NASA Gray, Emerson - June 23, 1999

Interview with Emerson Gray

 

Interviewer: Jason Walker

Date of Interview: June 23, 1999

Location: Gray home, Cedar Park, Texas

 

 

WALKER: Today is June 23, 1999.  This is an oral history interview with Mr. Emerson Gray, at the home of Mr. Gray in Cedar Park, Texas.  The interview is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in cooperation with Southwest Texas State University by Jason Walker.

 

On behalf of myself and the project we just want to thank you for your participation. 

To start off with tell us a little bit about your educational background and your family background?

 

GRAY: I don’t guess we need to do anything, but lead with this thing a little bit.  I was born in Detroit, Michigan on April 4, 1920.  Interesting thing about my name and such -- my name is Emerson Glover Gray, and I was born on Easter Sunday.  My initials are E.G.G.  My brother’s name is Hamilton who we use to call Ham and they called me eggs, they used to call us ham and eggs.  That’s an interesting little play on words that came up.

 

I married Thelma Osborne on July 3, 1941 in High Point, North Carolina where I went to high school and elementary school.  I have two daughters, Kathryn Ann Bollfrass and Marian Ellen Purtell.  I have the birthdates in here you can see them.  Presently I am in Cedar Park, I moved from -- we have a long move history and we sort of struggle with it.  And maybe as we look at my bio it might sort of fill in.  We lived in [Washington] D.C. and I worked in GSA (General Services Administration) with Raymond Helsem, Ed Campagna, and Charlie James.  We worked together at the GSA office in Washington D.C.  Ray Helsem came down and went to work for NASA, urged by Ed Campagna.  Ed was like a branch chief.  We were like section department.  So about a year after Ray Helsem came down, I came down.  The problem was I had just changed jobs to go to GSA.  It was a pity to have to leave in a hurry, but a promotion was real nice to move for.  I went down to NASA and that is when the fun started. 

 

We can get into the bio a little more.  But as far as my background is concerned.  It tells us that I lived in D.C. off and on, [and] I lived in Houston off and on.  The last time we moved, and I forget the dates, but we moved from D.C. down to NASA when NASA first started.  We were in the group of first ten or twenty people hired for the Manned Spacecraft Center.  That was before it even had a name.  So we were real pioneers in that respect.

 

Rest of my education.  I was at North Carolina State in Raleigh, North Carolina for college.  War came along and I was no longer a civilian.  Went in as an aviation cadet, and then I was discharged in and out in 1942.  When I was discharged, I went into food dehydration.  I had a medical discharge.  I went into the Air Corps, but I never got to touch an airplane.  So the day I got discharged, I said I am going to walk over to flight line and touch an airplane.  Which I did. 

 

At any rate I went into food dehydration.  There was a situation, there in employment back in 1942 that a civilian could not go out and job hunt.  You had to have a release form from your previous employer to allow them to even talk to you.  So in my case, since I already been in the service and got out.  I could do anything I wanted as far as employment was concerned.  We use to wear a little ruptured duck.  It was a little emblem you would wear on your lapel, and real proud of that thing.  At any rate that sort of dealt with that area.

 

After the war was over my father, my brother, and I established a business, Gray Engineering Company.  I became the Vice-President.  We did plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contracting work, largely on public buildings in High Point, North Carolina.  When I first got out of the Army I went to work for Bristol Instrument Company in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1942.  For a short time I worked for the Department of Agriculture in a coax-a-guise project.  Nobody knows what a coax-a-guise is.  It is a Russian dandelion.  At that time rubber was difficult, because of the war efforts it was difficult to get enough rubber to protect the country.  Coax-a-guise was an attempt by the Department of Agriculture to start a new industry to plant and harvest these Russian dandelions so that they could harvest rubber from the leaves.  The coax-a-guise was ten times larger than the regular dandelion.  Its roots is what they wanted for the coax-a-guise rubber.  I worked for them a while. 

 

Then I went into dehydration, food dehydration for dehydrated potatoes.  I worked for them for a while in North Dakota.  I went to work for another place in Fort Kent, Maine with True Food dehydrators.  I worked for them for about year. 

