NASA Bernhard, Marvin - May 24, 1999
Interview with Marvin Bernhard
Interviewer: Mark Samuels
Date of Interview: May 24, 1999
Location: Bernhard home, Kerrville, Texas
This interview took place in the dining area of Mr. Bernhard’s home.
SAMUELS: …24 May 1999 at ten till 9:00AM. We’re in Kerrville, Texas and this is Marvin Bernhard. Mr. Bernhard let’s begin with your pre-NASA career. Right before you got to NASA you were in the U.S. Air Force…
BERNHARD: U.S. Air Force.
SAMUELS: Yes sir, and what was it that…you made the jump from USAF to NASA. What was it that brought you to NASA?
BERNHARD: Well, we were doing Apollo runs, sled runs [acceleration/deceleration tests] and research for NASA for the Apollo program…
SAMUELS: While you were in USAF?
BERNHARD: [Nods]…and the engineers that came, and the people who came, NASA representatives came, contract people, suggested that when I was in the process of possibly retiring, they said “Hey, we can use you at NASA.” So they talked me into coming to NASA from the Air Force when I retired.
SAMUELS: Do you remember what year that was?
BERNHARD: That was ’65…December of ‘65 and I went to work for NASA on the fifth of January ‘66.
SAMUELS: And, when you joined NASA, it was with the Medical Administrative Office or with the Space and Life Sciences Directorate, which was it?
BERNHARD: Well, the Life Sciences Directorate was there but I was in the Medical Operations Division and they were supportive of the astronaut’s and their dependent’s medical treatment and all their medical needs. And, of course, we did the flight physicals on the astronauts, kept the crew’s physiological training and whatever we needed to provide support, medical support for the crew. And, of course, we did a lot of R&D [Research and Development] too, but not in that particular branch. In the Medical Operations Branch we supported the crew. And then we moved over from Building 8 to Building 32 and got into the research area.
SAMUELS: And this is at JSC [Johnson Space Center], at the time it was Manned Space Center?
BERNHARD: At JSC, yeah, at Building 32, where we had a sixty by forty altitude chamber and a smaller chamber to check suits and this type of activity, but the big one held the space craft, a mock-up of the space craft. And we’d put crews in that mock-up and do testing, man testing. [Testing took place in the Space Environment Simulation Lab, SESL]
SAMUELS: And this is beginning when you got there ‘ 65?
BERNHARD: In ’65.
SAMUELS: … It was a mock-up of Apollo Command Module, with a LM [Lunar Module] as well?
BERNHARD: The LM? The LM was done in… yes, we did some work on the LM, but that was done at Ellington Air Force Base [Near JSC] and we’d go over there and support those flights. And, of course, there was a little comedy on the big chamber right before I got there in ‘64. The door on the thing was forty tons and when they first pumped it down to do the check out on it the doggone door blew out and they had to get another door and put on the chamber. [Laughter]
SAMUELS: That didn’t cost too much, did it?
BERNHARD: Forty tons, it had to come in by lowboy. But, yes we did a lot of runs in there. We did LTA8 [The first manned-capsule-test in SESL] and we did L2. [Telephone rings and wife is heard talking] Well, we did all of our research in the big chamber with the crew and of course, the craft, too. Checking out the utilities in the craft, and of course, all of the instrumentation and everything else. Your communications and everything had to be checked before they launched.
SAMUELS: Do you remember the first crew that you worked with when you got down there?
BERNHARD: The people?
SAMUELS: Yes.
BERNHARD: I don’t recall. Except Zeke. [Deke Slayton] Zeke wasn’t on flight status at the time. [Chimes] Borman. [Frank Borman]
SAMUELS: Yeah, you had mentioned Frank Borman earlier. [Mr. Bernhard remarked that Borman still owed him a cup of coffee.]
BERNHARD: Yea, there was Borman, and two guys, one little buddy of mine. They cracked up in St. Louis with an aircraft coming in, in the fog and everything, and cracked up. Both of them were killed. And his name was… I don’t recall. It was the Original Seven. And, Zeke didn’t get involved. Shepard [Alan], Borman, White [Ed],… just off hand. I don’t recall, but they were all the Original Seven. And then of course we got in –
SAMUELS: But, here again, it was Apollo. When you got down to Houston you were working on the Apollo program…
BERNHARD: Right. I didn’t get into Apollo…Gemini, because I didn’t get there. The only thing I did on Gemini we trained the chimps for the two previous flights at Holloman, [Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico] Ham and Enos…we trained those two chimps for those two first flights on Gemini and Agena.
SAMUELS: That was the solid impact study, tests, that you guys were doing out of Holloman in New Mexico?
BERNHARD: Right, but we trained the chimps, too. We had 147 chimps at Holloman that we trained chimps for those flights.
SAMUELS: Right, that consisted of…right, teaching them to work the toggle switches?
BERNHARD: Toggles, tic-tac-toe. And they…Big Mean did… 979? 979 continuous tic-tac-toe without an error.
SAMUELS: The chimp’s name was Big Mean?
BERNHARD: His name was Big Mean.
SAMUELS: Because he was big and mean, I guess?
BERNHARD: A nine-year-old chimp. He could hand press six hundred pounds. [Cuckoo clock] He could take a ten-tread truck tire and make a figure eight out of it. But we trained the two chimps there and then the Original Seven, and then the second group that came in. Charlie, what was Charlie’s last name? I don’t recall. But he died in a crash in St. Louis, he and…two of them. I’d have to dig back in my records to find those.
