Along with an uncommon intellect and extraordinary range of talents and interests, Wernher von Braun had his share of personal failings. For example, he tried to quit smoking but failed, so he bummed cigarettes from other people. On the road he liked to stay up late talking and drinking good whiskey and then sleeping late. He used profanity when he was with the boys. “He was the best cusser of all the Germans,” remembered one close associate, senior information officer Foster Haley. “He had a tremendous sense of humor—profane, like most of the Germans.”1
He was charitably described as a “hearty eater.” (His favorite foods were steak, potatoes, and fresh vegetables.) A maid at a dinner party returned to the kitchen shaking her head, “That man has the worst table manners I’ve ever laid eyes on!” He spent so much time discoursing at the dinner table that he would eat in frenetic bursts, shoveling it in, holding the fork in his left hand, continental style.2
On trips he rarely carried any money, leaving it for others to pay the bills and tips. At times he fit the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, forgetting to wear a belt, wearing mismatched socks to the office, neglecting to pick up the waiting associate with whom he carpooled. He had little use for speed limits or for red lights and stop signs, if the way seemed clear. He got pulled over by police officers, highway patrol units, and the U.S. Army’s MPs (military police).
The engineer-scientist was a klutz when dealing with everyday gadgets and machines. “He doesn’t like mechanical things,” noted his longtime secretary Bonnie Holmes. He never used a dictating machine in the eighteen years she worked for him. “He doesn’t trust them,” she revealed. And he wasn’t any good at working the buttons and switches, so he invariably called her in to take dictation. It was easier that way—for him.3
Engineer-manager Thomas L. “Tom” Shaner, the civilian aide-de-camp to von Braun in 1969–70, observed, “Dr. von Braun . . . could do anything he set his mind to. He flew jets. He loved to fly any kind of aircraft. But it was funny to me that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, operate a simple thing like a VCR. Those things would frustrate him, and he would tear up more videocassette recorders just out of anger and frustration. He would beat on it and throw it on the floor.”4
One time Shaner and a dozen associates were gathered in von Braun’s office to watch the televised splashdown of a space mission. The reception was terrible, with a sepia tone. Shaner casually got up, walked over to the TV set, flipped open the little door covering the controls, and turned the color knob. Instantly the true colors of the blue sky, shimmering water, and bright sun came in beautifully.
“Tom!” exclaimed von Braun, “Vhat did you do? Vhat did you do?”
“I just adjusted the color on the TV,” answered an apprehensive Shaner, certain he had upset the boss. “Do you want me to put it back the way it was?”
“No, no, I didn’t know you could do that!” von Braun answered. “It’s been that way for five years!”5
Barber David Hinkle, who cut the scientist’s hair for most of the latter’s twenty years in Huntsville, recalled the day von Braun walked into the shop with his son, Peter, age six. While his father got a haircut and hid behind a newspaper, the boy played on the floor with a large toy airplane. It was a battery-operated tin plane whose engines emitted sparks when the toy was scooted along the floor. After a few minutes of vigorous play, the extra-long batteries fell out. The boy handed the plane and batteries to his father in the barber’s chair. The scientist tried to fix it, but to no avail. Then, his haircut finished, he moved to a seat in the corner of the shop and continued to wrestle with the batteries—still without success.
Then Peter’s two sisters arrived, sized up the situation, and one of them implored, “Oh, Daddy, let me do it.” As Hinkle looked on, struggling to suppress a smile, von Braun’s young daughter replaced the batteries in the toy plane in no time.6
He wasn’t very handy around the house, either. Ernst Stuhlinger and Fred Ordway wrote about a party at which Maria mentioned that she had repaired a broken picture frame by drilling a hole and driving a screw into the wood.
“Do you have a drill?” a surprised von Braun asked.
“Oh, yes,” his wife replied. “I have an electric hand drill, and a whole box full of other tools—and I even use them quite frequently.”
“I did not know that,” her husband admitted.
