Such had been NASA protocol back in 1964, when astronaut Theodore C. Freeman had fatally crashed his T-38 trainer near Houston during a routine proficiency flight. The day was Halloween. Freeman ran into a flock of geese while coming in for a landing. A goose shattered his aircraft’s canopy. Pieces of Plexiglas flew into the engine ducts, causing both engines to flame out. Freeman, a superb test pilot, tried to eject, but he was too low. He became the first U.S. astronaut to lose his life.
First on the scene at the Freeman home was a reporter from one of the Houston papers. Hearing the news that she had just become a widow, Faith Freeman became inconsolable.
Just six months before the Freeman tragedy, Janet and Neil faced their own trial by fire. That April night Janet awoke first to the smell of smoke and quickly shook Neil awake. He jumped up to investigate the source. Seconds later came Neil’s shouts that the house was on fire and for Janet to call the fire department.
In the days before fully automated telephone exchange systems, this meant that Janet had to connect long distance from El Lago to Clear Lake. Getting no response from the operator, who, at three o’clock in the morning, had fallen asleep, she tried dialing Zenith 12000. In many parts of the country, this was the universal number for emergencies, but not in the Houston area. She then unsuccessfully tried dialing 116, a Los Angeles emergency code that she remembered from a first-aid class she had taken while living in Juniper Hills.
Desperate for help, Janet’s thoughts turned to her next-door neighbors and friends, Ed and Pat White.
The Whites and the Armstrongs had arrived together in Houston in the fall of 1962 as members of the New Nine. After living in rentals for over a year, the two families bought property together in the El Lago development, “one of a handful of planned communities that had sprung up around the space center, scattered with ranch houses and crisscrossed with tidy streets.” According to Neil, “We were looking for property in the area to the east of Clear Lake, down toward Seabrook. I don’t remember who found the lots in El Lago, but Ed White and I both liked the area and we bought three contiguous lots and split the middle one in half so that we each had a lot and a half to build our house on.”
Several other astronauts also lived in the area, as did a number of NASA managers. The Bormans, Youngs, and Staffords built homes in the El Lago subdivision, just down the block and around the corner from the Whites and Armstrongs. So, too, did the Freemans, after air force captain Ted Freeman was named one of the third group of astronauts in October 1963. Preferring a site on the water, Elliot See and his wife Marilyn built on Timber Cove, an estuary that separated them from El Lago. The Carpenters, Glenns, Grissoms, and Schirras already lived at Timber Cove. Together, the two neighborhoods amounted to a virtual astronaut colony.
Neil and Janet naturally grew quite close to their next-door neighbors, the Whites. “We saw each other often,” Neil states. “I don’t remember us socializing together a lot, but Ed and I were both gone an awful lot of the time, and Pat and Janet spent of lot of time together. We had a swimming pool and they didn’t. We invited their kids, Eddie III and Bonnie, to use our pool anytime they wanted.”
Separating the two backyards was a six-foot-tall wooden fence. Ed and Pat, who were sleeping with their windows open as well as their bedroom door, easily heard Janet through their master bathroom window. As Janet explains, “The reason the children weren’t asphyxiated was the fact that our air conditioning wasn’t working and it was a warm night and I had closed the doors and opened the windows.”
Still to this day, Janet vividly recalls the image of Ed White clearing her six-foot fence: “He took one leap and he was over.” Privately, Neil questions whether his brave friend, as superbly athletic as Ed was, literally bounded over the high fence: “Ed certainly had the ability to do it. He came very close to qualifying for the Olympic team in the high hurdles, so maybe he did.” On the other hand, “We had a door on the fence. It was not an obvious door; you had to know where it was.”
By whatever expeditious manner he did it, Ed White flew to the rescue with a water hose. Janet ran around to the front waiting for Neil to hand Mark out of the baby’s bedroom window. “But no,” Janet recalled, “Neil didn’t do that! They were little windows, and Neil would have had to break one of them. He brought Mark back down the hall, back to our bedroom and out. He was standing out there calling for somebody to come and get Mark, because Mark was—what, ten months old—and Neil couldn’t put him down because he was afraid he would crawl into the swimming pool and drown.”
By this time, sirens were heard in the distance, as Pat White had managed to turn in the alarm. The living room wall of the house was glowing red, and window glass was beginning to crack. Ed passed the hose to Janet so that he could collect Mark from Neil then hand the child over the fence to Pat so he could get busy with another hose. The heat was now so intense that Janet had to hose down the concrete just to be able to stand on it in her bare feet. Parked in the garage, the fiberglass body of Neil’s new Corvette—a vehicle that a local Chevy dealer had offered to all the astronauts at a heavily discounted price—began to melt.
Neil made a second trip into the fire, to save Rick: “The first time I just held my breath the whole time; the second time I had to get down lower and put a wet towel over my face. I was still trying to hold my breath. I couldn’t completely. When you take a whiff of that thick smoke, it’s terrible.” If Rick had been screaming or making any sort of noise, it could have helped his father navigate his way through the ink-black smoke, but Neil does not remember hearing anything but the crackling of the fire. He would later say to Janet that the twenty-five feet he traversed to save Rick was “the longest journey” he ever made in his life, because he feared what he might find when he got there. But six-year-old Rick was fine. Neil took the wet towel from his own face, put it over his eldest son’s, and scrambled out into the backyard with the boy in his arms. Catching his breath as best he could, Neil asked Ed to help him push the cars out of the superheated garage. Then both men picked up the hoses and continued their firefighting.