 

Then I went back to North Carolina.  My father and brother got back together again with our business doing plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning contracting.  One of the projects we had was doing plumbing and heating for an elementary school in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  Which was interesting.  We go to work around the real secret projects.  I never will forget one occasion where we went out to estimate a job.  I went to this building and the guy gave me a roll of blueprints.  He said study all of blueprints all you want, because you can’t take them with you.  So there he gives you a wad of about fifty blueprints to roll under your arm.  So I looked at them [and] got an idea of what it was.  So I asked about the thing.  Well you run from here to here on these piping lines.  What’s going to run in the pipe?  He said none of your damn business.  At any rate, the guy walked behind me, about two or three steps behind me, with a forty-five pulled back.  He said you turn left when I tell you, turn right when I tell you.  And look all you want, but don’t make any notes, because we have to take them away from you.  The problem was figuring out how much the government wanted for us to do that job.  Needless to say we estimated the job, and didn’t get it. The school project that we had.  At the time I was flying with a private pilot’s license.  We flew from our North Carolina office to our Oak Ridge office on sort of a weekly basis to keep up with the job.  That got us through that mess. 

 

This is getting into a lot of the history, and I don’t know if you need it or not. 

 

We went into receivership in our business because we had several companies that got construction loans from their banks, and when the time came, they were suppose to convert their construction loans into permanent loans the banks ran into a government regulation that prohibited them to make loans of the type that those people needed.  So they ended up with the work practically done, in fact it was about 98% finished, but we could not get any money out of the job, and we couldn’t pay our people or our accounts so we went into receivership.  That was one of the other problems.

 

At any rate I went to work for the Army Chemical Corps in Fort Detrick, at that time it was called Camp Detrick.  I was working in an engineering division.  My job was to do plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning design for modifications to the different laboratories to do biological research.  Nowadays we talk about…  What is it called, they came out with a book…  At any rate it was biological warfare.  They had all the number of biological agents that today are becoming popular.  At that time they were classified information.  We didn’t talk about it.  Got along very successfully there.  But there it is again the whole business of swapping jobs again. 

 

Well I guess the next thing was I went to work for GSA.  In the GSA business we did plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning.  My emphasis was on heating boiler plants and diesel engine equipment, designed for the construction of new federal buildings.  The GSA is sometimes called the housekeeper of the Federal Government.  They are responsible for all the government construction, but there were certain exceptions.  Like the Army did their own, the Navy did their own.  But generally GSA handled it.  GSA is where I met Ed Campagne, Ray Helsem, and Charlie James.  We all worked together, and we used to go have lunch together.  It was a really nice happy gang.  It was really friendly cheery situation. 

 

Well I guess the next thing was we went to work for NASA.  Interesting thing as I worked for NASA, maybe we should revert back to our listing of events at NASA, but in my NASA career I worked initially with the facility division with those people I had just mentioned.  Our friend Ray Helsem had retired. He got sick and tired of the bureaucracy that the government has.  He left the job and worked as a contractor in his hometown of Yuma City, California.  They then had a competition of about fifty people competing for his job.  And at the time they went through it and I became the winner.  So I took over Ray Helsem’s job.  I was responsible there the plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning design and such.  That sort of covers most of that.

 

WALKER: Why did you choose NASA?

 

GRAY: Well NASA chose me.  Primarily it was my good friends.  Ed Campagne, Ray Helsem, and Charlie James had moved there.  The first thing is, it was a matter of dollars.  In order to build their staff they offered me a grade increase, so I changed from one GS grade to a higher grade. I don’t know how I am getting along here.  It was this strange thing about – well maybe I should finish this biography and then we can get into that next.

 

WALKER: okay.

 

GRAY: I guess we can sort of jump on by working with my sheet.  After I did that, I worked in [Washington] D.C. and I retired in 1980.  The last job I had in D.C. was at the Harry Diamond Laboratories.  I also worked for the Bureau of Standards.  And the Bureau of Standards and the Harry Diamond Laboratory and the NASA facility were interesting for one situation.  All three of those facilities started with nothing.  Just an empty field.  I was involved in the planning and construction information for design work for those facilities to be brought up out of the ground.  It was very romantic.  At least it was romantic to me and the people around us.  We did what had to be done and didn’t make any bones about it one way or the other.  It was a cooperative effort and it was a happy period.  And so I went through that with three different facilities. 