“It makes no difference, Wernher,” continued Maria, “because you would not know how to operate the drill, anyway, and you would certainly hurt yourself.” When others called von Braun a genius, he would jovially protest: “I’ve never considered myself a genius—and my wife is always ready to attest to this fact!7
Writer Arthur C. Clarke caught a glimpse of his friend’s minimal prowess around the house during a Huntsville visit in 1958. Maria sent the two men out to fetch ice for drinks. Von Braun inserted a quarter in an ice-dispensing machine and out came a bag of ice—and then a second bag, and then another, and another.
“Lest a new Ice Age descend upon Huntsville,” Clarke later reminded von Braun, “you took the approved remedial action. You kicked the deranged robot in the guts. It promptly returned your quarter. That was the moment that I decided that you were, indeed, a man who had Power over Machines.” Unfortunately, Clarke recalled, “this respect lasted only ten minutes.” When the two men returned home and deposited their complimentary ice into the kitchen sink, “you attacked it with a pick. You made such a mess that Maria ordered you out of the kitchen, and did the job herself.”8
Von Braun was not above taking advantage of free assistance. His personal attorney in Huntsville, Patrick Richardson, dropped by one Saturday morning in the early 1960s. He found von Braun holding a ladder in his garage for the chief engineer of radio telemetry from the space center at Redstone Arsenal. He was fixing the electric garage door opener. The rocket scientist explained that every time a radio-equipped, cement-mixing truck passed by, his garage door flew open. It was always helpful to have expert resources one could call on.9
Von Braun’s driving habits followed the pattern set in his rocket-propelled youth. In Berlin one day in 1938, he drove the wrong way around Wittenberg-Platz—a busy, one-way traffic circle—just to see, he claimed, whether he would be arrested. He was.10
Driving to and from work at Redstone Arsenal, he was sometimes pulled over by MPs and ticketed, or given warnings, for transgressions ranging from speeding to inattention while operating a motor vehicle. Said a longtime associate at Redstone: “He usually drives through the gate here at about sixty miles an hour—reading a speech!”11
Ed Mohlere, a NASA associate, described him as “a wild driver. He didn’t know the meaning of a stop sign.”12 Another colleague said that in the early years at Redstone von Braun tended “to drive on worn tires till they blew out.” J. N. “Jay” Foster, who also worked closely with the rocket scientist on both the army and NASA sides, and in Washington, reminisced with him about “the days I accompanied you to the [Capitol] Hill. Why is it you can get away with parking in a No Parking zone and the rest of us can’t?!”13
William R. Lucas, an eventual successor to von Braun as space center director in Huntsville, recalled the time he rented a car, met von Braun, and planned to brief his boss while driving from Baltimore to Washington. “Well, von Braun wanted to drive,” Lucas said. “If you were flying an airplane, he wanted to fly it. If you were driving a car, he wanted to drive. So he was driving and I was looking at my material and briefing him. He was breezing along down the road. I was not conscious of how fast we were going, but he said, ‘Look at all those cars stopped up there. What’s wrong?’” The heavy-footed von Braun began to get the picture when police pulled him over to join the line of cars. He had been speeding and got caught. It was one time Bill Lucas was glad his take-charge boss was at the controls.14
Von Braun was a night owl, especially when traveling on business. His associates suspected he preferred to rise just before the crack of noon. “He was not an early riser, that was for sure,” Lucas remembered. “I traveled with him several times, and one of the things you were always told is that you have got to be responsible for waking him up. That wasn’t easy, and you had better wake him up more than once. He would stay up all night, and he didn’t like to get up early in the morning.” Lucas never let von Braun sleep through a morning meeting in Washington or anyplace else, but it took some doing. “I would go to his hotel room and bang on his door the next morning. You would have to get yourself up and plan plenty of time to get him awake.”15
Assistant Tom Shaner endured many such experiences when on the road with von Braun. “He was definitely a night person and notorious for not getting up early,” he said. And in Washington “if you are scheduled to go before a congressional subcommittee hearing at nine o’clock in the morning, you have to be there.” He would get a firm agreement with von Braun the night before: “Okay, we are going to meet for breakfast downstairs at eight o’clock.”
