Navy vets recall their roles in race to space

By

News

May 26, 2017 - 12:00 AM

Bill Goode and Al Richardson have more in common than they ever realized.
Both served in the Navy during World War II, Goode in the Aleutian Islands in the South Pacific; Richardson stateside, as part of a rocketry testing program in Maryland.
Both remain skilled musicians: Richardson made a name for himself on the steel guitar in the 1930s; Goode continues to play the organ regularly for his fellow residents at Heartland Meadows in Iola.
But it wasn’t until the two became neighbors last summer — they live just down the hall from each other — that Goode and Richardson learned of the other’s extensive career as engineers, particularly within the early years of the U.S. space exploration programs.
“Isn’t that amazing,” gushed Leslie Weir, administrator of Heartland Meadows. “I never figured I’d meet an actual rocket scientist, and here we have two of them.”
Goode and Richardson sat down with a Register reporter recently to discuss their extensive, colorful careers.
 
GOODE, 92,  grew up in Texas, joined the Navy during World War II, and spent much of the war aboard a miniaturized version of an aircraft carrier, a jump carrier.
There were two primary concerns while on board — evading Japanese torpedoes, and ocean waves.
“The waves would wash the planes off the deck if we weren’t careful,” he explained. “We had to tie them down. We still lost a bunch of planes.”
After the war ended, Goode enrolled in college to be an engineer. He was hired shortly thereafter by Boeing and helped with developing such aircraft as the B-52 Stratofortress.
In the meantime, the United States and Russia were embarking on a space race. Boeing was hired as a subcontractor under NASA to help develop components for various rocket designs.
Goode was brought on board as the Apollo space missions were under development.
He moved from Wichita to southern Louisiana to the famed Michoud Assembly Plant in New Orleans, as part of the rocket booster design team.
The rockets would be assembled, tested, and if successful, loaded on barges for the long trek to Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“I liked everything about it,” Goode explained. “We did static firing of every rocket, and everything was kept in top shape.”
Perhaps most pleasing, Goode said, was that the Apollo missions went off almost on schedule. President Kennedy had declared the U.S. would reach the moon by the end of the 60s. Neil Armstrong did just that in July 1969.
Amid the triumphs was the tragedy. Goode was in the control room when a testing accident prior to Apollo 1 sparked a fire, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee in February 1967.

  The accident threatened to derail the entire Apollo program before the program resumed 20 months later, with a litany of new safety protocols.
“It was horrible,” Goode said of the accident. “We all knew them (the astronauts). Once the oxygen ignited, it was like dynamite.”
Undeterred, the program resumed in late 1968, with a successive series of launches, culminating in Armstrong’s iconic moon walk on July 21.
Goode watched the landing from his living room.
“I met Neil Armstrong once,” Goode said, “but he was pretty busy. We all were.”
Goode’s duties spread beyond the space program. When Hurricane Camille ravaged the Gulf Coast (less than a month after Armstrong’s moonwalk) Michoud became a recovery site.
Goode also met other legends of the space program, including famed German scientist Warner von Braun, whose invention of the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany and the Saturn V were instrumental in space rocketry.
A framed display above Goode’s bed shows most of the patches from the Apollo spaceflights. The patches, Goode notes, are identical to the ones the astronauts wore. He also has a medal sent to him from the Smithsonian Institute, recognizing his contributions to the Apollo program.
“It was the best job I ever had,” Goode said proudly. “I enjoyed the whole thing.”
 
AFTER Armstrong walked on the moon, the Apollo missions continued into the 1970s before budget cuts accompanied NASA’s shift from rockets to the space shuttle program.
Goode left Boeing for another gig, this one just as historically significant.
Goode found himself working for the Atomic Energy Commission in the famed Rocky Flats Plant in the heart of the Rocky Mountains  a short drive north of Denver.
There, he developed triggers for neutron bombs.
Daughter Margo Williams noted her father rarely spoke about his top-secret duties, other than to note he had to keep his work environment impeccably clean.
“There couldn’t be a spec of dust anywhere,” Williams joked. “It kind of fit his OCD personality.”
Coincidentally, another of Goode’s daughters, Pamela Arnold, began working at the facility years later as part of a cleanup effort to rid Rocky Flats of the nuclear waste. The site ceased operations in 1989, and remains off limits to the public.
 
