To the 7,000 folks back in Wapakoneta, their native son was a “space hero” whether the Gemini VIII spacecraft made its scheduled fifty-five orbits or only managed the seven that it flew. On Wednesday April 13, 1966, three weeks after his townsfolk had nervously sat around their TV sets and radios well past their regular bedtimes awaiting news of their boy’s splashdown in the Pacific, the little Ohio burg played host to 15,000 attendees of the “Blastoff!” a gala homecoming in Neil’s honor.
Armstrong was in no mood to celebrate, but, “Wapakoneta made the request, NASA put its seal of approval on it, and the event was on.” For his old friends and neighbors, the astronaut put on his best face. So did Janet: “I didn’t know these people,” but “it was a happy event for the town. It was just one of the things we had to do.”
Though it was a raw early-spring day, the smiling couple rode with their two boys in an open convertible from the small Lima, Ohio, airport to the Auglaize County Fairgrounds. Following a brief press conference, the parade then drove into Wapakoneta proper, through its flag-bedecked downtown business district to Blume High School, where Neil had graduated in 1947. In the high school gymnasium, to a luncheon crowd of 1,500 lucky invitees and ticket holders, Neil thrilled everyone by saying, “You are my people, and I am proud of you.” Among the gifts he received during the ceremonies was a small statue of a lion, a leather attaché case, a silver tray, and life memberships in the Elks Lodge and local senior citizens club. A local columnist wrote that Neil accepted the gifts with “boyish modesty and blushes,” reciprocating with small, framed American flags (as well as an Ohio flag) that had circled the globe with him aboard Gemini VIII. The prodigal son termed the homecoming “magnificent” and repeatedly told the crowds that the reception was “more than I deserve.” Asked whether he was afraid for his life during Gemini VIII, he admitted that the stuck thruster had scared him, “but no more than on some previous occasions when I was pilot of an X-15 test flight.”
Janet relates, “He was surprised at how much attention and admiration there was, and the number of people that were out there. I was, too. He probably wished that it could have gone away. He had to make the best of it.”
Neil’s parents beamed with pride from ear to ear. For Steve, a thirty-seven-year veteran employee of the State of Ohio, it was a tremendous honor to show off his family to government officials, including his boss in the Department of Mental Hygiene and Correction, Martin Janis, and Governor James Rhodes, like Steve a lifelong Republican. During his speech at the high school, the governor announced that the state would be joining Auglaize County in building a $200,000 airport to be named for Neil.
But Steve’s elation could not match the radiant glow of Viola Armstrong. “Those dear people,” Viola later wrote, “they did everything they could possibly think of to make it a lovely day. They were so good. Neil thanked everybody for everything that they had done. They [NASA] had a nice little movie for him to show, which is always a saving grace for the boys, so they can tell a little bit about their flight—you know, in color.”
For Viola, the happy outcome of her son’s Gemini VIII flight was, as always, a vindication of her Christian faith. Not that her own experience of the emergency had not terrified her. After watching the launch in person at the Cape, she and Steve had returned in the company of Janet’s mother and that of Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Child, some friends of Neil’s from Tacoma, Washington, to watch the television coverage in their Cocoa Beach motel room. When the networks reported that the docking had been made successfully, the group relaxed and went to dinner in the motel restaurant. While they were eating, the motel manager came and tapped Steve on the shoulder. Taking him to the side, he whispered to Neil’s father that trouble had developed with the flight. The boys were all right, but it looked like their mission would need to be aborted. The manager advised the Armstrong party to leave quietly by way of the back door so as to escape the gaggle of reporters already positioned out front. According to Viola, “We did this immediately, only to find two or three newsmen at our door. They were poking their microphones in our faces and asking, ‘What do you have to say, Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong?’ ” By then, the NASA protocol officer who had been assigned to them for the day had come to the rescue. He told them to say only, “Indeed, we know nothing yet, thank you.”