“Eight o’clock would come, and no Dr. von Braun,” recalled Shaner. “I would call his room, and he would answer and say, ‘Good morning. I’m not dead. I’ll be right down.’ He would hang up the phone and go right back to sleep.”
So his traveling companion would go up to his room and pound on the door. Von Braun would eventually answer, “Yes, yes. I will be right down.” Shaner said, “I would make him walk to the door and open it. He would be standing there in his shorts right out of bed. He hadn’t taken a shower, he hadn’t shaved. . . . So I learned not to trust Dr. von Braun when he would say he was up.”16
Von Braun said, on more than one occasion, at least half-seriously: “I’m convinced that none of the important achievements in human history were accomplished before ten-thirty or eleven in the morning!”17
Von Braun was no better at handling money than at getting an early start on the day. “He never carried cash,” Shaner recalled. “He never had any money with him.” So the aide carried the cash and credit card and kept up with all the travel expenses and receipts. After each trip he would settle accounts with Bonnie Holmes and Maria von Braun, “the family bookkeeper, accountant, and banker.”18
Although von Braun didn’t pursue the big bucks personally—at least not until joining private industry in his later years—he worked the system to his advantage. In his twenty-seven years on the U.S. government payroll, he found ways to supplement his income. Beginning in the late 1950s, his fame as “Mr. Space” brought him abundant opportunities for paid speechmaking, consulting work for Walt Disney (on Tomorrow Land at the original Disneyland, then on Walt Disney World) and others, and writing articles and books. He gave many more unpaid speeches than paid ones, and he often shared his honoraria and other outside payments fifty-fifty with the civil-servant ghostwriters who had helped with his articles and speeches, staff members said. Still, the paid activities became so lucrative that NASA placed a limit on his outside income.19 But it allowed a substantial sum per year, knowing that he could command a fortune with private industry.
“He’d mix business with personal business,” recalled Shaner. “He gave a lot of speeches back then, and he got paid for many of the big ones. They’d give him $5,000 or whatever as an honorarium. . . . He would work all these social things in with NASA business. He’d have a trip somewhere on business, and then that evening he’d be the guest speaker at some big banquet. That way he didn’t have to buy a ticket to fly commercial to do the dinner. If he worked it in with business, he could fly the NASA [airplane].”20
Government travel also allowed von Braun to indulge—free of charge—what biographers Stuhlinger and Ordway described as his “strange predilection for pills.” During his travels he tended to carry a pocketful of pills he just might need for various maladies. “If he had to visit a military installation,” the pair noted, “he rarely missed the opportunity to make a quick call at the infirmary and ask for some pills that might help to subdue an upset stomach, a sore throat, a little sinus trouble, or some slight pain in the chest.”21
On the road von Braun also took full advantage of the supplies of complimentary liquor provided for him and his staff or guests in the hotels where he would speak at large affairs. Before leaving, he made sure his aide packed up the booze for transport home, Shaner recalled. Von Braun, who considered the liquor simply part of the deal, always offered to split the loot with the assistant, based on who needed what for their home liquor cabinets.22
Despite his brilliance, von Braun’s mind could go AWOL at times. Unless his secretary intervened, he often lost track of the time at work and let meetings run long, which threw his schedule off. He tended to forget to stop by the supermarket when Maria asked him to pick up a few items on his way home. On a sailing outing in Chesapeake Bay with associates Frank Williams, Jay Foster, and others, he dropped anchor, only to realize he’d forgotten to secure the other end of the rope to the boat.23
A similar side of von Braun came into view on a trip to Los Angeles, as aerospace official Lee B. James reminded von Braun: “When we checked in to the hotel lobby, we set our bags down there, and you said, ‘Lee, would you watch my bags a minute while I make a call?’ That was the last time that I saw you that day.”24