SAMUELS: Were they flying a T-38 and hit a building maybe?
BERNHARD: I don’t know whether they were in a T-38 or what they were in. [Water in the sink] We had crewed T-38’s…T-33’s, we had some T-33’s and we had--yeah, we had some 38’s, two 38’s later. But, yes most of it was crew and then, of course we had test subjects, too, that we put in on the research in the chambers. And then, I went over there for -- I must have been there for at least six or seven years, and of course we started Apollo flights and then I had logistics support for…in fact, I’d rewritten the NASA physical standards and had the doctors approve them because we used identical, almost identical Air Force and NASA medical regulations…were almost identical, the standards. So I re-wrote those and put them under NASA headings. And then I had logistics support with the services, the Army and the Navy, for recovery worldwide. And at Patrick [Patrick AFB near Cape Canaveral]…I had coordinated with Patrick, because they were giving us support. We had an Air Force support team there. Colonel Freeze…and Ned? Ned…Ned…my God, he’s my friend. He was killed by a motorcycle on Brooks Air Force Base, [in San Antonio]… some drunk. [Wife heard in the background] But that week we supported…I moved over to Building 8, still in the Medical Operations group--and Hawkins was the chief. And then, of course, we established a branch at the Cape, a medical branch at the Cape, with a doctor and crew, a medical crew and they supported the flights. Of course, during the flights I’d go down prior to the flights…
SAMUELS: Go down to the Cape?
BERNHARD: [Nods]… and check… we’d keep five shots. [Wife leaves, with goodbyes] We’re getting off the subject. We had approximately, oh, thirty, thirty-five physicians on these worldwide nets during a launch. They’d go out to Australia and to Africa and so forth, in case of a crash in those areas, in case the ship came down, the space craft, they would be there of course for medical support. No, I went three times…four trips to Hawaii in regards to recovery and the coordination with the Navy out there to do our support. Chief Daniels and…we would coordinate all the activity there. He was assigned in Hawaii. But all of our medical support from the services, the medical services, well I’d coordinate with those guys all the logistics. And I had the logistics in Mission Control. I had at least one secretary all the time there, sometimes two, to do anything that was necessary--answer the phone, keep up with the records and the logs and what have you.
SAMUELS: Do you remember the first time…did you go on one of the Gemini flights? I mean, was that one of your first times to go to Hawaii or go to one of those remote locations?
BERNHARD: Apollo was the first time.
SAMUELS: One of the first…Apollo 7? One of those…one of those first manned Apollo shots?
BERNHARD: One of those Apollo shots, yeah. Well, actually there was two Apollo, yeah, I went on two Apollo on recovery. And then I went on another time because we had some problems out there with medical support. They had put another man in charge and I had to go out and get old Daniels to put the pressure on him and get squared away.
SAMUELS: What kind of problems? Anything life threatening, or…?
BERNHARD: I think they…I don’t know whether they court-martialed him or what. But, you know, there’s a lot of those stories that are untold and I guess some of them, it’s best that they never be told. But there were some things that were of interest and humorous that occurred.
SAMUELS: Yeah, let’s talk about, say, a day-to-day, routine sort of thing.
BERNHARD: A routine day?
SAMUELS: Yeah, were you living in Clear Lake?
BERNHARD: I lived across the street at Nassau Bay, at Bal Harbor.
SAMUELS: Nassau Bay?
BERNHARD: Yeah, I could sit in my office and see my house across the road.
SAMUELS: O.k., I guess you got down there, to Houston, in ‘65?
BERNHARD: I took off from Houston…we lived in League City. We found an empty new house in League City and we bought that, from a friend, an engineer and NASA friend, Franklin Perkins. He used to come out and do monitoring on the sled runs. So he looked for me a house and found one in League City and we bought that and lived in League City seven years. And then moved over to Clear Lake City and lived there for five or six years. And then sold that house and moved over to Bal Harbor. Lived there thirteen years.
SAMUELS: Do you mind if I ask you what you paid for that house? Do you remember?
BERNHARD: In Bal Harbor?
SAMUELS: Either one, I’m just curious what it was like for a young man in ‘65 moving to Houston. I was born in Baytown, so…
BERNHARD: I used my flight pay that I’d saved to make the down payment on that house. And it was $37,000. And when I sold it, I sold it for $52,000. And when we bought that one in Clear Lake, we paid $78,000 for that and we sold it for $87,000. And when I bought that one at Bal Harbor that was $105,000. We stayed there eleven years and with improvements and all, we sold it, I think for $127,000.
SAMUELS: And in that time…
BERNHARD: That was a down time, too. If I’d have kept another six months, I’d have gotten $200,000 for it. It was a condo. There were two units built in each house…in each house there were two units. And we lived there thirteen years.
SAMUELS: It probably changed a little bit from the time you got down there to when the development starts?
BERNHARD: Yea, we paid $49 a month maintenance fees for outside yards, and two swimming pools, clubhouse and all the rest. Tennis courts. And when I left it was $165, eleven… thirteen years later. But it was a nice place. It was a real nice place. The neighbors were normally real fine people.
SAMUELS: I guess you were living with most of the people you worked with at the same time?
