Secretaries, Assistants, and Administrative
Aides for Neil Armstrong, 1969–2012
There was no way for Neil Armstrong to keep up with the heavy volume of mail he received over the years following Apollo 11 without considerable—weekly if not daily—assistance from secretaries or administrative aides. While he was still working for NASA, the agency did what it could to help Neil manage his mail by assigning a person or two from Public Affairs to open his mail, read each letter, and make a judgment as to whether it was a letter Neil would want, or need, to see. The assistant might also answer the letter, following guidance Neil had provided, always making sure the reply would satisfy him. Anything the assistant was not sure about, she most certainly ran before him, taking the side of caution, to make absolutely sure the mail was being handled exactly how Neil wanted. Naturally, as an assistant gained experience working on Neil’s mail, she became more confident in her decisions and did not need to bother him as much in the triage of his correspondence.
Another thing the assistants did, particularly the assistants at NASA Public Affairs, was to keep stats on Neil’s incoming and outgoing mail—that is, how many letters, cards, and so forth were received each month and how many replies the office sent on his behalf.
The following table provides the names of all of the women who helped Neil with his mail at NASA, at the University of Cincinnati, and through private arrangement with him once he went to work for himself after leaving the university in 1979. Of course, most people did not know when exactly Neil left NASA, arrived at Cincinnati, or left Cincinnati. Few knew his working address, and even fewer knew his home address. So, letters kept arriving at NASA after he left, with the same being true after he left the university. For a short period after he left both institutions, his previous assistants continued to do what they could to help. After leaving the University of Cincinnati, Neil had to arrange for the administration of his mail and soon realized that handling his mail on his own was an impossible burden. In February of 1980 he rented a small office and post office box in Lebanon, Ohio, a little town north of Cincinnati, where the Armstrong family had moved to a farm after Neil resigned from NASA in 1971, and hired an administrative assistant—Vivian White—who managed his correspondence for more than twenty years. While he was at NASA, letters requiring translation were handled by government employees and contractors. At the University of Cincinnati, such letters were handled as best as could be from within the university community. The same was true when letters requiring translation arrived in the Lebanon post office for Vivian White to handle, as Vivian herself could not translate the letters.
| Years | Name | Organization |
| 1969–1971 | Shirley B. Weber | NASA, Office of Public Affairs |
| 1971–1972 | Geneva B. Barnes | NASA, Office of Public Affairs |
| 1972–1973 | Fern Lee Pickens | NASA, Office of Public Affairs |
| 1971–1973 | Ruta Bankovskis | University of Cincinnati |
| 1974–1975 | Luanna J. Fisher | University of Cincinnati |
| 1976–1979 | Elaine E. Moore | University of Cincinnati |
| 1980–2003 | Vivian White | Private (Lebanon office) |
| 2003–2012 | Holly McVey | Private |
While Neil was still with NASA and during his first couple of years at the University of Cincinnati, he also relied on these assistants to help him with his scheduling, bookings, and travel itineraries. Starting in 1974 he referred requests for nonacademic appearances—and there were a lot of them—to Mr. Thomas Stix, Stix and Gude, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, New York 10020.
We know a great deal about how Vivian White handled her assignment with Armstrong, as she was interviewed at length for First Man; and from Vivian we also know a lot about Neil’s policy for signing autographs.
Vivian White worked full-time for Neil for about ten years; after that she “cut back” to four-and-a-half days a week. According to Vivian, for the first twelve to fifteen years she worked for him, Armstrong would sign anything he was asked to sign, except a first-day cover. Then in about 1993 he discovered that his autographs were being sold over the Internet and that many of the signatures were forgeries. So he just quit signing. Still letters arrived in Lebanon saying, “I know Mr. Armstrong doesn’t sign anymore, but would you ask him to make an exception for me?” After 1993, form letters under Vivian’s signature went out in answer to 99 percent of the requests. In the few instances that Armstrong accepted the invitation, he composed and signed a personal letter. If he chose to answer someone’s technical question, according to White, he would “write out his answer, I’d type it up and then put underneath it, ‘Mr. Armstrong asked me to give you the following information,’ and I signed it. We never answered personal questions. They were just too much an invasion of privacy.” In Vivian’s filing system, they would go into “File 11,” the wastebasket.