As for his forgetfulness, missile and space agency translator and personal friend Ruth von Saurma once remarked, “In this respect he is very much the typical scientist. I suppose there is only so much room in [such] a man’s mind, and he eliminates the unimportant things.”25 Similarly, his daughter Iris wrote in a schoolgirl essay about her father that, if he forgets a few everyday things, “that’s because he always has so much on his mind. He’s always thinking about some problem.” (When the local newspaper learned of the revelatory essay and wanted to publish it in its entirety, Wernher and Maria gave their blessing.)26
On business in Washington, von Braun once left his billfold in the backseat of a taxicab. Later realizing his loss, he could not remember the name of the cab company, let alone the driver or the cab number. His wallet contained his “Secret” clearance ID cards and other valuable documents. He telephoned Bonnie Holmes back home and gave her the impossible task of recovering the lost wallet. It was his (and her) good fortune that the very next passenger in his cab was the widely read Washington investigative reporter and syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. He had noticed the billfold, quickly discovered the famous name within and, knowing how to reach von Braun’s office, had taken prompt steps to reunite wallet and owner.27
Von Braun had a natural flair for getting what he wanted from others. “He was a master psychologist,” observed Shaner. “He was an expert at manipulating people to get them to do what he wanted without being domineering. He was always making it seem like it was your idea and not his. . . . Many times he knew the answers to his dilemma or problem, but he wanted you to come to that conclusion and offer the solution.”28
One day in the 1960s, the custom-built “Pregnant Guppy” jet transport, designed for hauling large rocket upper stages to Cape Canaveral and other oversized cargo here and there, made its first visit to Redstone. Von Braun asked one question after another about the bulbous plane’s flight characteristics. The owner-pilot got the picture: Did von Braun wish to go up for a spin and try his hand at the controls? Yes, he did, and so it came about.29
For all his charm and charisma, von Braun the media star managed to alienate more than a few of his fellow scientists. Some saw him as an undignified huckster who hogged the limelight. Aerospace scientist Herbert Friedman found his colleague “an affable person with a friendly personality [who] certainly had the capability to charm people.” However, “many of us resented him because he would appear [at meetings] . . . and monopolize the stage. He was always followed by media people, and he could disrupt a meeting very thoroughly just by being there. . . . I was put off by his public image.”30
Given his personal magnetism and good looks, not to mention his fame, von Braun had ample opportunities to be a skirt chaser. Late in life he cheerfully confessed publicly that “I am a sinner, worse still . . . I sometimes even enjoy being one.”31 But he did not specify those sins, so one is left to wonder. Von Braun “certainly admired women,” recalled management associate James Daniels, who worked with him in Huntsville and Washington and accompanied him on trips. He enjoyed women’s company, their friendship, their attention, and their flirtations, at dinner parties and receptions. But he was not, to Daniels’s knowledge, a philanderer. In travels with von Braun, he witnessed the handsome scientist’s “No, thanks” response to colleagues’ late-night offers of arranged female companionship.32
“He always maintained the high road,” Shaner concurred. “There were people who didn’t know him or respect the way he was, but he would never get involved in things that were out of line. He was above all that. A lot of contractors would approach me about women for him, and all that sort of thing. I set them real straight on that: He didn’t do those kinds of things.”33 For whatever reasons, when it came to extramarital indiscretions, von Braun evidently didn’t engage in them, despite the rare rumor in Huntsville.
