Armstrong’s second X-15 flight, and his first for research purposes, came ten days later, just before the noon hour on Friday, December 9, 1960, also in the number-one airplane. Flight number 1-19-32 first tested the X-15’s newly installed “ball nose.”
Until this flight, the X-15, typical of all research aircraft up to this time, had a front-mounted boom with vanes to sense airspeed, altitude, angle of attack, and angle of sideslip in a free aerodynamic flow field. At such high altitudes and high speeds, the X-15 would melt its nose boom, destroying measurement data.
The ingenious solution was to design a sphere that could be mounted on the front of the aircraft. The sphere would be subject to the highest temperatures on the airplane, but it could be cooled from the inside by liquid nitrogen. Equidistant from the circumference were sensor ports in the middle of the ball as well as on the top and bottom. The “eight ball” moved automatically in pitch and yaw to keep the pressure equal on both of the ports, pointing the center hole directly into the free flow. The angle of the ball movement amounted to the airplane’s angle of attack. Similarly, the ball nose received precise indications of angle of sideslip and dynamic pressure, which then gave airspeed.
“It wasn’t a particularly difficult thing to fly for the first time, if it worked,” Armstrong explains. Dropped by the B-52 at the standard 45,000 feet over the Palmdale VOR station by Captain Jack Allavie and Major Robert Cole, the X-15 climbed to 50,095 feet at a speed of Mach 1.8. Burnout of the rocket came immediately after Neil extended the aircraft’s speed brakes. The ball nose worked extremely well, so well that it would be used throughout the remainder of the X-15 program. Neil’s own performance was, again, solid. Flying chase were Lieutenant Commander Petersen and Major Bob White in F-104s and Major Daniel in an F-100F. Upon touchdown, Joe Walker, acting as “NASA 1,” radioed up from the control center, “Real nice flight, boy!”
It would be over a year before Armstrong would make another X-15 flight. Throughout 1961, Armstrong continued to work on the new automatic flight-control system for X-15-3, the aircraft in which he would make his third through sixth X-15 flights starting in December 1961. Until then, there would not be nearly so much test flying for Neil as in previous years. But there would be more travel than ever, much of it done on commercial airliners, back and forth to Minneapolis-Honeywell and, even more so, to Seattle, where he consulted for NASA on the air force’s new X-20 space plane program, known as Dyna-Soar.
It would be in Seattle in late spring 1961 where one of the worst tragedies that could ever befall a young family began.
CHAPTER 14
The Worst Loss
Seattle, the state of Washington’s Emerald City, can in early June be downright blissful: fresh air, golden sunshine, azure skies, verdant landscapes. On such a day, the loving parents of two young children might think that nothing could ever possibly go wrong.
The family was temporarily in the city because Neil was working at Boeing, the contractor on Project Dyna-Soar, a joint NASA–air force program that was developing a manned hypersonic boost-glider as a follow-on to the X-15. Some of its advocates had thought that the Dyna-Soar vehicle, designated X-20, might beat Project Mercury’s ballistic capsule into space. But Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight just a few weeks earlier, on May 5, 1961, put an end to that part of the dream. Yet Dyna-Soar lived on.
Visiting the public park on Lake Washington had become a regular weekend outing for the Armstrongs in Seattle. Along with swimming, Ricky enjoyed riding the swing, the merry-go-round, and the teeter-totter as would any boy about to turn four years old. Karen, two years old, ran through the park in her own great big adventure.
Neil and Jan called their little girl Muffie. As a teenager in Wapakoneta, Neil had a friend by the name of Fred Fisher whose sweet younger sister was named Karen. In the little girl’s eyes, Neil could do nothing wrong. When he visited the Fisher home, Neil, unlike Fred’s other friends, paid attention to little Karen “Cookie” Fisher. Shortly before heading off to Purdue, Neil told his sister June that if he ever had a daughter he wanted to name her Karen. When a daughter was born on April 13, 1959, the couple named her Karen Anne Armstrong. Instead of Cookie, Neil chose for Karen the nickname Muffie, an endearing form of Muffin.