Once she knew her men had made it out safe and sound, Janet was able to laugh and joke a bit with the neighbors, who “couldn’t sleep through all of this.” Watching her house turn to cinders, she mimicked the actor in a popular television commercial who moaned, “I’ve got an Excedrin headache.” But then she remembered Super. That night, as always, the pet had been sleeping in Rick’s room. To lose Super, given his role in bolstering Rick’s spirits after the loss of his little sister, would be devastating. A considerate neighbor put together a small hunting party. In a few minutes, Super was found alive and well.
The volunteer firefighters began arriving some eight minutes after Pat White’s telephone call and took the rest of the night to drench the flames. Janet remembers, “It was a terrible mess afterwards.” Several of the firemen stayed on for a few more hours, helping to carry anything that was salvageable over to the Whites’ yard and carport. “We really made a mess of their whole place!” Janet recalls. The Armstrongs lived with the Whites for a few days before moving everything worth rescuing into a nearby rental home. Janet remembers Ed looking at the bottom of his feet the day after the fire and noticing an array of nasty cuts that he couldn’t remember sustaining. Checking their own soles, Janet and Neil also found mysterious cuts, sores, and bruises.
The wire service story that appeared in newspapers around the country reflected only a pale shadow of the perilous drama:
Seabrook, Tex., April 24, 1964 (UPI)—The suburban home of Neil A. Armstrong, an astronaut, was badly damaged by fire early today, but he and his wife and two small children escaped without injury. His wife, Janet Elizabeth, said she and Mr. Armstrong awoke around 3:45A.M. this morning and found flames eating across the roof of their home. There was no estimate of damage.
Janet harbored no illusions: “We could have easily all been consumed by the smoke. It was real, real sickening.” Even Neil characterized the danger in st
ark terms: “It could have been catastrophic…Had we started to become asphyxiated before we woke up, then we probably would not have made it.”
If danger was a constant for Janet, so was a fatalistic attitude: “I never cried. I never felt down in the dumps over the things that we had lost, and we had lost a lot of things. I was just so darn grateful that we were all unharmed. Mark had a little burn on his finger, which we can’t ever to this day figure out how he got because he wasn’t really in any fire area at all…We were so fortunate not to injure or lose any of our children. My heart just goes out to people who do lose children.” The loss of family photographs, particularly pictures of Karen, was deeply felt. Those few, salvageable shots of her became even more precious.
If they had been in their new home for longer than just four months, the losses would have multiplied. According to Janet, “The fire destroyed our dining room table and a beautiful glass-front hutch. All the crystal inside was shattered by fire hoses. Fortunately, we had minimum furniture in the living room. We had just bought brand-new bedroom furniture for Ricky’s room and our room and some other furniture.” They had insurance, but they still lost money.
“I feel very deeply for anyone who has a fire,” Janet commiserates, “because maybe things aren’t burned, but there is smoke damage to your clothes and to everything. Everything I was currently wearing was wrapped up waiting to be ironed on the ironing board. So I just didn’t have anything to wear for a few days. I’ll never forget how grateful I was to all the neighbors and people I didn’t even know who brought toys over for the kids. In a couple of hours—oh, less than that—we had a playpen to put Mark in and pretty soon we had a crib and we had diapers. Everybody went through their attics and said, ‘Here, we don’t need this anymore, you take it,’ shoes and all kinds of things. They were just marvelous. I have an attic full of things,” Janet said in 1969, “that I’m saving to do for somebody else like that.”
It took Neil and Janet “a good six months” to compile an inventory of what they had lost, a process compounded by the fact that so many of their possessions had remained in packed cartons since the move from California in November 1962.
For some of the cartons, Neil needed no inventory. These contained his prized boyhood collection of airplane models, as well as all of his handwritten notebooks filled with drawings of aircraft and aircraft design specifications plus issue upon issue of old aircraft magazines that he had bought in places like Brading’s drugstore with his hard-earned money.
“His models, we saved those,” Janet explained in 1969. “They weren’t all burned up. He saves them for gifts now…Priceless! They all got melted and twisted. You can tell what it used to be, but you don’t know how it got that way.”
The same might be said of the original design specifications of the Armstrongs’ El Lago home. “It was not a ‘spec’ home,” Neil explains. “It was custom-built. The builder used a designer draftsman rather than an architect. This was a man who drew up what we wanted in terms of the floor plan, exterior effects, and the general overall look of the house. A number of my colleagues had used the technique in building their homes. It was very good quality construction for the amount of money that it cost, which was twelve dollars a square foot for a brick home with tile baths.”
Armstrong determined that the loss of the house “could have been catastrophic but it wasn’t, and at that point it was just an inconvenience that required a lot of time being spent on things which were not very productive, like getting into another house, staying there, and renting furniture until we could get back into our own house and have it rebuilt.”