By all accounts von Braun shunned racial epithets and ethnic slurs, except for rare lapses. The scientist never made “any kind of off-hand remarks about any ethnic groups or any person,” aerospace engineer-manager Leland Belew asserted. “He had an affinity for life to the point that he had a very high tolerance for all people.”34 However, in a private letter written in the 1950s he used the then-common vulgar expression “nigger in the woodpile” in alluding to some problem or potential trouble.35
In satellite and other work in the 1950s and beyond, von Braun and his German rocket teammates had frequent association with Jewish scientists and engineers. “We had many contacts with . . . people of the Jewish religion, and there was never a problem between us in meetings,” engineer Rudolf Schlidt recalled. “Everybody respected each other. These guys we were working with—at JPL and so on—were terrific, absolutely terrific. There was never, never any feeling or remark of ‘Are you one of them?’” added Schlidt, meaning ideological, anti-Semitic Nazis. “The issue didn’t exist. We had very professional working relationships. During the day we had conferences and decision-making processes.”36
Perhaps the truest test of the personal relationships came after hours. “We were in the homes of many of the people out there,” noted Schlidt. “I remember Dr. Joseph Kaplan [who was Jewish] of Cal Tech, for example. He invited us in his home in the evening—von Braun, myself, and Stuhlinger. Never, never was there any problem between us.”37
Physicist Stuhlinger concurred: “Wernher von Braun and I had many scientist friends who were Jewish. We did in Germany, too.”38 Until the Hitler regime’s increasingly anti-Semitic policies made such relationships virtually impossible, that is. In postwar America, despite Schlidt’s and Stuhlinger’s rosy recollections, more than a few Jewish members of the U.S. aerospace community did not always feel so friendly toward von Braun and his team. The same could be said, of course, for a number of non-Jewish figures.
And what of the Prussian arrogance that some in the aerospace world—especially competitors—saw in the rocket pioneer? “Sometimes you think of people of nobility as haughty individuals,” observed senior aerospace manager Robert Lindstrom, who worked closely with von Braun for years. “I don’t recall him being that way. I’m sure that on occasion he could be. He was a very strong individual when he wanted to be.”39
Was von Braun prone to lose his temper? Did he ever go ballistic? Shaner and other associates recalled that he did have a fiery side but kept it suppressed, at least publicly. After an occasional run-in with what he called a “hard head” outside his team, an angry von Braun would privately unload to Shaner about “that damned so-and-so!” the aide euphemized.40
Von Braun cursed intrusive news reporters in late 1969 while on a family vacation. And he exploded during the filming of one of the many NASA promotions he was asked to do. An over-eager TelePrompTer operator sped up the lines of script von Braun was reading. The rocket scientist began speaking faster and faster, soon sounding like a sped-up voice tape. “Dammit!” he finally shouted. “Will you slow the damn thing down?” In a moment he regained his composure and was ready to continue. The shaken machine operator could not.41
Bill Lucas learned the hard way that von Braun “didn’t have lunch with someone just to have lunch”—that there was method and purpose in virtually everything he did. In the Skylab development days of the late 1960s, Lucas managed a portion of the design work. The project was running behind. “We were having a Management Council meeting in Washington,” he recalled. “We had a lunch break, and von Braun asked me to have lunch with him. He chewed me out—up one side and down the other—for something that came up during the meeting about Skylab, something where we were not doing all we should be doing.” Other attendees returning from lunch asked Lucas how his lunch had gone. “Well,” he told them, “when I went to lunch I didn’t know I was going to be lunch.”42
Von Braun was notorious for allowing endless, even if usually productive, meetings. But at times during them an unplugged, glazed look would cover his eyes. Engineer-manager James Kingsbury learned precisely what was happening with him at such moments. “One of the things people [on the team] looked forward to was making technical presentations to von Braun, because he always appeared to be totally immersed in what they were saying,” Kingsbury recalled.
Little did some of them know. “In a lighter moment, he [confided that] he had mastered the art of drifting off with his eyes open. When the presentation ended and he came back to the real world, there were a few key questions he had memorized” to show how alert he had been—generic questions about “vibration” or “rough combustion.” “And then,” recalled Kingsbury, “von Braun concluded [in his revelation], the presenters were delighted, because he obviously had paid careful attention.”43
While known for showing great patience with briefers in meetings—unless they tried to bluff their way through or otherwise put something over on him—von Braun could be impetuous on other occasions in the workplace. It happened when Tom Shaner showed up as a nervous, twenty-nine-year-old aerospace engineer in mid-1969 for an interview for the job of assistant to the director.