BERNHARD: No, there were not very many people that lived over there that worked out there. They were downtown CEOs for the insurance companies. The guy that lived next door to me bought a…
SAMUELS: Now, this is ‘65, when you got there? Or was this later?
BERNHARD: No, this was in the 70s, when we moved to Bal Harbor. But when I first got there in ‘65, there were people living in League City definitely that worked for NASA. And one…three…four, there were four that lived down by Frank. And the other people lived up by me, none of them worked for NASA. They worked for chemical companies down in, where they had the big explosion? Between Galveston and Houston?
SAMUELS: Texas City?
BERNHARD: Texas City. They worked down there in chemical, and Joe Kilgore run the lumber yard in League City, and well, just those people. The local people.
SAMUELS: Did you put in…you know, we read about working at NASA in those years, “can till can’t.” You know, going in before the sun comes up and coming home after it’s dark? Six, seven days a week, that kind of thing?
BERNHARD: There’s weeks I got in seventy – eighty hours. When I quit I had six hundred or seven hundred hours of comp time that I never got paid for. You couldn’t get paid for it.
SAMUELS: That was typical? Everybody did that?
BERNHARD: Well, during missions we worked around the clock. We’d get off…I might go home for four or five hours…
SAMUELS: Take a shower and change clothes?
BERNHARD: Yea. Come back and chew somebody out, sleep. [Laughing]
SAMUELS: And, everybody though, loved what they were doing and accepted it?
BERNHARD: Everybody that I know of, and Kraft, Chris Kraft and Gilruth [Bob Gilruth] and they both had guts enough to sign documents and make decisions to where there was no foolery about it, no politics, no messing around. No calling the President, “hey, what do I need to do?” Or calling NASA headquarters, von Braun [Dr. Wernher von Braun] and say “hey, I gotta problem with Thomas.” They did the thing there. And those kind of people, you don’t find anymore. Goldin, [Current NASA Administrator Dan Goldin] this guy Goldin…[Pause]
SAMUELS: O.K., you were talking about Pete Conrad is back. One of the old guys who is back.
BERNHARD: He’s one of the original crew that came back and he is working with NASA now. I don’t know whether he’s deputy or what. I don’t know who George Abbey’s deputy is right now. But, I haven’t been down there in five or six years. So… I get the paper every month so I can keep up, keep track of some of them, but not all of them.
SAMUELS: Is that the official NASA, JSC…
BERNHARD: The Roundup, yeah, the Roundup. I’ll give you a copy before you leave.
SAMUELS: Appreciate it. Thank you.
BERNHARD: And there are some of the old heads there. Of course, we went with Chuck Berry when I first came to NASA. He was head of the Space and Life Sciences Directorate. And then, they got an engineer up there, instead of a doctor, to give instructions to engineers. Dick Johnson. And he got along o.k., but he wasn’t top of the line. Because doctors don’t like engineers to tell them things. But Dick did a good job as director. And then after Dick came Joe Kerwin and everything got back in line again. And I guess I went up there in ‘84, to headquarters, to Building 1, to Space and Life Sciences Directorate, and Joe was head, and Bill was his administrator, and I fell in then under contracts and personnel and this type of stuff, logistics and all of that. And I worked up there for the last five years I was with NASA, in headquarters. [Coughs] But, it was good duty. When I quit, they hired a woman and then a GS-15 to do my contract work. I’d been taking care of seven major contracts all those times, funding and the logistics and everything for them. And then they hire a guy, a GS-15 to replace me and I’m only a GS-13. And then they hired a gal; they put in their personnel. I guess she did alright, but Carolyn Huntoon was made director then, she had been upstairs at the director’s office and they fired her up there and sent her down to be head of Space and Life Sciences. She lasted about two years, I guess. Then they finally got rid of her. I don’t know who’s in charge of Space and Life Sciences now. They should have a doctor. If you’ve got medical personnel, whether they’re doctors or Ph.D. or what, if you’ve got medical personnel doing medical research, the chief should be a physician because they’re just a different breed. I was twenty years in the Air Force and about twenty-five at NASA and I worked for doctors all my life.
SAMUELS: Yeah, right, with the medical Flight Surgeon background at USAF, and you get down to JSC, and I guess you’re surrounded by engineers.
BERNHARD: That’s right. But, of course, it’s good we got along real nice, we had no problems at all. Well we had a good organization, we had a good clicking organization. We had guys that went out on rescue and we had guys that stayed out on recovery and some did and some didn’t. I smoked one cigar. I quit smoking in 1966 and on Apollo 13, I smoked a cigar after we had brought them back.
SAMUELS: After you got splash down?
BERNHARD: Right.
SAMUELS: Where were you for that splash down?
BERNHARD: Mission Control.
SAMUELS: You were in the room, watching the big screen?
BERNHARD: Yeah. Listening to all the mess…Capcom and…yeah, that was a rough time. I didn’t sleep for nineteen hours. Most of the guys stayed. We hung in there until we got them back.
SAMUELS: Did you stay in Mission Control most of the time, or were you in the back rooms or at your office?
BERNHARD: Oh, I was in Mission Control or back across the hall in medical support. I had a desk and stuff in the logistics in medical support room and then of course, I’d go into Mission Control and sit by the Doc on the console. But, yeah there was a lot of things that we did there. Echocardiogram, that was a space…originally a space thing where we could bring the tracings back to…outer space on the people and get your temp and your pulse and your heart rate and all of this back. All of those medical things were developed, Mark.