 

When I ended up and left government employment, I had dabbled in photography and I developed into a pretty good amateur photographer.  Near the end of my career I became a commercial photographer.  I didn’t make a lot of money but I had the pleasure of doing it.  I was also a technical editor for McGraw Hill’s correspondence course in photography.  We wrote a book on photography.  We had written a book to be used as a correspondence course.  The students enrolled in the course and got books and they had assignments.  The assignments were sent in and I and some of the other photographers evaluated their work.  Told them what was good and bad about it.  Then I retired.

 

You can see in here my society.  They’re pretty simple in numeration.  There is no sense going over those.  You can notice a couple of the special awards.  I think that probably covered most of the bio, don’t you?

 

WALKER: Yes sir.

 

GRAY: Now we’re starting on this other thing.  Do you want to say anything first?

 

WALKER: No sir.  Let me stop the recorder here real quick.

 

GRAY: Sure.

 

GRAY: So we continue looking at this thing.  When we first started recruiting people for NASA they started out in Langley, Virginia.  The first problem was to decide where the Manned Spacecraft Center should be located.  Ed Campagna was with a team that went around the country looking for different sites and comparing information that went up to NASA headquarters up in Washington D.C. to make the final decision.  So the GSA shot.  This team of people collected this information.  I can remember in the early days of NASA anything I wanted to know about the blueprints or the plans or the siting were in the drawers in the vault.  So I would go in there, look in the vault and see what there was.  They must still have those same old historical buildings when they decided where to put it. 

 

NASA was located in Houston for a few interesting reasons.  One of them was when they first started talking about the spacecraft center we were going to do all the work on board.  All the engineering work.  And compare rolls of drawings for the work.  Corps of Engineers said I’ll make you a deal.  The deal was that if we let them do the plans and specifications they would allow NASA to acquire any of the military surplus hardware.  Like if there was an airplane over there that they didn’t need anymore they declared it surplus and all you had to do was pay the shipping charges.  So that sounded awfully good.  So as a result of that we people that were early employees and were hired to do the designing for the construction work, because we contracted that work to Corps of Engineers we were then converted to people who had to prepare the criteria for the Corps of Engineers.  So we did all the engineering work necessary.  For example a guy decides I want to do a centrifuge building.  Well we people from this engineering office would go and talk to the people in the centrifuge building and ask them, the people who are going to do the centrifuge work, and say what would you need for your facility.  So they would say these are the things we need to do.  And we would prepare enough information so we could tell the Corps of Engineers designer what to do.  That’s not simple enough for us.  It seems that the Corps of Engineers did not want to do all that design work.  So they contracted their contract to Brown and Root, George R. Brown and Company.  Brown and Root then prepared the plans and specifications and presented those plans and specifications to the Corps of Engineers who did their evaluation and guidance to make sure they complied with the criteria.  And when they got theirs checked out, the information went to NASA, who [had] prepared the criteria to tell what kind of building they wanted.  Whether it was a high ceiling or low ceiling or real big or real small and what kind of utilities they needed.  So you ended up with three guys overlooking each other.  And I’m not sure, but I believe Brown and Root also got a contract for the construction work.  I am not certain.  I think they did.  I don’t know if you have any knowledge of that or not?

 

WALKER: No sir, I know that Brown and Root was big with LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson, former Texas senator, vice-president and president of the United States].

 

GRAY: Also one of the other interesting things is NASA Road 1.  There was no road.  And it seems like George R. Brown said, I think you need a road to get to your buildings.  So he built one.  And he said whenever you get around to it you pay me for it.  At least that is the fairytale.  I don’t know how true it is. 

 

The other deal was that when they finally sited NASA to the Houston area.  They wanted access to waterways, because they were planning on barging the spacecraft to Houston and to different flight areas.  As we know, they never did barge anything like that.  That was one of the other interesting things that were in the criteria.  The other thing they had a longer nice weather in Houston compared with other places for flying and such.  So those were some of the factors involved in it.  And of course Lyndon Johnson, who was our Vice-President at the time, was quite interested in having it located in Houston.  So that is a little bit there. 

Another byproduct that is interesting.  When we first moved down to Houston on the first occasion they had a shuttle.  Probably a DC-3, I don’t know.  They had an airplane that was owned and operated by NASA.  And they made about a weekly round trip to and from Langley to Houston.  People who were interviewed were flown down, did the interview and were flown back.  I made my first trip to Houston in an airplane.  It is also interesting that both my daughters married men they met in NASA.