Back home in her church in Wapakoneta that evening, a Lenten service was under way when a gentleman who had been listening to a radio out in the parking lot rushed down the aisle to tell the pastor about Neil’s trouble. After asking the congregation “to pray unceasingly,” the pastor then put through a call to the Florida motel where the Armstrongs were known to be staying. After much persuasion with the long-distance operator, he talked with Steve and Viola and led them individually in prayer. According to Viola, “It was a very touching situation. Fortunately for me, I had had myself very close to God as long as I can remember and in these hours of real trouble, He was very near to me. It made it much easier, for I was not talking to a stranger . . . Our prayers were answered, and about one-thirty the next morning our boys were safely recovered.”
If not for NASA’s unwritten rule that wives best not be at the Cape for launches, Janet Armstrong could have been in Florida that awful night. Instead, she and her sister Carolyn Trude were at home in El Lago, caring for Janet’s young boys while playing host to a handful of houseguests.
In its bureaucratic paternalism, NASA equated keeping the wives away from the launch with “protecting” them. God forbid, if a disaster occurred at the launchpad, no one at NASA wanted a wife to experience personal tragedy in the VIP stands in view of a television audience of millions.
For the astronauts themselves, the rationale for keeping the wives at home was different. Bluntly put, Deke Slayton did not want the wives at the Cape. In the nervous days leading up to launch, a wife’s presence could only divert her husband’s attention. No astronaut wanted to risk Deke’s ire and the chance of it carrying over into future crew assignments. “Florida was an off-limits playground,” astronaut Gene Cernan has explained. “If you wanted to bring your wife and kids to Florida, you had to get advance approval from Deke and let the other astronauts know. There were plenty of pretty women imagining love with a space hero,” Cernan has candidly admitted, “and some of them would give anything to sleep with an astronaut, a temptation that some astronauts found too great to ignore.”
Some wives suspected their husbands were having extramarital affairs; a few wives might have known it with certainty. Members of the press who covered the NASA beat knew about a few of the indiscretions, but such things just were not reported in 1960s America. Still, circumstances must have been difficult for Life magazine’s Dodie Hamblin. “I think Life treated the men and their families with kid gloves,” Hamblin later observed. “So did most of the press. These guys were heroes. . . . I knew, of course, about some very shaky marriages, some womanizing, some drinking, and never reported it. The guys wouldn’t have let me, and neither would NASA,” not to mention the editors of her own magazine.
Infidelity was not something that Janet spent much time or energy worrying about. Staying at home alone was also nothing new to her. “When the men are preparing for a flight,” Janet explained in an interview with Hamblin in March 1969, “they are really home hardly at all. They come on weekends and even then they have work to do. We’re lucky if they have a chance to come in and sit down and say hello before they go off again a day later. Having them for eight hours is a privilege during times like this.”
As for the dangers in Neil’s line of work: “Certainly I realize that there are risks involved in his profession. I suppose we spend years trying to prepare ourselves for a possible tragedy, because the presence of danger is there. But I have a tremendous amount of confidence in the space program. I know that Neil has confidence, and so have I.”
Yet the pressures of Neil’s first space shot in March 1966 had been different, more extreme. For Gemini VIII, television cameras had not been allowed inside her home, but they were strategically positioned to start filming whenever she went outside. Right in her living room sat a ubiquitous Life magazine photographer. Janet realized that she was constantly on display, as were all of the wives of astronauts during a space mission.
“When Neil and Dave got in trouble,” Janet recalled in 1969, “the first thing I thought was, ‘I want to go see Lurton.’ I didn’t call. I didn’t say anything to the children except that I would be back later. When I got over there and things settled down, I wanted to come home, but I didn’t want to have to face all the press, so I waited a little longer until everything was really in satisfactory shape as far as the men were concerned. When we knew that they were down and that they were safe, then I felt that I could at least go by the reporters. It was dark and there were so many floodlights on. I was so petrified that I just walked right on through them.”