Back in the late 1960s Janet constructed her narrative about the El Lago home in the first-person singular: “I had just gone through the bit of building a house, carrying a baby around and the trips back and forth. After I built the house the first time—and Neil was gone most of the time during that—I vowed I’d never build another house! And here we were, going through the same thing again! But it was an experience, to say the least.
“We couldn’t afford not to [rebuild on the same lot]. By the time we went to rebuild, the building costs had gone up so high that they rebuilt the same house for us, minus the slab, for an increase in price. It was a different builder this time, a fire specialist. They built completely differently, from the roof down instead of from the ground up.”
As Neil would later do as part of the NASA teams that investigated the Apollo 13 accident in 1970 and the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, he did his best in 1964 to learn why his home had caught on fire, in order to make sure it did not happen again.
“We had a large combination living-family room with cathedral ceilings and beams, and the walls were paneled. This was drywall-framed construction where they built drywall walls and then put the paneling over the drywall. After a couple of months in the house, the paneling was warping and curling up and the joints were not fitting right anymore. The builders had sealed the front of the paneling before they painted the front side, but they did not put any sealer on the backside, so moisture was warping the boards. When we noticed that, we had the builder come over. We said to him, ‘Look what’s happening here.’ The builder said, ‘Oh yes, it shouldn’t be that way. We goofed, so we’ll fix it.’ In order to take the panels down they used a nail set and knocked the finishing nails through the back of the board so the board would just fall off. This time they put up seal paneling. After the fire, the inspectors found the cause immediately. What had happened is when they knocked in one of those nails, they knocked it into a wire. It wasn’t a ‘hard short’; it was a ‘trickle short’ with a little skin of insulation in-between, so there was a small current flowing for some months and built up the temperature in that location. There was no way to know until it had built up enough temperature there to ignite.”
It wasn’t until Christmas 1964 that their new home was ready. “Because of our fire,” Janet recollects, “they were able to sell quite a few detector systems to homeowners in the area,” including the Armstrongs themselves, as well as next-door-neighbors Ed White, Ted and Faith Freeman, and Elliot and Marilyn See.
Life is full of ironies. So is death. In less than three years time, all three of these vital young men would be killed—Freeman and See in fiery airplane crashes and good neighbor Ed White in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire.
“People are always asking me what it is like to be married to an astronaut,” Janet told Life magazine during interviews conducted from 1966 through 1969. “What it’s like for me to be the wife of Neil Armstrong is the more appropriate question. I’m married to Neil Armstrong, and being an astronaut happens to be part of his job. To me, to the children, to our families and close friends, he will always be Neil Armstrong, a husband and father of two boys, who has to cope with the problems of urban living, home ownership, family problems, just like everybody else does.”
Janet did not coddle Neil: “As his wife I do keep his clothes clean for him. I try to keep his suits pressed. I occasionally polish his shoes, although he usually has to do that himself. I send his shirts out to the laundry because they come back all nice and folded and are easy for him to grab and put in the little suitcase that he carries. Many wives, I know, pack their husbands’ bags. But long ago I quit doing that. I always packed too many things. I always added an extra shirt or an extra this or that. He knows better than I do what fits in a very limited space. He likes to help in the kitchen when there is time. In the winter, when I have to teach swimming at mealtime, I leave a note on the refrigerator door telling him what is in the oven for dinner. He is very good about getting it out and serving himself and the boys. Overall, he’s very easy to live with. I really think I’m awfully lucky.
“It never, never shows in Neil that he’s had a very distressed day. He does not bring his worries home. I don’t like to ask him questions about his work,” Janet related, “because he lives with it too much already. But I love it when someone else asks him about his work, and I can sit and lis
ten to it all.”
Based on her experience during Gemini VIII, Janet understood the dovetailing pressures on both spouses: “It kind of all works hand in hand, because they, the men, are so busy, and we, the wives, are so busy. Of course, we women have to do it in different ways. We certainly feel the pressure. It has to be dealt with in some way…You rush around very hard and fast before a flight as you know everything will be mostly under someone else’s control for those important days.” Then, as the actual countdown to launch begins, time stands still: “You get so intently involved, and there is always a strain. It is a strain on many, many people, and it is definitely a strain on the wife and the family.
“The only way we wives can participate, really participate, in what the men are doing,” Janet explained, “is to know as much as we can about it in advance and then follow it closely on radio and television and through the communications with the ground.” “If [the primary flight crew wives] don’t listen [to NASA’s squawk box],” Janet felt, “[they] miss the fun part, the humor that the men have, which helps to lighten your day and share their flight with them. You want to know every little thing that happens, everything they say.
“The way we do it at home is by listening to the local radio station, which has very good coverage. But invariably when they are having a transmission from the spacecraft, the children are in need of something, right then and there. Of course, it’s even more of a conflict when your own husband is flying.” Mark, her youngest, especially “notices that I am not giving him the proper attention and he is a very demanding child as far as attention goes…so I might as well quit fighting it.”
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