A good father naturally loves all his children. Yet there is often something special between a father and a daughter, perhaps especially with Neil, whose formative relationships were with his mother and his sister rather than his father and his brother. June discerned “how he loved Rick [his firstborn], but when Karen was born, he was just a different man.”
While leaving the public park on Sunday, June 4, 1961, Muffie had one of those typical childhood spills. “Karen was running from the grass down to the street,” Janet remembered, “and it was such a big step, she tripped and fell. You could see the knot right there on her head. We went immediately home. She had a little nosebleed with it, and we thought maybe she’d had a little concussion. By that evening we noticed that her eyes weren’t operating properly.” The Seattle pediatrician Janet consulted the next day while Neil was at work told Janet to have Karen checked out thoroughly back in California, where the family was headed at the end of the week.
Karen’s regular pediatrician in Lancaster, Dr. Phil Stumm, sent her on to an ophthalmologist, who immediately saw that there was a problem. The eye doctor told Janet to see how the child did at home and to bring her back in a week.
“I was teaching swimming during this time,” Janet explained, “and putting on a water show involving synchronized swimming.” A mother of one of Janet’s students was a registered nurse. While Ricky swam and took lessons with the others, Karen stayed with the nurse, who was alarmed to observe that Karen seemed to be getting progressively worse. She kept tripping and her eyes were almost constantly crossed. The nurse told Janet to hospitalize Karen for a comprehensive series of tests.
Janet made the arrangements, because Neil, upon returning from Seattle, had left immediately to do some work at Minneapolis-Honeywell: “He didn’t know anything about it, so I finally called him and told him I was hospitalizing her.” That day the girl’s eyes began to roll and she could not talk plainly anymore.
Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital was a Catholic hospital on North Prairie Avenue in Inglewood, southwest of downtown Los Angeles. There, at a facility grounded in the tradition of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, a team of physicians led by Dr. Eric Yuhl and Dr. Duke Hanna put the little girl through a battery of tests, culminating in a pneumoencephalogram. Prior to the invention of CT scanning, a pneumoencephalogram was the only diagnostic tool for the inner parts of the brain. The invasive procedure required a spinal tap and an injection of air into the patient’s spinal canal. The injected air displaced spinal fluid as the air rose to the patient’s head—specifically, into the cerebral ventricles—when the patient was turned upright. Radiographic visualization then allowed the doctors to evaluate the midline brain structures and the brain stem.
The X-rays showed that Karen had a glioma of the pons, a malignant tumor growing within the middle part of her brain stem. Brain-stem tumors were, and still are, the most dreaded cancers in pediatric oncology. Quite rare, such tumors account for about 10 percent of all childhood brain tumors, of which there are only about 1,500 newly diagnosed cases in the United States each year. Even today, with the availability of chemotherapy, the prognosis for brain-stem gliomas is remarkably poor: a majority of children still die within a year of diagnosis.
“They immediately started X-ray treatment on her to try and reduce the size of the tumor,” Janet recalled. “In the process, she completely lost all her balance. She could not walk; she could not stand…She was the sweetest thing. She never, ever complained.” Everyone at the hospital was “so good to her and so kind.” They would let Janet stay with her: “I was with her around the clock, or Neil was there. He took a week off [the flight logs at Edwards indicate that Neil was off from June 26 through July 6 and again on July 13 and 14
] and we stayed in a motel down there. One of us kept Ricky and one of us stayed at the hospital.” The initial week of radiation was followed by six weeks of outpatient treatment.
“During this time, she learned to crawl again and eventually she learned to walk again,” Janet noted. “Ricky was a big, big help there. He had just turned four. Eventually her eyes straightened out. Of course, she had a big bald spot from the X-rays. Then it got so I could bring her home on weekends and took her back to L.A. through the week.” Over the seven-week period, the hospital gave Karen the maximum 2,300 roentgens of X-ray. “She took the radiation beautifully,” according to her mother. “She never had any sickness.”