SAMUELS: Yeah, we talked about that earlier. We talked about developments that came from the space program…
BERNHARD: That’s right.
SAMUELS: … that have current applications.
BERNHARD: Yeah, CorningWare. CorningWare from the nose cone of the space craft. That was developed by research. These troops would go out and they’d do the research and develop this stuff. Then NASA would give those patents to some outside organization, corporation, and they would go ahead and patent it and make all the money on it. And there were many, many things in the medical field that we did that had been…and communications, communications and medical. Just looking at those two things alone and the advancement that was made, is worth the millions of dollars that we spent in developing them and didn’t get credit for. A lot of things we didn’t get credit for, but in the end, we got them and if the people don’t abuse them, we’ll have them a long time. They’ve also…DeBakke [Dr. Allan DeBakke] has now developed a--he and an engineer from NASA, they were working on this before I left NASA--a heart pump. They’ve got a miniature heart pump. And they implanted it in Europe, in Germany, a couple of three times, and it worked perfect. And DeBakke and this engineer from NASA are the ones that developed it. So, that is going to be something where you don’t have to have…[fingers snapping]
SAMUELS: Don’t have to worry about a pacemaker?
BERNHARD: A pacemaker, don’t have to mess with a pacemaker or worry about walking in someplace where they got…
SAMUELS: A microwave.
BERNHARD: …have a microwave or something. You can walk in and this thing will pick up, if the heart stops, it picks up. And it replaces…but it’s proven that it is 100% now. And they’ve done two or three transplants here in the states, down in Houston, so they’re real happy about it.
SAMUELS: Mr. Bernhard, you mentioned earlier, you talked about a lot of things got done and people didn’t get credit for it, but nevertheless, it still got done. Was that an attitude that you all enjoyed when you first got down to Houston? I mean, is that sort of idea of “ get the job done and don’t worry about the credit”…
BERNHARD: As far as credit goes, you can look through these awards and you can tell--
SAMUELS: We’ve got a pretty good-sized scrapbook here.
BERNHARD: --you can tell what kind of awards were given and for what subjects. So, yes, there was recognition, locally we got recognition. But what I mean by not getting credit for it, is I’m sure that a lot of this gym equipment that’s now in these Ultra-Fits and Sports Centers and all of this, that they were developed by NASA. We had a biofeedback and a gym lab, and a sports medicine lab, and the whole thing where they developed a lot of these crew-used equipment. So, if they went into space, we had…like for…when the space lab went up, Joe Kerwin spent, I think it was seventy-two days on that thing or whatever. But they had a treadmill and they had other exercise equipment that was used on there. In sleeping bags where they slept and instrumentation they were instrumented with when they slept, and sleep studies, and dreams, and, my God, what else did we do? Bone marrowization…it was tremendous. But for local recognition and individuals, there was awards given and so forth…so, as far as that goes, but for major things like medical and communication equipment that was developed, there was a lot of that that NASA didn’t get credit for. It was given to corporations.
SAMUELS: I’m looking at some of these awards here, Mr. Bernhard, and I noticed that they did give you awards for cost reductions, programs, and… [Chimes]
BERNHARD: Oh yes, speed-reading.
SAMUELS: And having suggestions that were taken up?
BERNHARD: Yes, one suggestion was that I took a dolly, a gurney. And…we used to put the oxygen, when you went out to get someone and they were needing oxygen, you had an oxygen bottle about, about so gross [Gestures two feet] that you laid on the gurney. I don’t know whether it was ever a patented thing or not…I mounted the bottle on the gurney and I had a rack welded in and we put the gurney on the bottom and then it was easier to get to and easier to turn on and all this, instead of laying it on the patient on top of the gurney.
SAMUELS: That would be almost common sense, you might think.
BERNHARD: In the Air Force, the ambulances, you always had to put the trunk in the cock-eyed thing, on your crash ambulance, to keep all your IVs and everything, [Cuckoo clock] medical equipment in it. So I got fed up and I went and I pulled the toolbox out of one, it was thirty-two inches by three feet, I think, by about eleven inches tall. I took it and went down to the workshop and had them make me up a drawer that would fit in there with catches on the back of it and when you got to the crash site you would pull the thing out with all your equipment there that you needed that you could get to without dragging a trunk out of the back of the ambulance to drag it around with. So I had two or three things that I got recommendations for.
SAMUELS: And it was a simple idea of you looking at a problem saying, “There’s a better way to do it” and somebody listening to you and saying, “Sounds good, let’s get it done.”
BERNHARD: Yes. I went…on the ambulance I went out to the garage and had them do it. I didn’t ask anybody. And when I got back, the old man looked at it and said, “Why didn’t I think of that?” I said, “Because you never use it, do you?” And he said “Yes I use it, but the trunk was real handy to get in and out.” I said yes, it was real handy to get in and out if you loaded the back end of the ambulance with about four corpses in bags and then you had to crawl over that to get your medications out. I said “Yeah, Doc.” [Laughter] But we had fun and I fired one guy. He followed me around over two bases trying to get me to change his efficiency report [ER]. He wouldn’t touch a body one day. We were unloading a big reserve aircraft that crashed. What was it? I don’t recall…It was a big one.
SAMUELS: Now this is, when you were in the Air Force?