 

WALKER: How was the family background as far as whenever you did move to Houston?

 

GRAY: Well we moved to Houston initially I came down first.  I lived in a house that didn’t have air-conditioning.  I didn’t have any heating either, and it was sure hot.  I lived in bachelors type quarters in this little house that I rented every month.  My daughters were finishing up school in Maryland and Thelma was up there of course.  So I came down and the next thing was my daughter Kathy came down on the shuttle and she went to work for NASA.  Then later on Thelma and Marian when school let out came on down and set up household for us.  So that was a little bit of that.  Does that answer what your thoughts were. 

 

I think I mentioned that we ended up preparing criteria. The first building I went to work in was the Farnsworth Chamber building.  And that was a nice set of buildings.  All of NASA people were located within that building complex.  And then as time went on we began to interview people in the labs.  Everyday there was a new employee coming in.  So different departments began to be created.  And as they were created these temporary buildings were acquired.  The Farnsworth Chamber building was good.  I think I have some others listed in here, about the fourth or fifth paragraph.  Our early buildings were the Farnsworth Chambers building, the Canada Dry building, the Peachey building, the Houston Petroleum Center, and several motels and apartments, and the University of Houston.  There was actually a total of thirteen of these temporary facilities.  We just took these empty buildings and started working there.  One of the things we had to do was -- the air-conditioning was grossly inadequate in most of the buildings.  So we made up some temporary air-conditioning machines.  And we put all the air-conditioning equipment on skids, loaded them in a flat bed trailer, brought it out and set it beside the building, and ran some big flexible ducts into the building.  And that managed to take care of the air-conditioning that was needed there.  Others we put additional air-conditioning units to supplement what was there.  So we were scattered all over Houston.  As we were scattered all over and the organization was growing all the time, we kept going to different departments to find out what they needed so that we could tell the Corps of Engineers who could tell Brown and Root what to put in the blueprints. In that respect it was still interesting. 

 

The thing that strikes me as being interesting is Camelot.  And I lean on this pretty heavy as the story unravels. 

 

WALKER: Before we get to that let me stop the tape and flip it over. 

 

GRAY: As I mentioned in here, Camelot.  I have heard many people refer to John Kennedy’s presidency as a Camelot situation.  Where everybody in the country contributed to the Camelot mood.  Where we were going to do wonderful things to build a wonderful world for everybody.  That was a mood that we had at NASA.  When we went to work nobody counted the minutes or the hours.  If everybody was suppose to go home at four o’clock or four-thirty sometimes you were lucky to get out of the building by six o’clock.  So you worked based on what had to be done rather than what the clock says.  Lots of times you had a lot work ahead of you so you went ahead and worked all day Saturday.  Some cases you worked part of Sunday, usually had a little bit of Sunday for church.  But there was a lot of devotion to your job and your importance.  So we started out with this Camelot mood under John Kennedy and it perpetuated itself for quite a while.  One of the things, as things progressed it grew into a pretty worthwhile organization with pretty good staffing.  They had real good guys here and there and everything. 

 

On one occasion Jim Bayne, who’s our design architect/engineer like a branch chief,  Jim Bayne says we got a problem in Florida.  I would like you to go to Florida and take a look at their plans and see what they’re doing, and see if they’re doing alright.  So I got into an airplane and went to Florida.  They were developing the Merritt Island complex, what is now called Cape Kennedy where the launch facility is.  People rolled up a bunch of [unintelligible] and the Corps of Engineers had their plans laid out, and I told them what they shouldn’t do and things they should do to make a better and more significant facility out of it.  I got back from that trip and low and behold Jim Bayne said, I got another trip.  Somebody has to go to California.  So I went to California.  At any rate we went to this California plant, and the people began asking me we are going to need about $500,000 for this and $1 million for this you think that would be alright.  I said, my God I don’t know.  Nobody told me what we could or couldn’t do.  So I called Houston and said what do I do.  They said use your best judgement, do what you think is right.  So we were in many cases doing jobs without portfolio preparing criteria based on what we thought was right and wrong, not by any specific hard cased rules and regulations.  Camelot again.  So we were beginning to flow into an organization approach.  Let’s see where we are on our sheet.  I think we talked about our temporary facilities.  We talked about Farnsworth Chambers building.  We talked a little bit about Merritt Island.  Oh yeah this other thing was interesting. 