It has been difficult to find biographical information about Armstrong’s administrative aides, with the exception of Geneva B. Barnes and Vivian White. Thanks to a lengthy oral history interview conducted with Geneva Barnes on March 26, 1999, by historian Dr. Glen Swanson at NASA Headquarters as part of the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, we know a great deal about her. We also know quite a bit about Vivian White as she was interviewed at length as part of the research for First Man. Profiles of both Geneva and Vivian follow.
PROFILE OF GENEVA B. BARNES
Geneva B. Barnes—known to her friends as Gennie—was born on June 29, 1933, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, so she was roughly three years younger than Neil.
During her senior year in high school in Tahlequah, Gennie was encouraged to enter into government service by her business administration teacher, who urged her to apply for a job with the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., knowing that a civilian recruiting officer would be visiting their school prior to Gennie’s graduation, looking for talented stenographers. Along with her two best friends, she took the civil service test and received an appointment with the Office of Naval Material in Washington. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a forty-one-year career of federal service.
Gennie worked at the Office of Naval Material for four years, then accepted a position at the Pentagon in the Office of the Judge Advocate General (JAG). From there she moved to a position assisting the director of the Washington Regional Office of the Post Office Department (now the U.S. Postal Service). She was still working at the Post Office Department on February 20, 1962, the day Mercury astronaut John Glenn made America’s first orbital flight in space. She left her office and stood in the rain watching Glenn in the company of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson riding in a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue celebrating the historic mission. Afterward, she went back into her office, telephoned the NASA personnel office, and asked if it was hiring secretaries. Invited to apply, Gennie filled out an application with NASA the next morning and was, in her words, “on the payroll by 10 o’clock.”
Her first job with NASA was as a secretary in the Office of Programs at NASA Headquarters. Then in 1963 she moved to the Office of Public Affairs, where she worked for the next eight years, handling many of the behind-the-scenes arrangements involved with NASA special events, including White House ceremonies and astronaut award ceremonies and appearances. During the Apollo missions, she assisted in protocol activities at Kennedy Space Center for four of the flights, including Apollo 11. One of the grandest and most personally rewarding events of her life was being part of the select group of support staff who accompanied the Apollo 11 astronauts and their wives on their Giant Step Presidential Goodwill Tour around the world from September 29 to November 5, 1969, visiting twenty-three countries in thirty-eight days. It was no vacation, however, as Gennie had worked hard with members of the State Department and President Nixon’s White House staff setting up every detail of the project, including preparation of briefing materials and schedules.
As revealed in Armstrong’s letters, Gennie served as Neil’s public affairs assistant during his stint as deputy associate administrator for aeronautics in NASA’s Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology. When Neil left NASA, she stayed on at OART until 1980, when she for a brief period worked as a management analyst for NASA’s Office of Management Operations. But Gennie loved the astronauts and soon returned to a post as coordinator of astronaut appearances for the Office of Public Affairs. When she retired from NASA in 1994, she was handling the astronauts’ appearances when they traveled internationally. After her retirement, Gennie spent many hours doing volunteer work at the White House in the e-mail section of the Presidential Mail Office.
In retirement Gennie lived in Capitol Heights, Maryland, just outside of the District of Columbia, due east of the nation’s capitol.
PROFILE OF VIVIAN WHITE
Vivian White was born in 1921 to parents Archie and Lucille (Currey) Tartt in Kings Mills, Ohio, twenty-five miles northeast of Cincinnati. After graduating from Kings Mills High School in 1939, she began a secretarial position with Lou Romohr, a realtor in nearby Lebanon, Ohio, who later became the town’s mayor. Vivian worked for Rohmer for twenty-eight years, during which time she earned her own real estate license, the first women in the history of Warren County, Ohio, to do so. In 1980, Lebanon’s chamber of commerce honored her as Woman of the Year.
That same year Vivian went to work for Neil Armstrong, an assignment she handled with skill and dedication for the next twenty-three years, until 2003, from an office Neil rented in downtown Lebanon.
Vivian had two daughters, Lois and Margie, three grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren, as well as several step-grandchildren and -great-grandchildren. She had one sibling, a brother named Archie Eugene Tartt. Besides working for Neil, Vivian enjoyed collecting antiques and playing bridge. She was active in the Town and Country Garden Club and Lebanon Council of Garden Club, organizations in which she held several leadership positions. She also was a long-time member of the Lebanon Business and Professional Women’s Club.
Vivian White died on November 27, 2017, at the age of ninety-six.