But in 1969 Janet purposefully left out the most troubling part of her sojourn that evening. Initially she had set out, not for the Scott home, but for Mission Control. As soon as the trouble with Gemini VIII was known, NASA had turned off the squawk boxes the agency supplied to astronaut families, leaving her and Lurton Scott in the dark as to what was happening. The NASA public affairs officer assigned to the Armstrong home drove an insistent Janet to the Manned Spacecraft Center. There she was stopped at the front door of the control center. “I was denied entrance, and I was furious,” Janet recalls. Only then did she drive to the Scotts’.
“Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Janet later told Deke Slayton, on the eve of Apollo 11. “If there is a problem, I want to be in Mission Control, and if you don’t let me in, I will blast this to the world!” As for turning off the squawk boxes, Janet understood: “NASA did not know who was in our homes listening to the squawk boxes. There might have been information that would be leaked to the public that NASA did not want leaked in a critical situation, which is why they had a policy for terminating communications in our homes during a crisis. This was totally understandable for security reasons.” What was not understandable was why an astronaut’s wife would not be allowed into a secure place to follow what was going on inside Mission Control. “Okay, the men there would have felt bad if something awful happened to our husbands and it might have been difficult for them to see us there, but my comment to Deke was, ‘Well, what about the wives?’”
Life’s version of Janet’s experience that night was even more fictional than Janet’s sanitized tale. In its initial story about the Gemini VIII flight, Life ran a dramatic picture of Janet down on her knees, “listening but not watching” as she leaned over a living room TV set. According to the caption, the picture was taken just as “the word came that the astronauts had been picked up and were back in good shape.” The caption quoted Janet accurately as saying, “I simply knew they were going to make it. But also I am a fatalist.” The truth ended there.
“The picture published in Life magazine with me kneeling at the TV was because the squawk box was there.” (The shot was taken in her home before the squawk box was turned off, not at the Scotts’, where she was when the word came that the astronauts were okay.) “I was on my knees there with my eyes closed trying to concentrate on what was being said, but it came out that I was in a praying position and blah, blah, blah. Well, that’s not true.”
• • •
Given the tragic deaths of Elliot See and Charlie Bassett just days before Gemini VIII, NASA should have been prepared to show far greater consideration for the astronauts’ wives. See and Armstrong, the two civilians chosen by NASA for the New Nine back in 1962, had become quite close working together as the backup crew for Gemini V. In that role, they had spent a lot of time together, as had Janet with Elliot’s wife Marilyn. Not since Chet Cheshire back in Korea had Neil grown so close personally to another man. “Elliot was a hard worker, diligent. He really worked hard on Gemini V. He had good ideas and would express them. He may not have had the same personality as most of the astronauts, but being of a little bit different personality is not necessarily bad. I heard from others that they thought his piloting—particularly his instrument skills—were not as good as they should have been. I flew with him a good bit, and I don’t recall anything that was of substantial concern to me.”
The deaths of Elliot and fellow Gemini XI crew member Charlie Bassett had occurred as they were coming in for a landing at St. Louis’s Lambert Field in a T-38 airplane. The two men had flown up from Houston, accompanied by Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan, their backup crew, in another T-38, in order for the four of them to get in some practice time on McDonnell’s rendezvous simulator. Approaching the field in bad weather and low cloud cover, both planes overshot the runway. Stafford climbed straight out of the fog, circled, and landed safely. Hoping to keep the field in sight, See banked to the left to stay below the clouds. His T-38 slipped too low. The aircraft smashed into Building 101, the same building in which McDonnell technicians were working on the Gemini IX spacecraft. Elliot and Charlie died instantly; no one else was killed.