 

On one occasion well into the program, the Apollo office had need for somebody to construct a docking ring to connect the Agena and the Apollo spacecraft.  They needed to produce this docking ring and transport it from one place to another.  So the Apollo office collected many people from a number of different disciplines throughout the NASA/Houston complex to go too.  They rented an airplane.  They didn’t buy individual seats on an airline, they rented an airplane and we filled it up with about twenty some specialists and we went to three or four facilities to determine if they had the facilities needed to construct this docking ring.  We got into this airplane and we flew up to the first factory.  We had a bus that was rented and ran from the airport to the factory.  We went straight to the conference room in the first factory.  They put on the conference room table some of the blueprints and plans and information on what they had.  We looked at them, and then we walked through the factory and looked to see how well they were equipped to be producing that docking ring.  We did this for three or four places and we made our recommendation.  We managed to get about eight hours sleep one night at the motel.  Bright and early they rang the doorbells and knocked on the doors.  Said let’s go.  So we were eating with sandwich in one hand and drawings in the other.  That there again we were looking at Camelot.  That was a special achievement that was done over the weekend.  People patted us on the back and said fine job. 

 

WALKER: So were you away from home a lot?

 

GRAY: No, these were rare occasions.  Maybe what two months.  Usually three or four days.  Most of my bonding was still always in Houston, except when special tasks like that came up.

 

I don’t remember much about it but when we basically occupied the Clear Lake site, the city of Houston gave a party.  At the downtown building, I forget the name of it, the big auditorium.

 

WALKER: The Astrodome.

 

GRAY: Well it didn’t go by that name.  Well what it was a big downtown auditorium.  Everybody who worked for NASA and all the contractors who worked for NASA were invited for a free show.  So we had barbecue everybody had a big plate of food.  And I remember Hugh O’Brian and four or five other famous Hollywood actors were there putting a show on.  I never saw that happen before.  And I bet you have not either.

 

WALKER: No sir.

 

GRAY: That was there again Camelot.  The city of Houston was saying thank you by doing something like that.  There again we were the loved babies.  Everybody loved us.

 

WALKER: Was that common to have that kind of camaraderie with everybody at NASA?

 

GRAY: Yes, that carried on.  I am running out of my notes here.  One day we had a spacecraft fire, and we lost our astronauts.  And of course, they did all the things they could do to deal with it.  About a year later our budget suffered seriously.  And they said that you, you and you we don’t need any more.  And I was one they didn’t need any more.  That was after Gemini and the beginning of the Apollo program.  Up through Gemini I was in on a lot of stuff.  When they said we don’t need you any more all of a sudden something happened to Camelot. 

 

On top of that they began to hire spacecraft engineers.  So the facility people like me, who knew all about plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning they didn’t need them anymore. Everything had been built.  They didn’t seem to know that once you got it built you had to make it work.  So I was one of the people they said we don’t need you anymore.  The way they went about is the government has a program they called reduction in force (RIF).  In a reduction in force they chose people in a general category grouping.  In my case one of my employees I would bump. I would take his job.  He would be out on the street.  But one of the guys I was targeted into, his first name was Jack, I won’t tell you his last name.  But Jack was suffering from a cancer and needed something like six months more employment to qualify for retirement.  When they told me that I was in the RIF and I was going to bump Jack, I told Jack don’t worry about your job.  I am leaving.  So I left, and Jack continued on his job.  After a while later they riffed Jack off and replaced him with some aerospace engineers.  The aerospace engineers at that time were not very experienced, and they were particularly not very experienced in plumbing, heating, air-conditioning, and electrical, so they made a lot of mistakes.  I am only saying that Camelot got lost right about then.

 

WALKER: So did these engineers take your position?  They were working in plumbing, heating and air conditioning when they had no training?

 

GRAY: Yes.

 

WALKER: So they hired these engineers to do what you were experienced in doing?

 

GRAY: Yes.  So for some mysterious reason Camelot got lost.  If you look at Mallory and your story about King Arthur you’ll see that Camelot got lost there too.  We lost it.  The day they did the moonwalk I was working for someone else and I was on vacation.  I went to the motel saying they have got to have television so I can see the moonwalk.  That is the end for me.  I lost all the romance. 