BERNHARD: Air Force. And he wouldn’t touch the body. I said, “Come on, Neil. Help me, help me.” Just the two of us were there and the ambulance driver. No, he wouldn’t touch the body. He was a Sergeant, been in the Air Force ten or fifteen years. So I fired him and wouldn’t give him an ER, wouldn’t promote him. He cried and I told him to go get into another field like engineering or something. [Laughter]
SAMUELS: Let’s touch…tell us…those engineering guys—you got something there, Mr. Bernhard?
BERNHARD: I don’t know anything about engineers. Oh, I have a thing here. When the crew went into space, when Cernan [Gene Cernan] came back he was almost gray headed. A lot of them, their hair turned gray after they had been in space. So, we had a Ph.D. at Holloman, and I talked to people when I went back on this reunion. And he had taken mice and put them in this similar atmosphere chambers that these guys were in, in space. And the color of their hair all turned white. So, that was of interest. And we talked about the runs on the sleds at Holloman.
SAMUELS: Well, you mentioned that Gene Cernan lives here in the area. Did you discuss that with Gene Cernan…
BERNHARD: With Gene?
SAMUELS: … When he got back or did someone notice that?
BERNHARD: No, well I haven’t seen Gene since five years ago since [Unintelligible] told me he had done the study. But I have discussed it with some of the guys in Houston. And talked to Sam Poole about it. And they said, yeah, they had read the study. And then I had chimp flights at Holloman too, that I wanted to tell you about. We were flying chimps and old Big Mean. And what we had was, we had a test subject and a chimpanzee, and we had him instrumented and the test subject instrumented and the coordinator, the monitor, was sitting up facing the back of the aircraft. And we had a Ph.D. and he kept getting airsick. So I said, “Look, Phil. I’ve got an idea. We’re going to put a window…mirror on this panel. We’re going to turn you around and your going to face that mirror. And you can observe the test subject and the chimp, get all the data and let’s see what it does to you.” And he never got airsick again.
SAMUELS: Because he had something to focus on?
BERNHARD: No, because he had been flying backwards.
SAMUELS: Oh, I see.
BERNHARD: When Chevy made the station wagon and they put that backward facing seat in the back, you would get back there and the kids used to get airsick.
SAMUELS: I’m one of them. We used to have one of those.
BERNHARD: Turn them around and they were o.k. So, we used that, and, of course…I’ve got to say something else. [Pause] We had bear and pig runs. We would clobber those pigs on impact and then we would bleed them out and take them out to White Sands [White Sands Missile Range near Alamogordo] on the barbecue pits and have barbecue for supper. [Laughter]
SAMUELS: So, after you tested them on the sled and the solid impact studies?
BERNHARD: Yes, and if they were going to be destroyed we would go ahead and eat the pigs. And the fish. The dogs--we had barkless beagles, so they wouldn’t drive you crazy at night or in the daytime. And the chimps, of course, we hit them too. We also had a big tank where we floated air mattresses, instrumented a test subject and we would leave him there for seven days with instrumentation on. And this was buoyancy, lack of gravity. So that way we checked out a lot of the instrumentation. We were checking out…salt leads, saline leads from the Russians. They used saline leads instead of paste. And they said you got better contact through it. Well, you did, but boy, when I wore that thing for seven days, day and night, I had some of the derndest blisters that you’ve ever seen.
SAMUELS: Now, how do you get the information from the Russians? In other words, was that sort of through scientific community conversations?
BERNHARD: I don’t recall how we got those. Maybe because the Germans brought them over. You see, we had Germans, Strughold [Dr. Hubertus Strughold] was one of our German from Peenemunde [Nazi rocket research center], with von Braun.
SAMUELS: We’re talking about the mid-60s now? Or early 60s?
BERNHARD: Yes, we’re talking about the early 60s.
SAMUELS: When you’re doing these…
BERNHARD: We were checking out those saline leads. We also put shoes on chimps. We spent $25,000 on chimp shoes. And you couldn’t keep them on them. They would untie them and throw them. We had a Ph.D. that was trying to get imprints with a camera. As they would walk across the top we’d bring them up a ladder and walk them across this plexi-glass [Unintelligible] and down again. And then they would take them and see how they were performing. And the old chimp…crapped. [Laughter]
SAMUELS: Made a little bit of a mess, though, on that camera?
BERNHARD: That was humor. And I told you about the balloon flights? Balloon flights…where Kittinger [ Captain Joe Kittinger] went up about 77,000 feet…
SAMUELS: We mentioned White Sands and a lost balloon.
BERNHARD: And then we found the balloon about three hundred yards in Mexico and we went over and talked to the border patrol and talked to the Mexican mayor and he was about 4 feet 3 inches. And the Army pilot that I was in the helicopter with, we had unloaded, and he went over and landed and took the mayor in the air in the hello and took him and turned him around a few times. [Laughter] And when he walked off he was about six feet tall. So we had no problem retrieving the balloon. We took a big 18-wheeler in there and picked it up.
SAMUELS: And this was all early 60s, out of Holloman Air Force Base and White Sands, in the Alamogordo area?