For certain astronauts, the circumstances of Elliot’s death only confirmed their dubious opinion of his astronaut status. Neil never saw it that way: “It’s difficult to try and blame him for his own death, and I certainly wouldn’t do that. When you’re doing a low go-around underneath low clouds it’s hard to be sure . . . It’s easy to say, well, what he should have done was gone back up through the clouds and made another approach. There might have been other considerations that we’re not even aware of. I would not begin to say that his death proves the first thing about his qualifications as an astronaut.”
Armstrong also knew Bassett, and Janet knew his wife Jeannie, but not nearly as well as they knew the Sees. “Charlie was a very affable fellow,” Neil relates. “He had a good reputation and was in my branch in the Astronaut Office. I had worked with him some. It’s always hard to lose friends, but it was a common occurrence in the world I lived in.”
On March 2, 1966, two weeks to the day before the launch of Gemini VIII, Neil and Janet joined a large group of mourners, most of them NASA employees, at two separate memorial services held for their deceased comrades. Elliot’s funeral took place at Seabrook Methodist Church at ten in the morning, Charlie’s at Webster Presbyterian Church at one-thirty in the afternoon. The following day, with every one of the astronauts present, the two astronauts were buried in Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington, DC. NASA’s attention to the emotional state of their astronaut corps seemed virtually nonexistent. “I don’t have any knowledge of them having such concerns,” Armstrong recalls of the days between the death of his close friend and his own command of the most complicated space mission ever tried.
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 3:45 A.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 stark 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 dry-wall. 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 listen 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.”
Janet wanted both of her sons to have an appreciation of what their father was doing and of the remarkable events going on around them but worried, “I think I try a little extra hard to make sure they understand what is happening, and in so doing I have probably antagonized the whole situation. Instead of just letting them be!”
Both Janet and Neil worked hard to keep their boys grounded: “You don’t want your children to go around with their thumbs under their armpits and saying, ‘I’m an astronaut’s son.’ For this reason we try to make everything we do very common and everyday. We feel that is very important for them not to be favored by their classmates. We want them to grow up and have a regular life—a normal life. Kids are kids, and you want them to be kids, and yet this program has demanded an awful lot of our children. When you put your children in public, they really have to be very sophisticated children.”
As she anticipated in the early months of 1969 what all the family would be going through for Apollo 11, she recorded for Dodie Hamblin her extended reflections of the Armstrong family’s frenetic pace of life:
Something that occurred to me the other day when I was driving the car made me think of the compelling force that I have spoken to you about. . . . I was in a hurry and found myself pushing the speed limit as I was going down the freeway. I found that when I came to a red light, another car, which I had passed long ago, ended up at the same red light that I did. Here we were, two people—one person in a tremendous hurry, the other person not pushing the speed limit—and here we were together. . . . I couldn’t help feel that this is just a small example of how we feel before a flight, or at least the way I feel before a flight.
Janet’s mantra became, “Living in the present is most important. We take our lives day by day. As for planning and organizing for the future, it is very difficult in our lives—in my life, at least—because I find I have a husband whose schedule is changing day by day, sometimes minute by minute, and I never know whether he’s coming or going, particularly during flight time when he’s on a crew. It’s very difficult for the wife to try and keep up.
“I think it’s of prime importance that you are able to understand yourself,” Janet concluded, underscoring her ongoing quest during the second half of the 1960s to carve out and maintain her own identity:
Trying to maintain one’s own identity as a wife, I feel, is very healthy for family situations. I think the wife needs a challenge—at least I, as a wife, need to be challenged. If I’m not challenged, I’m not accomplishing anything, and I’d like to feel that ninety percent of the time I am accomplishing something, whether it be with the children or with my own interests. I feel that I am a better person for it. . . . I feel I can be a better person to my children, to my husband, and to my community.
The pressure on all the astronauts’ wives was extraordinary. Each bore a heavy burden, trying as they did to appear before the public as Mrs. Astronaut and the All-American Mother. They knew what NASA and even the White House expected of them. For an astronaut’s wife, deciding what to wear was about much more than just a woman’s sense of style or even her vanity. It was about maintaining the wholesome and sanctified image of the entire U.S. space program, and of America itself.
