Episode 148: The Life and Times of Astronaut Jim Lovell

After more months that I thought it would take, I am back! While I was away, we lost another Space Race pioneer: Navy Captain James Lovell, best know as the commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. Many credited his coolness under pressure as the one of the main reasons he and his shipmates survived that ordeal. He was laid to rest next to his wife Marilyn, who preceded him in death, at the Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.

There were also come cool updates about the Harlem Hellfighters and seven Nisei members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team so 

Episode 130: Tales from Punchbowl, Part IV

 

We recently lost another pioneer of the Space Race, US Ambassador and Air Force Major General William Anders, who died on June 7, 2024 at age 90 when the small airplane we was piloting crashed into Puget Sound in Washington State. He was the only one on board. Funeral Arrangements are still being made.

As a crewmember of the Apollo 8 mission, Anders was one of the first three humans to orbit - and as such - see the far side of the moon. Right after the crew's 3rd of 10 orbits, he asked for a roll of color film and the above photo - eventually titled Earthrise - the first color photograph of Earth taken from space and one of the most iconic photos of all time. 

Technician Fourth Grade Isaac Akinaka was arguably the most respected medic in the 100th Infantry Battalion. Based on stories, if you were injured, you wanted Akinaka to be the one near by to help you. While other medics admitted when they were called pause for a brief moment to take a deep breath or close their eyes or do something else to mentally prepare to run headlong into a firefight, Akinaka seemed to always be prepared and never hesitated. Many thought it had to do with his devout faith as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Isaac Fukuo Akinaka died unexpectedly after complications from a surgery when he was 73 years old. He was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section 3, Grave 133-A. His wife Gwen was laid to rest by his side when she passed away in 2001 at age 83.

Episode 121 - Tales from Punchbowl, Part I

Charles Lacy Veach was the second astronaut from Hawaii. After a career as an Air Force fighter pilot he went to work for NASA as a consultant but eventually became an astronaut himself and flew on two shuttle missions.

Air Force Colonel Charles Lacy Veach died of cancer on October 3, 1995, he was 51 years old. His ashes were placed in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific Columbarium Court 3, Wall J, Niche 233.

Yashiyuki Harold Sakata began life working on various Hawaiian fruit plantations before taking up weightlifting. After World War II began, he joined an Army engineer battalion that stayed on Hawaii for most of the war which gave him the chance to continue to train. He even won a few local lifting competitions. After the war, he won a national event which qualified him for the 1948 London Olympics. In London, he won a silver medal.

After the Olympics, Sakata retired from weightlifting and took up professional wrestling. Over a little more than a decade, he performed with ten or twelve promotions and won three solo and nine tag team championship belts.

Then, in 1964, he hung up his wrestling trunks and began acting. His first role was as the iconic Bond Villain Oddjob in the James Bond file The Man with the Golden Gun. He continued acting for the next two decades in movies, television, and commercials. His last TV appearance was just a few months before his death on stage at the Academy Awards in his Oddjob persona while Sheena Easton performed the Oscar-nominated Bond title song For Your Eyes Only.

Army Technician Fifth Class Harold Sakata dies in 1982 at age 62. He is interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section III, Grave 317.

Leo Sharp, Sr. was a decorated World War II infantry soldier in the Italian campaign before returning home and eventually gaining fame in the botanical circles for his hybrid daylilies.

While he was well known in the daylily community (he claimed to have even been invited to plant some of his flowers at the White House by President George HW Bush), it apparently didn't pay well and he had a lot of financial issues.

Leo was talked into become a drug mule for the Sinaloa cartel, driving hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Arizona to Michigan and then returning thousands and thousands of dollars back along the same route. He was caught in 2011 and eventually convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released after one year due to poor heath and died in 2016. He was 92 years old.

I'm not sure how he ended up there as he didn't seem to have any prior connection to Hawaii, but Army Private First Class Leo Sharp, Sr. is interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section CT13A, Row 100, Grave 150. The 2018 Clint Eastwood film The Mule is based on Sharp.

The Godfather of modern American tattooing, Norman Collins, known as Sailor Jerry for most of his professional career. He joined the Navy in 1930, spent several years in East Asia and the Pacific, and learned tattooing from the masters in that region of the world. After he left the Navy, he settled in Honolulu and continued tattooing the service members on Oahu.

Sailor Jerry's tattoos quickly became world famous as US service members took his designs all over the world.

When World War II broke out, he wanted to get back into the Navy but had developed a heart condition and was not allowed to reenlist, but the Merchant Marines were more than happy to get another experienced navigator in their ranks and made him a lieutenant commander.

After the war, Sailor Jerry continued his tattooing. On June 9, 1973, he had heart attack while riding his motorcycle and died three days later. He was 62 years old. Navy Seaman First Class Norman "Sailor Jerry" Collins is interred at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Section T, Grave 124.

Episode 119: Ernie Pyle's War, Part VII

In June 1944, Ernie Pyle hit the beach in Normandy, France just one day after the D-Day invasion. He followed ally forces through six weeks of hard fighting over difficult terrain before breaking out of hedgerows and driving the Germans east. He was on hand for the liberation of Paris in late-August and then decided that he had seen enough of war. But that didn't last; by late-December he was in the Pacific covering that theater of the war

When he got back from this trip to Europe, his newspaper bosses commissioned a bust by renowned sculptor Jo Davidson which Pyle sat for while on a layover in New York City.

Today, the bust is at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

I was planning on finishing Pyle's story this week until I heard of the passing of golden-age-of-space-exploration astronaut Air Force Lieutenant General Tom Stafford and deviated from my plans a little to eulogize him as well. Final funeral arrangements are still pending so it is unknown if Stafford will be interred alongside other astronauts at Arlington National Cemetery at this time.