 

I don’t want to be a sour grapes guy, but only that somehow or other it did develop that the camaraderie lost.  Now all of sudden you had it is four-thirty-two, time for us to go home, see you later bye.  The meetings were ended like that.  During the Camelot era so its six o’clock so what.  We sent out for some sandwiches.  There was a whole different approach.

 

In addition to our regular jobs we had project assignments.  One of the things they had, NASA.  You notice I keep saying NASA and I keep referring to the Manned Spacecraft Center that is not the name of it now.  But when I was there that is what it was.  So my history is all related to NASA not to Kennedy or the LBJ center.  Special job assignments.  We each had different special things.  In order to bring the spacecraft back to earth it had to enter the atmosphere. When you enter the atmosphere there’s friction and the friction was pretty bad, so the problem was when the spacecraft came back through the atmosphere without any special provisions it would melt up to a cinder.  So they had to find some way to protect the spacecraft and the astronauts on return, on re-entry.  I had the assignment to see what we could do to get criteria and information for the design and construction for the building to test and evaluate a re-entry service.  So the first question came up.  Well how are you going to do it.  And you also have to realize that we were trying to evaluate this re-entry in high altitudes.  One thought was we would take a sixty foot sphere and fill it up full of nothing and we would puncture the thing and it would pop out.  Another way to do it was using boilers and steam injectors.  They produced a lot of steam pressure and the steam pressure would be ruptured and be blown through and cause this particular re-entry shield the problem of heat friction in high altitudes.  We ended up providing a building.  The guys that were going to use the facility and we guys that were plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning and electrical we were suppose to ensure that the facility would accommodate that and in addition to that then they had to come up with the hardware necessary to go into the building and do it.  That was one of the projects that I personally handled.  There again special trips and special assignments.  And we went to different places where people offered ways that you could do these things. 

 

WALKER: What were some of the more satisfying moments that you had?

 

GRAY: The whole thing was satisfying.  As I said it was Camelot.  There was not one thing much better than the other.  I mentioned in my employment history that I had worked for the biological warfare laboratories in Fort Detrick and lo and behold.  One of the projects I had was all of the special services related to the -- well when the astronauts came back -- the lunar receiving laboratory.  The lunar receiving laboratory, the idea was that we don’t what is out there, so when we go to the moon or out of the atmosphere we don’t know whether there is a lot of pathogenic bacteria or what’s going to happen.  Could this thing come back and infect the whole world and everyone die.  So there was not too much strength.  So there were a lot of gatherings talking about biological containment.  Which I spent five or six years designing facilities for biological containment.  All of a sudden somebody knocked on my back and said we need somebody to do some special things. 

 

For biological containment, you take outside air and put a filter in there as a barrier and deliver it into the building.  Then you have to get rid of it.  How do you get rid of the air that’s got biologicals in it.  So you have to go through with an extremely fine filter or you have to expose it to a very high temperature.  This is a new world, the only people who have ever done that before were people at Fort Detrick, or Camp Detrick, and I was one of the guys who use do it.  So they tapped me on the shoulder and said, you need to go up and find out how we made a facility that will take the exhaust air from our laboratory and get it thrown away.  In particular we had something called a glove cabinet.  Do you know anything about a glove cabinet?

 

WALKER: No sir.

 

GRAY: Well there is a stainless steel box.  Rubber gloves that stick through there and you manipulate the thing, like this.  You have to go through a special filter and when you come out you have to go through another special filter and then you have to go through an air incinerator and the air incinerator they didn’t know anything about.  So I had to go up and get some drawings of how you build an air incinerator.  The funny thing about it was they were my drawings.  So I was the person who made the drawings that NASA said that I had to go up and get, because they said I didn’t know anything about it.  That was a little interesting thing. 

 

So I went to two or three different places where they were making things like air incinerators and gathered information and brought them back.  And gave them to one of the new engineers who then could produce what was needed to do that job.  Our environment or backgrounds prepared me for what was going on.  It just came at the right time and right place.  Unfortunately it was no longer my job.  So that was in a period when they were transitioning us out. 

 

WALKER: What were some of the more challenging jobs or projects you were involved with?