Von Braun had not wanted an aide in the first place (other than his brother Magnus, who had served for a time in that capacity in Germany), but in the late 1950s his closest associates had convinced him that he needed one to “manage” him, especially when he was on the road for up to three weeks of every month. He tended to make commitments and cut deals during his travels but did not always remember to share the details with staff back home. For what was typically a two-year assignment, the aide would stick to von Braun’s side, attending briefings and other private meetings and all public appearances with him; monitoring conversations and any decisions reached; and taking care of whatever the boss needed done. Von Braun insisted that the aide be a young person with a technical background who could later take professional advantage of the insider experience. Jerry McCall, mathematician; Frank Williams, engineer; and Jay Foster, technical manager, had filled the post earlier.
In 1969 Shaner was the first of three finalists—chosen from a dozen candidates within the center—to interview with von Braun. The young engineer had seen the director mostly at a distance during his six years in the Test Laboratory. Shaner recalled that he “was in total awe of him and scared to death when I went into his office. But he put me at ease. . . . Von Braun asked me why I wanted the job. I told him I really didn’t want it but that Karl Heimburg [Test Lab chief] was my boss and he told me I should try for it and that I would always have a job with him afterward.” Von Braun apparently liked the answer. “He told me this was not his idea, either, but the idea of these other people because they got tired of putting up with him and all the trouble he caused when traveling.”
After determining that Shaner was committed to the agency for the long haul, von Braun asked him if he drank—alcohol, that is. “Of course, that took me aback,” the engineer remembered. “I didn’t know what he was feeling for there. I said, ‘Well, I like to drink socially. I can take it or leave it, but I don’t have any objections to it.’ Evidently I gave him the right answer. He just said, ‘I never trusted a man who wouldn’t have a drink.’” Then von Braun smiled and canceled the two other interviews. Shaner was in.44
A devilish von Braun delighted in having fun at his associates’ expense. Shaner was one such victim. From the start, the young assistant had let his boss know he preferred to fade into the wallpaper at big events where von Braun was speaking. The director would have none of it. “Before Dr. von Braun would give a speech, he always felt like he had to introduce me to the audience,” Shaner recalled. “There might be five thousand people sitting out there at this big, fancy, black-tie dinner, and he’d introduce me. I didn’t like him to do that. It embarrassed me. A lot of times he’d have them put the spotlight on me and I would have to stand up. Later I would go to him and say, ‘Dr. von Braun, don’t do that. Please don’t do that.’” But the more Shaner protested, the more von Braun would embellish his introduction: “If he was introduced as the most important man in the space agency, then he’d say I was the second-most important man in the agency, because without me, he couldn’t do anything. He got a big thrill out of doing that. And the more he could embarrass me, the better he liked it.”45
It wasn’t only new employees who got teased, however. A longtime colleague from Germany also fell victim to his needling. Von Braun was an early and eager practitioner of MBWA—management by walking around. One day in the late 1960s he strolled into his center’s Space Sciences Laboratory. With him was a small group including Ernst Stuhlinger, the lab’s director, and Hermann Weidner, the overlord of all the labs. Harry Atkins, a young research physicist in the SSL, was at an optical workbench, performing infrared astronomy research and using a special soldering iron. As Atkins recalled:
Dr. von Braun and the group were . . . seeing what people were doing. He had this extreme interest in science. He used to go down into the labs and hide from his secretary. . . . With von Braun, all you had to do was mention something scientific you were working on and he’d just get into it. I happened to mention that this infrared detector I was working on was made out of a compound called lead sulphide. Well, he knew about it from their World War II work. He was very interested and asked me all kinds of questions.
During the discussion Hermann Weidner backed up against my bench and his suit coat came in contact with my pencil-thin soldering iron. During all the talking someone smelled smoke. Weidner looks around, jumps forward, starts beating his smoking coat, and they’re all helping him. Here I am, thinking my career has ended very fast!
Von Braun started laughing and said to Weidner, “No, Hermann, this is good! It’s time you bought a new suit! You’ve been wearing that one since the first day I saw you in Peenemünde!”