For the next month and a half, Karen’s condition improved. The radiation temporarily arrested the tumor. Neil frequently consulted with his sister June and her husband Dr. Jack Hoffman, a physician who had just set up a private practice in Wisconsin. “We had a lot of phone calls back and forth,” says June. “I’m the eternal optimist, but my husband told me, ‘No, she’ll be dead within six months.’”
Before long, all of Karen’s symptoms were back—the difficulty with coordination and walking, the crossed eyes and double vision, the inability to speak clearly, the sagging of one side of the face. The person who first noticed signs of Karen’s regression was brother Ricky, her regular playmate. Returning to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, Neil and Janet knew there was only one possible treatment remaining: cobalt. The invention of the cobalt machine in the 1950s had been a major breakthrough in cancer treatment. Instead of relying on X-rays, which could not penetrate deep-seated tumors, the gamma-ray beam generated from the breakdown of radioactive cobalt 60 irradiated much deeper. Unfortunately, cobalt killed not only cancer cells but also healthy tissue. Side effects could be more unpleasant and more damaging, especially for a two-year-old girl.
Neil and Janet decided to try the cobalt, but Karen’s weakened little body could not take it. The doctors at Freeman Memorial were very straightforward with the Armstrongs. Rather than hospitalizing her again, everyone involved realized she would be happier at home. The family even traveled to Ohio for the holidays. “She made it through Christmas,” Janet recounted. “She couldn’t walk by this time—she could crawl—but she was still able to enjoy Christmas. It seems like the day Christmas was over, she just went downhill…. It just overcame her.”
Through the ordeal, Neil and Janet received particularly thoughtful support from Joe Walker, Neil’s boss, and from Joe’s wife Grace, who were their best friends in California. The Walkers had recently experienced their own tragic loss. In June 1958, their two-year-old son, Robert Bruce Walker, had died suddenly, the result of a radically deficient immune system brought on by an extreme case of food allergy. “After Robbie died,” Grace Walker-Wiesman tearfully remembered, “I was really searching for what it must mean that a child comes into this world and then is taken away. When I heard about Karen, I desperately wanted to do something to help.”
“Jan brought Karen around a number of times,” Grace recalled. “We put her in the high chair and tried again with some Jell-O or pudding. She was a gay little thing. She would try to eat it and then she would just throw it up. Janet said to me, ‘I’m going to go over to the doctor and see if there is something we can do.’” But there was nothing that could help.*
Somewhat earlier, Neil also paid Grace Walker a visit: “I remember Neil bringing Karen over without saying anything, just a visit on a Saturday. They wanted to see our new baby [a daughter born in September 1961]. So I got her out of the bassinet and put her on the bed, and Neil carried Karen over so she could touch her and kind of hold her. Karen was a valiant little girl. I wanted to do something overt, but I didn’t feel Neil would consider it acceptable—putting hands on Karen or saying a prayer or something. But I felt that Neil came to me because he wanted somehow to encourage Karen and to hold on to a hope, just a wild hope, like parents do. You could see that he loved his little girl very deeply.”
On Sunday morning, January 28, 1962, Karen Anne Armstrong died at home in the family’s Juniper Hills cabin after an agonizing six-month battle with the inoperable brain tumor. The week leading up to her death must have been particularly difficult on Janet as Neil was away on job-related travel to Florida. The little girl succumbed to pneumonia, a complication caused by her weakened condition. The day she died was Neil and Janet’s sixth wedding anniversary.
Final rites were held at the Mumaw Funeral Home at 2:00 P.M. on Wednesday, January 31, with burial in the children’s sanctuary at Joshua Memorial Park, both in Lancaster. The Reverend Carroll N. Parker of the Community Methodist Church in Pearblossom officiated. A poem printed on the remembrance card read: “God’s garden has need of a little flower, it had grown for a time here below. But in tender love He took it above, in more favorable clime to grow.” The well-known passage from the Gospel of St. Luke offered a final prayer: “Suffer little Children to come unto Me—for of such is the kingdom of God.” The small stone marking her grave read “Karen Anne Armstrong, 1959–1962.” In between these two lines was carved the precious little nickname Neil had given her: Muffie.
