast lay granite buttes amid huge sandscapes, such distinguishable western landmarks as Saddleback and Piute. Though the harsh summer sun baked the land an ugly brown, in the springtime, after a wet winter, the entire valley bloomed into a vast garden rainbow.
Between 1905 and 1913, the City of Los Angeles, at a cost of $23 million (the equivalent of some $430 million today), built a 223-mile aqueduct (later a landmark along Armstrong’s daily commute to Edwards). In the early 1920s, the state paved the valley’s first road, the Sierra Highway. In 1925, an enormous deposit of a
nhydrous sodium borate, useful in the manufacture of glass and ceramics, was discovered in the tiny town of Boron, on the edge of one of the valley’s largest dry lakes, the flattest of all the world’s geological features. Eventually, the mining of “Borax,” which came to be used widely as a cleaning compound, produced the world’s largest open-pit mine.
Into this process of industrializing the western desert came a number of government facilities. The U.S. Army set up a bombing range in 1933 on Muroc Dry Lake, adjacent to Boron. “From my point of view,” Armstrong has said, “it was clearly a superb flying place. The skies were blue most days, and you didn’t have to worry about clouds or instrument flying.”
With the phenomenal growth of American airpower during World War II, Muroc Field mushroomed in size and purpose, the site’s succession of aviation firsts culminating in 1947, when the Bell X-1 broke the mythical sound barrier. The newly established U.S. Air Force that year took over the army operation, later renaming it Edwards Air Force Base in honor of Glen W. Edwards, a young air force captain who lost his life at Muroc in a June 1948 crash of Northrop’s experimental YB-49 Flying Wing. It was at Edwards that the first supersonic fighter to enter U.S. military service, North American’s YF-100A, debuted in May 1953. Later that year, the NACA’s A. Scott Crossfield, the Edwards test pilot whom Armstrong came in 1955 to replace, became the first person to fly at Mach 2. Although Edwards Air Force Base and the NACA’s High-Speed Flight Station (HSFS) were officially independent entities, most people referred colloquially to both facilities simply as “Edwards.”
From the lofty vantage of the San Gabriels, the huge Edwards complex appeared much closer than its actual fifty miles’ distance, and Janet Armstrong could see the airplanes flying overhead. “I used to get up there,” Janet remembers, “and watch the early X-15 flights. You could see the X-15 when it dropped because it left a separate contrail [from the B-52 launch aircraft]…. Well, you couldn’t quite see it [drop] if you happened to beblinking your eyes. Then you could watch it all through its powered flight and then you would lose it. But then, if you looked real hard at the lake bed, you could see the dust that it kicked up when it would land.” A pair of binoculars brought the action all that much closer to her. Occasionally when he was flying more routine aircraft than the X-15, Neil flew over their Juniper Hills cabin and waggled his wings at his young bride.
Neil and Janet had met as students at Purdue University the year Neil returned from Korea. He was a twenty-two-year-old junior and she was eighteen and a freshman. What attracted Neil was Janet’s poise and bearing, her smarts, her good looks, and her lively personality. Born in Cook County’s St. Luke’s Hospital on March 23, 1934, Janet Elizabeth Shearon was the daughter of Dr. Clarence Shearon and his wife, Louise. A native of South Dakota, Dr. Shearon was chief of surgery at St. Luke’s who taught at his alma mater Northwestern University’s medical school in Evanston, on the shore of Lake Michigan. A specialist in reattaching tendons to make damaged fingers and hands work again, he coauthored a textbook published in 1932 by the American Medical Association Press, The Process of Tendon Repair: An Experimental Study of Tendon Suture and Tendon Graft.
The Shearon family lived a very comfortable upper-middle-class life in the town of Wilmette, Illinois, an affluent suburb of Chicago located just north of Evanston. Life in Wilmette rated well above average: household income, house size and value, the percentage of the population who completed high school and went on to college. Well below average were the unemployment rate, the percentage of the population that was black, the percentage of people renting houses, and the crime rate. Even today, the average household income and house value in Wilmette are high: over $110,000 and $450,000, respectively.
Interestingly, Dr. Shearon owned and flew his own airplane, a Piper Cub. He regularly logged weekend round trips to the family’s lake cottage in Eagle River, in far northern Wisconsin, where his wife and three girls usually spent their entire summer. “I’ve never learned to fly a plane,” Janet once said, “though I’ve always wanted to…. My mother and oldest sister actually flew, but I never did because I was always too young.” Later, during married life, Neil would occasionally let Janet take the controls of their Beech Bonanza, “but I never made a landing or a takeoff in the Bonanza.” As late as 1969, Janet expressed a determination to become a licensed pilot, yet that dream never materialized.