Some of the women delighted in the role. They enjoyed primping for the reporters. They loved attending all the parties and charity balls, the ones validated by the presence of the astronauts and only incidentally by their wives. Others, like Janet Armstrong, disliked social trappings to the point of avoidance.
Privately, Janet and many of the other wives also disliked the patronizing attitude of NASA leadership. For example, Deputy Administrator Dr. George Mueller occasionally came down to Houston for special meetings to which all the astronauts’ wives were “invited.” “It would be like a coffee,” relates Janet. “We would meet over in the NASA auditorium. We would get all dressed up and we would have to put our gloves on to get, what I felt was, lectured: ‘Keep a stiff upper lip, girls.’ How else were you going to ‘win’ this unless you are ‘proud, thrilled, and happy’? By the time we got to the Apollo program that’s how it was. Well, it wasn’t a joke, but what were we going to say? ‘We were proud, we were thrilled, and we were happy.’ Another successful flight had happened on the way to a goal.
“Our lives were dedicated to a cause, to try to reach the goal of putting a man on the Moon by the end of 1969. It was an all-out effort on everyone’s agenda. It wasn’t just our astronaut families that had put our lives on hold; thousand of families were in the same mode.”
As for the notion of speaking more honestly to the press about her being barred from Mission Control during the Gemini VIII crisis or about anything else that troubled her about NASA and the space program back in the 1960s, Janet never felt inclined to do it. “That was none of their business,” she expresses today. “What advantage would there have been in that? The press would have not understood and would have blown things all out of proportion.”
NASA might have been wise to have established early on a formal counseling program for its astronauts’ families. Given that thirteen of the twenty-one marriages involving astronauts who were married when they went to the Moon later ended in divorce or separation, it seems obvious that a number of couples could have benefited.
Sadly, some husbands did not recognize their own wife’s anxiety or general unhappiness with her personal situation—or they chose not to recognize it. In his extremely candid autobiography, Gene Cernan, the veteran of three spaceflights (Gemini IX, Apollo 10, and Apollo 17), regretfully admitted that many years passed before he learned that his wife Barbara had been so frightened by staying home alone early on during their time in Houston that she stayed up half the night crying. According to Cernan, “There is no doubt that I was so overwhelmed and excited, caught up with being an astronaut, that when I came home for a weekend, all I wanted to talk about was our training and the program. It was, ‘My God, let me tell you what I did,’ rather than asking, ‘What did you do this week?’ Looking back now, I realize my family suffered because of my tunnel vision.”
Cernan blames himself for failing to pay closer attention to the needs of his wife, but notes that “while everything had been planned in detail for the new astronauts, NASA did not have a survival handbook for our wives. That was a dreadful oversight, and one for which our families paid a heavy price. I guess NASA thought that since we were mostly military families, we were used to the long separations and tightly structured environment of service life, and that wives historically learned to make do with the hardships. They were wrong.” Gene and Barbara’s marriage survived from their wedding in 1961 through the entirety of Cernan’s years in the space program, but in 1980, when their only child, daughter Tracy, turned seventeen, the couple separated. The following summer, they divorced.
Janet never actively participated in any wives’ clubs, not even when Neil was with the NACA in California. She had never been a military wife, as Neil was already a reserve officer by the time they had married, and he had resigned his commission shortly thereafter. Janet was more of a loner, as Neil was.
In the coming years, Janet’s struggle for identity would only intensify, because, after Apollo 11, she was no longer just any astronaut’s wife, she was forever more the wife of the first man on the Moon.
The wonder is not that Janet and Neil eventually divorced. It is that she survived as Mrs. Neil Armstrong as long as she did, until a divorce that she initiated ended in 1994 a marriage that had lasted thirty-eight years.