In honor of Neil’s daughter, the Flight Research Center grounded all test planes the day of her funeral. (The fact that Karen had died was recorded in the FRC flight log for January 28.) One man who paid his respects, FRC engineer John McTigue, recalled Neil being very “composed” at the funeral, though everyone knew he was suffering deeply. Grace Walker also remembered Neil being very stoic and showing little emotion, in contrast to Janet, who was visibly shaken. Despite their close friendship, Grace also remembered not hugging Neil that day or ever: “I think he always felt like that wasn’t the thing to do.”
Very seldom was Neil Armstrong not in control of his emotions. Grace Walker observed Neil channeling his grief for Karen, just as her husband Joe had done in the aftermath of their son’s death in 1958. “Joe was very supportive for me, but I would say it is a pilot thing. Most of them act pretty stoic. They would say they had an ‘okay flight’ and then they would go into the bathroom and vomit. I think Joe was a little more supportive for me than Neil was for Janet. Now I say that not as a criticism, but just the way that Neil was—he was very tight emotionally. But the whole attraction to those men—outside of their being good-looking and daring—was their laid-back nature and sense of humor.”
People who knew Armstrong well indicated that Neil never once over the years brought up the subject of his daughter’s illness and death. In fact, several of his closest working associates stated that they did not know that Neil ever had a daughter.
Quickly after his son’s funeral, Joe Walker went right back to work; so did Neil after Karen’s. Neil was back in the office on Monday, February 5, and back in the air the day after that. Armstrong took no other time off from the job until a family trip to Ohio in mid-May, though there was another monthlong stay in Seattle from February 26 to March 20, when Neil was again consulting on the Dyna-Soar program.
“That hurt Jan a lot,” Grace claims, that Neil went right back to work. “She is a very directed and self-sufficient person, but she really needed support after that. She desperately needed her husband to help her. Neil kind of used work as an excuse. He got as far away from the emotional thing as he could. I know he hurt terribly over Karen. That was just his way of dealing with it.
“Jan was angry for a very long time,” said Grace. “Angry at God, and I think at Neil, too. The dynamics between a married couple are already so complicated…. I don’t think they were communicating too well.” Unwilling to get into combative verbal exchanges, “Neil would leave Janet in limbo.”
To help Rick through the loss, Neil and Janet got their son a new pet. (Their previous dog, a Belgian shepherd, had run off with a pack of wild dogs.) Rick named him Super, perhaps because Superman was indestructible. “They came by that day and Ricky was so happy,” Grace remembered. In response to a question from Life reporter Dodie Hamblin in 1969, Janet stated that Ricky,
twelve years old at that time, definitely still remembered his sister. But “he doesn’t speak of her much anymore…. He was a different child after all this.”*
Grace Walker and a handful of other close friends did what they could to support Janet and Ricky emotionally: “We did things with the kids.” Slowly but surely she saw Janet making a stronger effort to keep life going. During the summer of 1962, Janet became pregnant with her third and last child, Mark. By the fall, the family was making its move to Houston.
Still, one wonders about the lasting effects of Karen’s death upon Neil and Janet Armstrong, both individually and upon their marriage, even though that marriage lasted another thirty-two years, until a divorce (initiated by Janet on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences”) sent them on their separate ways in the early 1990s.
In a remarkable chapter of his 2003 book All the Presidents’ Children: Triumph and Tragedy in the Lives of America’s First Families, author Doug Wead describes how an unusually high number of U.S. presidents and their wives—Adams, Jefferson, Harrison, Pierce, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, George H. Bush—suffered the loss of a child. For a few, the death became the catalytic event in their ascendancy to the presidency.
It is tempting to apply to Neil Armstrong Wead’s assertion that propelling the man outside the family and into public life enabled him “to be alone and escape the tenderness of the loss,” for there is no question that, despite surface appearances, Karen’s death shattered him to the core. “It was a terrible time,” June reminisced, still teary-eyed forty years after her little niece’s death. “I thought his heart would break. Somehow he felt responsible for her death, not in a physical way, but in terms of ‘Is there some gene in my body that made the difference?’ When he can’t control something, that’s when you see the real person. I thought his heart would break.”
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