In November 1945, when Janet was twelve, her father died suddenly of a heart attack. Although her father’s career as a physician had kept him away from home a lot, Janet dearly loved him. On the verge of her teenage years, the loss of her father was devastating, “gravely affecting the way I grew up, and my thinking.” As the third and last daughter, Janet did not always get along well with her mother, who, like Janet, was quite strong-willed. So her father always had—and always would—loom large in Janet’s mind as her hero, the one person who most truly recognized and appreciated her worth, including her skills as a swimmer.
Graduating in 1952 from Winnetka’s New Trier High School, one of the Chicago area’s largest and highest-achieving township high schools, Janet chose to attend a college in her home region. Purdue University offered a nationally prominent program, established in 1926 as the School of Home Economics, then defined as “the science and art of home management.”
Purdue was an excellent choice for Janet’s ambition to become a modern homemaker, wife, and mother. As part of her busy college life, Janet stayed active by swimming intramurally and joining the women’s synchronized swim team. She pledged to Alpha Chi Omega, a sorority whose motto, coincidentally enough, was “Together let us seek the heights.” Among its many traditions was Alpha Chi’s “sweetheart song”:
Down deep in the heart of each Alpha Chi girl
Is the dream of a love that is true.
He’s loving and he’ll always be faithful
And somewhere he’s waiting for you.
One of Janet’s good friends in college turned out to be the man who would become the last Apollo astronaut to leave the surface of the Moon, Eugene Cernan. A 1952 graduate from Proviso High School in the Chicago suburb of Maywood, which was New Trier’s main sports rival, Cernan matriculated at Purdue the same fall semester as did Janet. He pledged the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and moved his sophomore year into the frat house. His roommate was William Smith, who had gone to New Trier High School with Janet and had dated her occasionally. Cernan met Janet through Smith: “She was a young, attractive coed, very effervescent, very pleasant, very nice…. She was a sorority girl. She was all the right things.”
“Neil knew me for three years before he ever asked me for a date,” Janet recalled during the Apollo era. “That wouldn’t be so bad except that, after we were married, his roommate told me that the first time Neil saw me he came home and told the roommate that I was the girl he was going to marry. Neil isn’t one to rush into anything.”
Neil returned to Purdue from Korea in 1952, and Dean started at the school a year later. Dean believes he met her before Neil did. “Janet is as strong as horseradish,” Dean explains, “a dynamic and self-confident person…. She looks you in the eye. Her body language is dramatic—the wayshe crosses her arms to say ‘What do you mean by that?’” One day during her junior year in 1955 after Neil had graduated and was working in Cleveland, Dean arrived at her off-campus apartment to drive her to school. Janet told him that Neil and she had gotten engaged. “It shocked the heck out of me that they were engaged,” Dean remembers, “because I had no idea that he was serious with her.” Neil had never been serious with anyone before.
“Maybe opposites attract,” Dean has remarked about the pairing of Janet and his brother. “They are really sort of opposites,” Gene Cernan seconds. Janet was outgoing and talkative, “very much so.” According to Cernan, “Neil and Jan must have just found something in common. …Maybe they mutually filled in voids…. Jan was a classy gal and I could see her being attracted to class—being attracted to someone who was not trying to i
mpress her. You know, ‘Sure, baby, I fly jets,’ ‘I just got back from Korea’ thing. She probably had to drag that out of him. Neil was the same Neil. He’s never changed since I’ve known him.”
The courtship was unusual in that there really wasn’t any. The betrothed were virtual strangers to each other. “We never really dated,” Janet explains today. “My philosophy was, ‘Well, I’ll have years to get to know him.’ I thought he was a very steadfast person. He was good-looking. He had a good sense of humor. He was fun to be with. He was older. He had a better sense of maturity than a lot of the boys I dated, and I had dated a lot of boys on campus.”
Curiously, neither Neil nor Janet remember the exact timing or circumstance of their engagement, other than that it occurred while Neil was working in Cleveland. On his way to Edwards that July, Neil detoured to northern Wisconsin where Janet was working as a summer camp counselor. According to Janet, Neil joked that “if I would marry him [on the spot] and come along in the car, he’d get six cents a mile for the trip. If I didn’t he’d only get four.” Recalling Neil’s father’s sole piece of advice upon the couple’s engagement was for her not to ride with Neil in a car, Janet decided, equally in jest, to join him in California later. Their wedding took place at the Congregational Church in Wilmette on January 28, 1956. Dean served as his brother’s best man and June as one of Janet’s attendants. “It was very lovely,” Viola Armstrong remembered. The newlyweds honeymooned in Acapulco.
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