Episode 110: Space Age Sunsets

 

Navy Rear Admiral (Upper Half) Thomas Kenneth (Ken) Mattingly II, who helped the crew of Apollo 13 recover from the in-capsule explosion, fix their oxygen scrubber, and maintain the ship's power during reentry, passed away in Arlington, Virginia on October 31, 2023. He was 87 years old. His exploits were brought to the attention of a new generation when he was portrayed by Gary Sinise in the 1995 blockbuster Apollo 13.  Funeral arrangements are still underway, but I believe he will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery. 

A few days after Mattingly's passing, Air Force Colonel Frank Frederick Borman II, who was one of the first three people to see the far side of the moon when he commanded the Apollo 8 mission, passed away in Billings, Montana on November 7, 2023. He was 95 years old. At the time of his death, he was the oldest living former NASA astronaut.

When the band Led Zeppelin released its sophomore album, Led Zeppelin II, in 1969, Borman's face was cropped into the cover. He standing in the back row, second from the right, with the hat and no beard. The album was released just a few months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon and the artist thought that he was using an image of Neil Armstrong... oops!

Borman was known to sign Led Zeppelin II album covers. The example above says: "Not Neil Armstrong! Frank Borman Apollo 8 CDR [commander]."

When Led Zeppelin released its sixth studio album Physical Graffiti in 1975, another effort was made to put Neil Armstrong on the cover, and this one also failed. In the top left window there is photo of an astronaut on the moon, but the photo isn't of Neil Armstrong, it was taken by Neil Armstrong. The photo is of astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Keeping with the space theme, Led Zeppelin's 1999 album Early Days: The Best of Led Zeppelin, Volume One was a riff on the official photograph of the Apollo 14 crew.

Apollo 14 was made up of Alan Shepard, Stu Roosa, and Ed Mitchell

Episode 84: Godspeed John Glenn, Part II

 

At 77 years old, John Glenn is the oldest astronaut to fly on a NASA mission. Only pioneering aviator Wally Funk (82) and actor William Shatner (90), both tourists passengers on different Blue Origin flights, were older during their trips into space.

Shortly after the STS-95 mission, Glenn retired after 24 years in the Senate but continued to live a full life, traveling the world with his wife Annie.

In 2011, Glenn and Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were presented the Congressional Gold Medal...

...and in 2012 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He passed away in December 2016 and after laying in state at the Ohio Capital Building his remains were eventually brought to Arlington National Cemetery where he was buried on a rainy April 6, 2017.

Annie specifically asked for the funeral interment to be delayed until that day. It would have been John and Annie's 74th wedding anniversary.

Air Force Colonel John Herschel Glenn, Jr. is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 34, Grave 1543. He was 95 years old. Three years later, in May 2020, Anna Margaret Castor Glenn, John's beloved Annie, joined him. She was 100 years old.

Episode 83: Godspeed John Glenn

 

After John Glenn left NASA, he became fast friends with Robert F. Kennedy. This above image, taken the day before RFK was assassinated, shows RFK (front) with two of his boys and John Glenn riding a Matterhorn bobsled at Disneyland.

The Kennedys and the Glenns started vacationing together not long after Glenn left NASA. They spent a lot of time together at Hyannis Port, MA but at least once they traveled to Idaho to brave the rapids of the Salmon River.

It was partly because of Bobby's influence that Glenn first agreed to run for one of Ohio's two senate seats. His first campaign was a disaster and he had to withdraw after suffering an injury that wrecked his equilibrium. 

After his friend, RFK, was assassinated, Glenn felt it was his duty to get elected and try to honor his friend's legacy as best as he could.

Glenn was first elected to the Senate in 1976 (his wife Annie watches as he takes the oath of office for the first time) and would go on to serve four terms - the first four term Senator from the state of Ohio.

Before retiring from the Senate in 1998, the seventy-seven year old convinced NASA to let him return to space to run experiments on how space affects those over sixty-five. The press conference announcing his mission drew more attention than most anything he did as an elected official and featured a large picture of Glenn in his Project Mercury days.

Episode 82: The Space Shuttle, Part VIII

 

Sadly, the Space Shuttle Challenger was not the only orbiter lost during the shuttle era. Twelve years later, on February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas while reentering Earth's atmosphere after a 16-day mission in orbit.

During it launch, a large chunk of foam broke off and struck the orbiter's left wing. The strike damaged tiles on the wing designed to protect the shuttle and her crew from the extreme heat of reentry.

During reentry, some of the tiles damaged during launch failed, sending the shuttle into an unsurvivable spin. It broke up during reentry and all crewmembers were lost.

More than 85,000 pieces of Columbia were recovered on the ground (most in Texas) during a lengthily search period, including one of the shuttle's main engines seen above. 

The recovered debris was shipped to Florida, catalogued, and laid out to support the investigation. The recovered pieces constituted about 38% of the shuttle.

In 2004, more than 400 people were on hand for the dedication of the Columbia Memorial in Section 46  at Arlington National Cemetery, right next to the Challenger Memorial.

In 1996, Teacher in Space runner-up Barbara Morgan returned to NASA, this time as a full fledged astronaut and made it to space on the Endeavour as part of STS-118.

In 2018, astronauts Ricky Arnold (above) and Joe Acaba, both educators who followed in Christa McAuliffe's footsteps, first into middle and high school teaching and then into NASA, traveled to the International Space Station and performed the four experiments that Christa has spent so much time on Earth preparing for but never had the chance to give. You can see Christa's Lost Lessons, as they are called, on challenger.org.

Earlier this year, Joe Acaba (who also happens to have been the first Puerto Rican in space, became Chief of the Astronaut Office.

NASA's shuttle era came to an end on July 21, 2011, when Atlantis landed, finishing STS-135.