 

GRAY: Well it was a highly challenging thing when I went to Merritt Island.  They were using high temperature hot water systems rather than steam systems for their heating facilities.  It was extremely challenging to me when we went to Downey, California to North American Aviation where we would go to these places where they were doing NASA contracting work.  And here I was a plain ole fashioned plumbing and heating engineer telling these manufacturers what they need to do their job.  That was pretty challenging when your being asked to extrapolate beyond your normal skills.  The same thing was true for the Fort Detrick stuff.  Special skills that to me were very romantic and satisfying.  To most people I guess it would not have amounted to much.  But to me it was my fingerprint.  Just like my fingerprint was on the steam systems of the GSA buildings.  My fingerprint was on the NASA programs.

 

Thirty inches is about that big isn’t?  That’s the size of the chill water pipe that goes out of the central heating and cooling plant at NASA.  That’s a big pipe.  It goes underground and it goes through underground tunnels.  Ray Helsem and I connived how we could deal with the underground tunnels and do special things like sooner or later you’re going to have to repair something.  What are you going to do with all the stuff that goes under the tunnels? You have steam.  No, you have high temperature hot water, electricity, telephone, and communication -- all the things that are distributed.  And any one of them you might have to repair.  So we said why don’t we make a figure eight.  Things normally go north and south. And if you have a utility problem you might be able to reverse and say south to north and bypass one or two facilities and still maintain operations. 

 

I haven’t mentioned Lunar Receiving Laboratory.  Wait a minute the Lunar Receiving Laboratory.  Wrong word.  Mission Control Center.  When the Mission Control Center was in operation and an astronaut was in the air there had to be somebody on hand to make sure that if the utility system broke down, we wouldn’t have to cancel the flight or cease to function as a mission control center.  My office was responsible for having someone there at all times as long as that bird is in the air.  That is sort of challenging.  We started out working eight-hour shifts.  Then we decided to let the guy go around the clock.  With eight-hour shifts, in order to do a shift you had three people.  But because of vacations and holidays you ended up having five people.  We ended up having one guy who would cover round the clock.  He had a place to sleep.  So while the bird was in the air he was excused from his regular duties.  And he stayed on hand.  If an event came up he did whatever was necessary to be sure that stuff was taken care of.  For example, if they broke an important part of a diesel engine it was up to him to authorize the contractor to fix it.  And the contractor might be somebody from Chicago.  You never know.  So that was sort of challenging.  There are more things that happened than you can remember.  These are just little bits of things we are picking out here and there.  The whole career was like that.

 

WALKER: So, it was very rewarding then. 

 

GRAY: It was very rewarding.  And rewarding had nothing to do with money.  Most people think rewarding is we will give the guy a promotion or incentive awards.  Rewarding to us was the fact that we had our fingerprint on the building.  We had these special things.  There was so many special things done there. 

 

I go back to the NASA site now and see hazardous area do not enter the tunnels.  When it rained I went through the tunnels to get to the cafeteria.  It was a good way to go without getting wet.  We also designed special protection.  If we happened to have a ruptured line of any kind we would have an alarm and a ventilation system to allow for us to get out.  But I wasn’t allowed to go in there now, because it is hazardous.  Same old thing though thumb print.

 

WALKER: The tape is about to run out.

 

GRAY: Well we are about to run out of words.

 

In particular the design that we had for boilers in the Clear Lake facility – the boilers were not doing very well.  We had problems with them.  So when we bid on the new addition to the plant, I said that we are going to have us one good boiler in that boiler plant.  Think about it.  Five or six boilers lined up in one room, and each of those boilers are bigger than this living room.  So I had designed boilers, specific boilers.  We told the boiler manufacturers how we wanted the boilers built.  So I prepared a design on the boilers that we wanted and gave it to the Corps of Engineers to be incorporated in their plans and specifications so they would do it.  That boiler has been a real wheel horse.  It has worked beautifully with very little trouble.  But there again the old history and the thumb print again.  I thought it was particularly satisfying to me that that boiler was still plugging away while the others had some troubles.

 

WALKER: How long has it been since you made it back to NASA?

 

GRAY: We moved from Houston.  What about?  Can you remember Thelma?  Was it about 1996 that we moved here.  So I guess it has been two or three years.  Thelma?

 

THELMA GRAY (wife): At least three years. 