BERNHARD: Yes. And, of course, we did…when the French were in Vietnam and having trouble in the mountains, and we got a respirator from Germany, an experimental thing, and went up to Sierra Blanca, New Mexico--it was at 11,000 feet--and we stayed up there six days and did some respiratory studies with the respirator and with three guys because the French were having difficulty with the altitude. The Vietnamese were born there and they were climatized, but the French couldn’t hold anything because they would go up and their soldiers would get incapacitated at altitude for lack of breathing. So we did some studies on that and proved that they would have to send them to altitude to climatize them before they had sent them in. It’s like if you go with a biological clock and you fly from New York to Paris, then you are drugged for about two days before your old biological clock catches up with you. And that’s what screwed up Roosevelt when he went down into the Asian…Adriatic Sea with the Russian and Churchill and de Gaulle because he was sort of half under the weather…wasn’t totally recovered. Okay, the balloon flights, Sierra Blanca studies, chimps…
SAMUELS: Let me ask you something, Mr. Bernhard. That’s an interesting area you touched on. We talking about the mid-60s, you’re a WWII vet, and when you were at NASA, did the Cold War, and that atmosphere have any serious impact with the way you guys went about a day-to-day routine?
BERNHARD: Well, the Russian medical, we were doing studies in coordination with those people. With their Sputnik and their flights, NASA was still coordinating information [Chimes] with them and they would come over here. We’d furnish the steaks and they’d furnish the vodka. We’d go over there, they’d furnish the vodka and maybe something else. You know, the fish eggs.
SAMUELS: Did you make any of those trips?
BERNHARD: No, I never went to Russia, but my son has.
SAMUELS: But you heard stories and knew people who did?
BERNHARD: He’s a chief scientist now and he had gone over a couple of times to Moscow and Space City.
SAMUELS: That’s one of your sons that’s still working with NASA?
BERNHARD: He’s a chief scientist now, he’s still down there. We coordinated efforts with those people. The medical, of course, did send over six docs that had two KGBs with them. There was only one, the head doctor, he would talk about anything he wanted to. But the rest of them were always a little bit resistant. They wouldn’t talk quite as much as the old chief did because they couldn’t get rid of him. He was the only one that knew a lot of the things. But we coordinated with the Russians. The Russian people are good people, it’s just that the leaders and their thinking of communism is all wet. Well, I don’t know, you’ve got a communistic president now, so…[Laughs]
SAMUELS: On a day-to day routine at the JSC, when you got there in ’65, up through ’66, ’67… up through Apollo, man on the moon…the overriding concern was not, then, East versus West, us versus the communists. That was not what drove you guys to work every day?
BERNHARD: No, no. Of course, it was competitive because they were doing flights and we were doing flights and some of the information was exchanged. But of course, they had secrets we didn’t know, either. It wasn’t that… As far as engineering and all goes, I don’t think they coordinated that. But as far as the medical goes, I know that we did have Russians visit us and we visited them. Chuck Berry went over and there were times that…those people came over here and they were good people. It’s just that…
SAMUELS: Well you mentioned the folks that you worked with as well, just talking about the people in general that you worked with at NASA. You mentioned Chris Kraft, Bob Gilruth. For the most part…
BERNHARD: They were good, solid citizens.
SAMUELS: The best bunch of folks you’ve ever worked with, kind of thing?
BERNHARD: Pardon?
SAMUELS: The best bunch of folks that you’ve worked with…just a real solid core of folks?
BERNHARD: Yes. And you would hit one, once in a while, you would hit a guy that was a climber, you know, just pushing his own self. But you find that anywhere. But in those days you had people that would make decisions without a bunch of conferences and all this mess. Now, if you have a problem, they call a conference and you spend a lot of money conferencing, travel pay, and so forth, high priced restaurants and motels. And back then, you didn’t need a conference. They made their own decisions and that’s the way it went. That’s the way I see it from now. Being eighty years old, I guess I think, maybe, a little different than I did when I was forty. Still, there is a great difference in the society today, Mark, than there was then. And those people were good down to earth people. If I walked by Chris Kraft in the hall and said “Good morning, Mr. Kraft” he’d say “Bernhard, how are you doing?” And it was not that I was trying to crawl higher or anything, it was that I worked in the area that he did, his office was just a floor above me. You worked around there, you knew the people. So it didn’t matter… But they were just different…just different. And we got things done, and if you needed a helping hand you had hands to help. And people would stay in. I know I stayed in many times when I should have gone home, but we had a problem. You’d stay there and you try to get it fixed. Or give it to somebody that could fix it. Those were the good days in the space program because it was a new area, everyone was learning. It was like the service. You went in and fought in the service because it was for your country. The space program was sort of similar to that and there was a lot of the ex-military that were in the space program. All your pilots and all were either Air Force or Navy people, Marines, and then finally they got, of course, to take civilians and stuff. But Mark, it was the good…like they say, the heydays of the space program. And I think we accomplished a great deal for this country. Look where we are today. And… it’s good. There are a lot of things we need yet to do and figure out. If you get up there and a satellite or anything--my son is now in Orbital Debris. Before a flight, he goes down and he checks the spacecraft for any damage on it. When it comes back, he goes back and he checks again and they document all these things. And then, in case there is an asteroid field there or something is coming, they will change the trajectory of that craft to miss it. But they’re all coordinated. The geologists--of course, Ronnie [son] had a degree in geology, but he had gone back and got his master’s in science and stuff…I guess he’s got a couple of more… I don’t know how much time he’s got to do his Ph.D. yet, but he works and does his job and then works on the educational part in conjunction with that. The University of Houston now has that Clear Lake subdivision out there to the University and a lot of the guys at NASA go back and further their education. So, it’s beneficial for the community, and the schools, and the people. It’s just, it’s a real good feeling that you have.