“I will never forget it,” added Atkins. “Weidner, a big, burly guy, was just stunned. . . . You could tell it was an older suit. It was funny. Von Braun’s comeback was just fabulous.”46
An odd thing about von Braun, remembered Bonnie Holmes, was his noisiness. When not talking, he hummed, whistled, and otherwise made sounds. “You can hear him before he comes in,” she said. “He just naturally makes noise.” Also, he was a man gifted with an “almost photographic memory,” virtual total retention and recall of everything he ever read or heard, Holmes said.47
Although he was said to have been an exceptional listener, von Braun was also a world-class talker, an adroit conversationalist, polished presenter of reports and testimony, and spellbinding speechmaker. “He would take information, he would tap knowledge no matter where he found it, and he would enter into extensive conversations,” remembered I. M. Levitt, astronomer and early space advocate. Von Braun “was like my wife,” observed Levitt in 1999 when he was ninety. “She visits with people—the cashier at the supermarket, a woman in line, whomever. Wernher liked to visit with people. He was a talker.”48
Others noted that von Braun tended to dominate small-group conversations. He often was guilty of interrupting other, faltering speakers before they had finished. Occasionally, he oversold his ideas in face-to-face meetings with higher authorities. “The problem with Wernher sometimes,” Maj. Gen. John G. Zierdt, U.S. Army (Ret.), observed, “was getting him to shut up.”49
Once he contracted a severe throat infection and, after hospitalization and treatment in Washington, D.C., was ordered to take an additional two weeks of complete voice rest, away from work at Redstone. Von Braun normally held daily informal lunch gatherings with members of his management staff. And normally, recalled staffer David Newby, he would talk a blue streak during these sessions, whether trying out parts of a speech or congressional testimony he was soon to present or bouncing new ideas off staffers. “His absence with the throat infection prompted a lot of conversation—and wisecracks,” Newby remembered. “People said things like . . . ‘Has anybody noticed how quiet it is around here lately?’ and ‘This [two-week silence] has set back the space program a whole month!’”50
The scientist enjoyed telling jokes, and he was good at it—in English or German. American- and German-born associates said he often livened up his all-male staff meetings at Redstone with a risqué joke or two. And hardly surprisingly, those with a space angle held a special appeal for him. Ordway recalled this “favorite von Braun joke that he’d tell with delight.”
Two American astronauts are launched to Mars. When they reach the Martian surface they see a beautiful red-skinned, red-haired woman. Using their language-translation machine, they tell her they are from Earth. They see she is stirring a big pot, and every now and then she pulls a newborn baby from the pot. So they ask her, “What are you doing?” She replies, “Making babies,” and she continues to stir. “How strange,” the astronaut commander says. “Well,” the beautiful woman asks, “how do you make babies on Earth?” So the commander says, “Let me show you,” and they go behind the Martian rocks and bushes. After awhile, they come back out and the woman asks, “Well, where is the baby?” And the commander says, “Oh, back on Earth it takes nine months to have the baby.” Perplexed, she asks, “Then why did you stop stirring?”51
At one staff meeting, playing off the rivalry between his Huntsville space center and the Manned Space Center in Houston, von Braun told this one, to rousing laughter. “One day a plane landed at the Dallas Airport and out stepped a dozen or so male dwarfs. Someone asked, ‘Who are those little people?’ The other fellow there says, ‘Oh, they used to be big tall Texans—before they got the shit beat out of them!’”52
Von Braun was also capable of making, or repeating, the occasional ill-considered, politically incorrect remark in public. Asked by reporters early in the space age where he stood on the question of future women astronauts, von Braun wisecracked: “Well, all I can say is that the male astronauts are all for it. And, as my friend Bob Gilruth [in Houston] says, ‘We’re reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment.’”
Aerospace manager Lindstrom was present when von Braun was fielding questions after making a presentation on large launch vehicles to a technical society gathering in Dallas. “A man stood up and asked von Braun, ‘What do you think about automation?’” Lindstrom recalled. “And his response was, ‘Well, automation is much like having a wife: She helps you solve some of the problems you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t got married in the first place!’”53
It is clear that while von Braun demanded technical perfection in rocketry, he did not pursue it in his life. Along with his many positive personal qualities, a rich complement of imperfections only showed how very human this extraordinary man was.