 

GRAY: At least two or three years.  We lived down in Houston before we moved up here.  The idea was real simple.  I owned a house in Maryland and a house in Houston, both of them at the same time.  The problem was you can’t live in two houses.  So I sold one house and moved into the other one.  The one in Houston seemed like a nice place to live.  So we lived in that house.  Then we discovered Thelma had Alzheimer’s Disease.  So we needed to be near one of our children.  One of our children lived in Maryland, Marian.  Our other child, Kathy, lives in Austin.  So they elected for us to live in Austin near Kathy.  It has been a very satisfying situation.  But we had a lot of dear friends in Houston that we moved away from. 

 

THELMA GRAY: We have lived a lot of places.

 

GRAY: All told I have had thirty job titles.  That does not sound like very much, but when you start making a list of them it is hard to keep score.  And it is hard to keep track of cities. 

 

Remember we talked about different special projects.  I was in food dehydration.  Do you know what the astronauts used for food today?

 

WALKER: Not today.  No sir.

 

GRAY: Dehydrated food.  Pre-packaged food.  They come up with a toothpaste tube and that is a ham sandwich or whatever the case may be.  Very special relationships to the production of such things as food for the spacecraft.  Just like these other things that came up from my past history were related to NASA.  Just because we put plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning in the building didn’t deny our knowing and working with people who produced special functions.  So food dehydration that I had in my experience which was five or six years was another thing that was related to the space program.  I was just tailor made for it.  Of course it is a pity I’m not there now. 

 

Of course the other thing is I retired in 1980 when I was sixty years old.  Think about it I have had nineteen years I have been retired.  Most people don’t have a career that lasts nineteen years. 

 

I think we have just about run out of words. 

 

WALKER: Well what were your feelings about the Apollo fire.  What were the whole feelings of everyone as a whole?

 

GRAY: It was a shock.  Well when you mentioned that I guess it is suppose to stimulate me to talk about something about feelings.  Shock. 

 

As NASA was chugging along [President] John Kennedy came down and stopped off in Houston.  He gave a little presentation, then took his plane to Dallas.  At that particular time we could not be excused from the project we were on.  We were preparing criteria and budget proposals for support, facility support for the spacecraft to Mars.  As soon as news came that Kennedy had been shot everything stopped cold.  Everybody lost.  It was severe physical shock.  That has only happened once or twice in the world.  Such a shock had taken place when he was killed we dropped the project.  The Mars project right now is beginning to show up, but we were doing that just about the time Kennedy was here.  We were preparing budgets and information, because the spacecraft that goes to Mars has got to be different.  Among other things it has to be bigger.  And if you are going to do that then the buildings you put them in have to be bigger. 

 

Have you ever heard of a clean room?

 

WALKER: Yes sir.

 

GRAY: Well, the first clean room that was popularized was one we built at NASA.  We had it in the shop building.  I am even forgetting names of buildings.  In the shop building we had a facility that would allow us to put the full-size spacecraft inside of a clean room.  I designed it.  I was one of the early clean room designers.  Going back into history the old thumb print again.  The clean room at that time it was referred to as a class one hundred, which was state of the art as good is it got.  Now everyone has one. 

 

WALKER: Alright.

 

GRAY: It was those special little projects that we built this room that went in this building that we were going to put the spacecraft in.  We had to open up the walls of the building, bring the spacecraft in, put the walls together, and start the clean room operation.  They had to have their booties and coveralls and such.  There again biological warfare, clean room, and biological containment all of that keeps tapping all the time and history.

 

If you wanted someone to have those skills that I brought with me, that was not even identified, you couldn’t find one.  Yet those are the things that I had continued to have life experiences in.  To me it was a very special fit.  And like many other people I cried when Kennedy was gone and we cried even more when we lost the Mars project.  It stopped cold.  I have never felt such numb feeling in my life as that happened.  Some guy runs the government, you don’t even think of them as real people.  But it was very real to us.

 

But these events keep popping up and you can’t even remember them there are so many of them.  They all seem to tap on past histories.  And Camelot.  And bang all of sudden somebody slammed the door.  And wouldn’t allow us to do it anymore.  That’s a strange feeling.

 

That is about all I have to say.

 

WALKER: Thank you again for participating. 

 

GRAY: Did I answer your question to give you a good handle?

 

WALKER: Yes sir.  I appreciate your time and Thanks again.