SAMUELS: Is there one sort of defining moment for your NASA career? Or is there one thing, that first day on the job, the first time when you realized when you were part of NASA and part of the team and what you guys were doing was, like you said, just so important?
BERNHARD: Well, number one is Apollo 13. Number two is--come here and I’ll show you an award. [The interview moves to a different room.] This means more to me than anything. [Showing a plaque]
SAMUELS: [Reading] This is the “President’s Special Award, Presented to Marvin A. Bernhard. May 11, 1988, For outstanding dedication and support of aerospace medicine throughout your career, especially significant accomplishments including work with Dr. John Stapp on High G Decelerations, your support of the early development of the NASA Space and Medicine Program, and your leadership in establishing NASA’s medical interface with the Department Of Defense for launch and landing activities.” And that’s the Society of NASA Flight Surgeons.
BERNHARD: This award means as much to me as some of the other ones. Most of the other awards, so many of them, Mark, are group awards. They were special awards for certain crews that you were on that they gave you awards for.
SAMUELS: We see awards here for Apollo 13, we see various space shuttle launches--
BERNHARD: Yes, these and I’ve got a whole box more full of these in a box in my backyard. Well, these here are just mission launches.
SAMUELS: [Looking at a signed award] That’s one of the shuttle launches, with John Young and Bob Crippen.
BERNHARD: Here’s one that John Young and Bob Crippin signed. I’ve got some of the other stuff. But you accumulate so much of this stuff…you accumulate so much of it, there’s no way… But this special award here—Bill?…William…William…He was the first in NASA, he got out of the Air Force, he was my commanding surgeon in Newfoundland and he left up there and came back to the states and was given the job of NASA Physician. Bill…? He had a heart attack flying in an aircraft from Seattle back to California. You might be interested in that—[points to another plaque] Dr. Strughold gave me a copy of that.
SAMUELS: [Reading] The Star Messenger, Johann Kepler, 1610, …not unlike the human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight and create vessels and sail on the [unintelligible] of the heavenly ether. We shall prepare for the brave sky travelers, map the celestial bodies [Chimes] I shall do it for the Moon, you Galileo, for Jupiter.
BERNHARD: [Chimes continue] This kind of stuff, you have it, you worked with it, and it’s priceless to you, but to someone else it might not mean anything, unless you have an interest in it. I don’t know…I don’t think I would care to live it over again, but I would not change the way that I did live it. Because once I went into the service, there was a war on. So I did my part. I stayed an enlisted because that was the field that I wanted to stay in. They offered me a commission and I turned it down because I didn’t want to get into politics. And I did my job and hard work and used a little initiative and I think that’s what brought me up to where I was when I finally left NASA. This here, [pointing out another award] the guys all signed it.
SAMUELS: I was just taking a look at this big poster, here, you’ve got.
BERNHARD: Yes, a bunch of the old guys.
SAMUELS: Do you keep up with most of those guys that you were pretty close with?
BERNHARD: Oh yes. With Sam, I have talked to him and a guy by the name of Berthold, who was…[Digging for materials]
SAMUELS: This is a copy of Roundup, the NASA publication.
BERNHARD: Yeah, well I had current…this is it, current enough. You might take that with you, if you’d like.
SAMUELS: You bet…take a look at…
BERNHARD: I just threw four year’s accumulation of those away. There is no way that you can keep it all, Mark. There is just no way. And I have a bunch of pictures, too. But there’s no way that…but the kids all want them.
SAMUELS: That is certainly one of the points of this project. To find and collect as much of this stuff, either physically or at least on tape. And from you guy’s own perspective.
BERNHARD: I enjoyed my tour at NASA and I don’t think anyone should complain about what we’ve accomplished. I feel real good about it. It’s something that you live with, and now that I’m old enough to kick the bucket, I can look back on the good times and really appreciate them. And the family, we moved to Houston and I had five kids. They have all got Masters or above and they are all working. They’ve got families and go to church. They don’t smoke and only a couple of them have a beer once in awhile.
SAMUELS: Or maybe the occasional cigar when a major spacecraft returns to Earth? [Laughter] You mentioned Apollo 13 being sort of that second milestone for you…anything in general?
BERNHARD: It was a crucial time. It’s like losing one of our guys, you know? I had a dream and it kept coming back recurrently for about three or four months. It was right before Zeke Slayton died. And Zeke was sort of a good friend of mine. I was in a hotel or a bar or something, in a lounge. And I was going to the restroom and the door was open and there was a table there. And there were five or six of the crew that were in there. And old Zeke was there and he said, “Hey, Marv. We’ve been waiting for you.” And I say “Hi, Zeke. I’ll see you later. Gotta go to the restroom.” Then I’d wake up. But then I’d have that repeat dream again. And after about five or six times, I finally got the message. Those guys that were there--this was shortly after Zeke had died--they were all deceased astronauts. And I said, “Is he trying to tell me something—they’re waiting for me?” [Laughs] I haven’t had it in a long time. Hadn’t had a dream in a long time, not since the stroke, anyway. [Mr. Bernhard suffered a stroke in September 1998]
SAMUELS: But, here again, Apollo 13 turned out o.k.
BERNHARD: It did. Then we had a couple of others we had problems on, too. And they used good sense. They were just real trained people. They were good down to earth trained people.
SAMUELS: Training… I think you have to give a lot of credit to the fact that, apparently, it was training, training, and more training.