AFTER retirement, Goode moved to southeast Kansas to be closer to his family.
Williams, chief nursing officer at Anderson County Hospital in Garnett,  is the wife of Tom, Allen County commissioner and retired sheriff and KBI agent. 
 
AL RICHARDSON, 96, offers a friendly bit of advice to anyone he meets.
“My first name is Herbert,” he says with a smile. “But if you use my name Herbert, you are not my friend.”
He prefers “Al,” short for Alvin, “Just like Alvin and the Chipmunks,” he laughs.
 
RICHARDSON’S date with history came after he moved with his family to Los Angeles from his native Michigan.
Richardson was a maestro on a new instrument of his era, the Hawaiian steel guitar.
He was in search of a music career, and had received a job offer from a music instructor in Los Angeles.
“He wanted me to come out and teach students,”  Richardson recalled.
He did so, while performing professionally with Al’s Tropical Troubadours, touring across southern California. That group eventually became the Ambassadors of Rhythm when an accordion player joined the fray.
Little did he know it, but Richardson — whose parents joined him when he moved to California — would share a duplex with a graduate student from the California Institute of Technology. The student had been testing small, alcohol-fueled motors, which eventually drew the attention of the U.S. Army for potential rocket development.
Caltech quickly realized developing such motors would be unwise on campus, so it helped the students establish a new testing facility near Pasadena. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was born.
And its founder was Richardson’s neighbor.
“We got to talking, and I got to join them,” Richardson said. “Matter of fact, so did my dad.”
Richardson’s passion for rocket engineering soon eclipsed his love of teaching steel guitar.
Richardson became instrumental in the development of Jet-Assisted Take-Off units (JATO), essentially small rockets capable of providing quick bursts of thrust. The JATO units became pivotal for military aircraft taking off from short runways, such as aircraft carriers.
“Wouldn’t you know it, those rascals in the Navy wound up calling up us reserves before they did the Navy regulars,” Richardson asked.
But as luck would have it, Richardson was ordered to continue his rocket design work in Annapolis, Md. He even worked briefly with Dr. Robert H. Goddard, considered the father of modern rocketry.
“Call it the luck of the Irish,” Richardson said with a smile.
After the war, Richardson returned to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he focused on building both solid- and liquid-fueled boosters.
Like Goode half a continent away, Richardson soon found himself enveloped in the Space Race.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was working with military rockets, ready to launch space vehicles. Had it not been for a bit of bureaucratic interference — one of the developers objected that the lab was using military equipment for a vehicle that was not a weapon, delaying the program a few months — Richardson is confident the U.S. would have beaten the Russians into space.
“Instead, we had to stop and put it in storage,” Richardson said. “Then what happened? Sputnik.”
Within 90 days, the program was back up and running, and U.S. rockets were launched.
“We should have been first,” Richardson said. “We were ready.”
 
RICHARDSON remained with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory until 1973, when, like with Goode, NASA-related efforts began to wane.
“But there were still a lot of rocket things going on in southern California,” Richardson said.
He was among the founding members of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a professionally society in the field of space engineering.
The AIAA Society today has a membership of more than 30,000 members.
Richardson eventually retired, but remained active.
He continued to teach and play guitar, help write training manuals and became a member of Toastmaster International.
“I’m a historian, too,” he said proudly.
He remained in southern California until about six years ago, when a bout of pneumonia meant “things came to a halt for me real quick.”
Doctors told him he could no longer drive, so Richardson moved to Colony with his daughter, Dian Prasko.
There, he remained until last summer.
“She’d drive me each day back and forth to Windsor Place for therapy, and we saw this wonderful building being constructed,” Richardson said of the Heartland facility, at the intersection of Oregon Road and U.S, 169.
“My daughter didn’t need me around all the time, and I thought this was a good facility.”
 
RICHARDSON moved to Heartland when it opened in August. A few months ago, he adopted a companion, a small rescue dog from the Allen County Animal Rescue Facility.
“By the second day, she responded to ‘sit.’ And she loves tug-of-war,” Richardson said. “She’ll bring me a rope, and say ‘let’s go.’”
Richardson remains modest about his role in shaping American history.
“I just did my job,” he said. “I loved it all.”

 

Related