Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

It would have greatly simplified matters for the wives as well. For as much as they would have denied it, had anyone confronted them with the topic, many of the wives of the Original Seven reacted to the arrival of the Next Nine and their wives… precisely like service wives since time was. The classic and often-told story of service wives concerned the wives of a group of Navy pilots who had just been transferred to a new base. A commander designated to give the wives an orientation lecture says: "First, would you ladies please rearrange yourselves by rank, with the highest-ranking wives sitting in the first row and so on back to the rear." It takes about fifteen minutes for the women to sort themselves out and change their seats, since very few of them know one another. Once the process has been completed, the commander fixes a stern glare upon them and says: "Ladies, I want you to know that I have just witnessed the most ridiculous performance I have ever seen in my entire military career. Allow me to inform you that no matter who your husbands are, you have no rank whatsoever. You are all equals, and you should kindly remember to conduct yourselves as such in all dealings with one another." That was not the end of the story, however. The wives stared back at their instructor with looks of utter bemusement and, as if with a single mind, said to themselves: "Who is this idiot and what planet has he been stationed on?" For the inexpressible provisions of the Military Wife's Compact were well known to all. A military officer's wife rose in rank with her husband and immediately took on all the honors and perquisites pertaining thereto, and only a fool or the sort of simple-minded jerk who was assigned to give orientation lectures to wives could fail to comprehend this.

Further, said the code, the wise wife of a junior officer was careful not to make her family's style of living so ostentatious that it outdazzled that of higher-ranking families. It was on just this point that the Next Nine began to rankle some of the wives of the Original Seven and, for that matter, some of the seven astronauts, as well. They were irritated to notice what terrific houses many of the Next Nine immediately bought. Just like that—in Timber Cove even!—they began gobbling up the goodies ! For the Original Seven the ascension from the drab life of the junior officer had seemed like a glorious pioneer straggle and part of the prize for winning the contest, for being chosen as the Original Seven. They found something distasteful about the attitude of the new crowd—this notion that as soon as a man was designated an astronaut, he and his family were entitled to stride out upon the golden boulevards of the Celestial City as if they owned the place.

The Group II astronauts immediately produced an agent, their version of Leo DeOrsey, and sat down to negotiate and cut up the Life pie. He was Harry Batten, president of the N. W. Ayer advertising agency in Philadelphia. He was as much of a big leaguer as DeOrsey, and like DeOrsey he agreed to serve as agent without pay. It was a bit too much! People were already treating the Next Nine like the Original Seven! The developers in Timber Cove and Nassau Bay, the second-best development, offered them big houses for small down payments and huge mortgages at low interest—a mortgage of forty to fifty thousand dollars seemed enormous in 1962—and the Next Nine took it all on without even blinking. They were not behaving like junior officers in the presence of the Single-Combat Generals. For, as everyone understood, tacitly, this was no mere civilian agency; this was a new branch of the service.

It was in that spirit that the "A.W.C." was started. Without anyone coming out and saying so, it was understood that Marge Slayton was the C.O.'s wife in this outfit. By now Deke had taken on his job as Coordinator of Astronaut Activities with such determination that he was about to be put in charge of crew selection—meaning that he would be the one man who had the most to say about who flew, and in what order, particularly when it came to the Next Nine. He was about to be made Assistant Director of Flight Crew Operations. He became the equivalent of a commanding officer, making Marge the C.O.'s wife. Marge organized a couple of coffee hours for all the wives, the First Seven and the Next Nine, so they could all get to know each other. By the second time they met, they all realized, without a word—nobody had to say it—what this was. This was… the Officers Wives Club, such as existed at every base in the land. One of the newcomers who seemed absolutely tickled to death about the coffee hours was Sue Borman, the wife of one of the Next Nine, Frank Borman. Borman had been one of the first instructors at the Air Force's new Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards. He was a short, compact West Point man from Arizona, and his wife, Sue, was the perfect super-efficient officer's wife. She had a fireproof cheeriness about her and a determination to get things organized. They were a great team. "This is fun," she said, speaking of Marge's coffee hours for the wives. "Let's start doing this on an organized basis." So the A.W.C. began. The initials stood for Astronauts Wives Club, of course, but the full name was never used. It was a gaffe for an astronaut or an astronaut's wife to use the word astronaut . Marge herself was always talking about "the fellows." Besides, the full name would make the military analogy too pointed.

The A.W.C. was no great delight to most of the wives of the Original Seven, however. Some of the newcomers, such as Sue Borman, were too gung-ho about it all. That was what they would tell themselves. In fact, the newcomers acted too equal about it all. There was no protocol for showing the deference due Single-Combat Generals' wives. The wives of the Original Seven began attending the monthly A.W.C. hours less and less. Betty Grissom almost never showed up; but then Betty had hated teatime functions from the very beginning. If one was going to feel ill at ease in the cheery chitchat game and not be treated as the Honorable Mrs. Single-Combat General… why bother?

For both the wives and the men there was at first an Oaken Bucket nostalgia for the early days, the Langley era, the pioneer period, the period of youth and idealism and spartan courage and yahoo cowboy disregard for the bureaucratic proprieties. You would even see engineers and support personnel who had moved from Langley and the Cape here to Houston getting misty about those old days… three years ago… The new facility, the Manned Spacecraft Center, was taking shape out in the middle of a thousand acres of absolutely flat gumbo pasture. The buildings were great squat beige cubes set at grandiose intervals from one another and connected by wide roads, veritable highways, lined with aluminum light poles. The place looked like one of those "industrial parks" that were always being touted in the real-estate sections of the Sunday newspapers.

Nevertheless, it was obvious that something of vast proportions was underway; and given a rosy enough picture of what lies down the road, a man could get over a case of homesickness soon enough. Perhaps Houston, the boom town of boom towns, was just the place for the expansion occurring in the space program. After a while you could begin to appreciate Houston's energy and its sense of the grand sweep, the risk-all plunge. And Timber Cove and Nassau Bay and the other new housing developments out by Clear Lake weren't half bad, it turned out. In fact, they were luxury itself compared to what you found around most air bases, and the locals, out here in this erstwhile farming country, were really good folks. Two-thirds of NASA was already geared up for Projects Gemini and Apollo and the great race to beat the Soviets to the moon. Just imagine what waited, here on earth, for the first man to walk on the moon… and the boys could imagine it. You had only to look at John Glenn. Glenn had not been the first man to fly in earth orbit or even the second, merely the first American. Yet he had ascended to a status so extraordinary it had no precedent. Some of the boys were convinced that Glenn had his eyes set on becoming President. (Nor was the notion farfetched; after all, it was David who had succeeded to the throne of Saul.) Glenn now moved in a world full of the Kennedys, the Johnsons, senators, congressmen, foreign dignitaries, heads of corporations, VIPs of every description. Next to John Kennedy himself, John Glenn was probably the best-known and most admired American in the world. Oh, the boys were aware of all that! Just ask Al Shepard!—although of course no one did.