BERNHARD: It’s a hard life, Mark. Being an astronaut is a hard life. And on some of these women it’s even harder. To raise a family and try to be an astronaut is…it’s a chore.
SAMUELS: Well, it doesn’t sound like you guys were putting in a lot of free family time, either. It sounds like you guys were working just as long hours.
BERNHARD: Yeah, it was long hours. During missions, we didn’t have much time off. But then, of course, we had some good parts, too. We would go down for launch and we would bring the family with us and throw them on the beach until the launch was over, and they would watch and so forth. So, it was good for them. Because all five of my kids are all educated and it had to be something, other than their mother’s cooking.
SAMUELS: [Laughing] Let me ask you, what’s it like to watch a Saturn V blast off?
BERNHARD: It’s tremendous. It’s something else. They…I won’t say that. They were something else. It rumbles, and it shakes, and it goes. I think Star Wars ought to be put on the shelf somewhere and hidden and locked up. These guys are making billions and it’s all fantasy. You know, we had Jack and the Beanstalk when I was a kid. And that was a fantasy, I guess. And the Pied Piper and those things. But it’s getting out of hand now.
SAMUELS: Yeah, but Apollo was the real deal…
BERNHARD: Apollo was the real deal.
SAMUELS: And the space shuttle is the real deal.
BERNHARD: And so was Gemini. The Gemini was the real deal, too. It got up and back.
SAMUELS: You were there during space shuttle launches. Was there a major shift that you felt from Gemini, to Apollo, to the Space Shuttle? Mr. Bernhard, I had just asked you about how you felt from Gemini, to Apollo, to Space Shuttle missions and whether or not with each different program, you felt a shift in the way you did your job.
BERNHARD: Well, Mark, we went into those from one to another, gradually. We were working on Apollo when we were still doing Gemini. And when we were doing Apollo, we were working on Space lab and so forth. So going from one program to another was just another day’s work, it’s just a little different. Technologies increased, more of them and more facets that you had to watch out for. But, as far as the medical goes, we had advanced in Apollo, like bone mineralization, heart rates, temperatures, and this type of information, for all your body functions and things. We had increased… kept increasing in the process of doing them, like your urine things. Those we got other adapters for, for the female astronauts.
SAMUELS: That’s true. I didn’t think about the fact…that’s right.
BERNHARD: They had to be adapted. We sent them down to the Veterans Hospital and made plastic fittings for them, and this type of thing. So, yes, from one thing to another you had changes, but they were for the better and you gradually worked into them, from one program to another.
SAMUELS: Let me ask you this --
BERNHARD: It’s like walking for a child. He crawls, then he walks, then he runs, then so forth.
SAMUELS: That’s an interesting aspect though, that you just brought up, the fact that, in the old days, you had nothing but men in space, and then, women eventually got there. Did that change the way that a predominately male work force looked at their jobs or were women brought in on a design aspect or, that sort of--particularly with your field of medical sciences?
BERNHARD: Well, they worked together quite often, a lot. The crews, once they were crew established then they all worked together on the ground before they were ever launched. And they went through all the phases of launch and check out and so forth, so that by the time they were airborne, by the time they were launched into space, they were a team. And, male or female, that gender didn’t make that much of a difference because they were all part of the crew, as one. I’m not a woman, and I can’t tell you how they felt, but the guys, I know, they took them on as part of the crew, as one of the mates. So, you know, it was, although there was different things that had to be done as far as the body functions went, but we took care of those. They were taken care of in a manner that didn’t cause a lot of trouble.
SAMUELS: Just one more job to be done and you did your job.
BERNHARD: That’s right. Well, I don’t know how to explain it. They were just…Once they trained on the ground as a crew, they became a crew and they became associated, closely associated. So, anything they had to do in space, they had to do on the ground, too. Like going into the water tank and training, and this type of stuff. And we bought two water tanks, one in Houston and one in Huntsville, for the assembly of the current space station. Alright? They went into the water tank together to build and construct the space station and assemble it, and well, they were just one of the crew. So, I don’t think male or female had that much impact on them. I really don’t.
SAMUELS: But that’s certainly an interesting perspective. I guess, a lot of people didn’t, maybe, think about at first.
BERNHARD: You know they’re narrow-minded. It’s the same in the service. They had WAFs and they had -- you know what a WAC is, don’t you? You know what a WAF is? And a WAVE and a WAC…you know what a WAC is?
SAMUELS: Women’s Air Corps? Women’s Air Auxiliary…
BERNHARD: No, a WAC is what you [unintelligible] with a ‘wabbit.’ [Joking, then laughs]
SAMUELS: Oh, I see. I stand corrected. [Laughter]
BERNHARD: I don’t know, Mark. But, I think that from one program to another, they were so closely entwined, that by the time you left one and went into another, you knew it very well, too, before it was actually going. Because, my God, how long did we work on Apollo before we finally launched, you know? So, it was interesting, though.
SAMUELS: Well, to say the least. Mr. Bernhard [Wife returns and greetings] I think we’ve got plenty. Mr. Bernhard, we appreciate it and we’ll go ahead and shut this guy down.
BERNHARD: Well, you can look at that…
SAMUELS: At the newspaper, right…This interview with Marvin Bernhard took place on May 24, 1999 and was conducted by Mark Samuels as part of the NASA Oral History Project, in cooperation with Southwest Texas State University.