NASA Normand, Ann - May 21, 1999
Interview with Ann Normand
Interviewer: Amanda Brand
Date of Interview: May 21, 1999
Location: San Antonio, Texas
BRAND: My name is Amanda Brand. It is 11:00 AM, Friday, May 21, 1999. Mrs. Normand you are aware that this interview is being conducted for the NASA/SWT Oral History Project and will be available for research purposes.
NORMAND: Yes.
BRAND: What was your life like before you joined NASA? Where were you from . . . what was your family like, your educational background?
NORMAND: I had my education was in Louisiana and then I did night school after we came, after I came, here. I graduated in 1942 and was the first, well really the second, person that was sixteen, the age limit had been lowered, so I could go to work at Kelley Field, and I worked at Kelley Field from 1943 to 1967. When I went to NASA I trailed my husband down there. He was precision dye and toolmaker with Kelley Field and he went to the shop at NASA and then when my daughter, when midterm got here, my daughter and I went down, back and forth every week . . . every other weekend. He came home one weekend to do the yard, and I went down the next weekend to do the wash [laughter].
It was even fun back then, but I enjoyed all of my time at NASA. There were few women so you didn’t get any fights going, verbal, just like not getting along, or she’s getting favors, and so forth, and so on. There were very few women and we, most of us, got along fine and from then until I retired in 19… medical retirement… in 197… I have to think awhile on that one. Give my brain a chance to catch up with me, 1976 I believe.
I retired and went to Fort Worth and I’ve missed my work for every day since then ‘cause I really enjoyed the development of those old poor spacecraft. As we lost these such as Alan Shephard and Ed White and all of those it was heartbreak for us who’d been with them since they were the only ten astronauts available at the time and I was Federal Records Officer, transferred down there in Federal Records Officer down there being NASA and virtually had to set up my own routine for checking if they were keeping the records and sending them where they should go and things like that. So as I said it was a time of good times, lots of laughter, and plain hell-hard work [laughter], but I enjoyed it and I have no, no complaints or really no bad memories of NASA, lots of hard work.
BRAND: How old were you when you first started working there?
NORMAND: I don’t know. Goodness me I’d worked for so long until I’d thought I’d worked all my life. I went to work at sixteen when they lowered the age limit, and the federal government lowered the age limit I was the second girl. There was another girl that had gone to work the day before I and she was six months older than I was and I went to work and my first job was with the ration board and Spanish names and I had come from French country. So I got some good laughs at trying to pronounce names and when someone would come in and say their name was Jesus and spell it for me J-E-S-U-S and that was [laughter], that was time, that was fun. My mouth would come open and I’d stare and look at them and look at, well, what I had written and wondered if I was in a strange land. I had not heard but one Spanish name before I came to Texas and that was the name Martinez. And so you throw me at the Ration Board where everybody who wants tires or gasoline has to come in and talk to me [laughter].
And so it was fun, and I have enjoyed . . . I guess I’m a funny person. I like work which is, I think, a rarity. And now from what I see in the workplace I’m glad that I retired because the ones that are there do not want to work. They want their paycheck and the ones that worked with me, for me, and around me worked. The paycheck was just, “Hooray my wife will shut up today.” And, other than that it was working time so I en . . ., I’ll say it again, I enjoyed my whole working time and I miss it and if I hadn’t of began to have physical defects I would still be there. They’d find a desk for me somewhere because I’d be the longest, longevity [laughter] person there. So that’s it. I might be a little grumpy now. [laughter]
BRAND: What was the typical day like when… what did you do on a typical day at work at NASA?
NORMAND: Pulling my hair… trying to figure out what this particular set of books really should go to the historical department as because you were developing three different things that were going to follow one. A, B, C for instance. Suit Mercury, Suit Apollo, Suit Gemini and which is going to develop the fastest and the best and you had to decide how you were going to set up your controls. Which the one in Fort Worth where you sent your federal records would have [as] her index to know where to put them in her case when they got there. The first box, set of boxes, I sent out there had been nothing sent except some payroll cards before I was down there and I sent a hundred boxes to Fort Worth. I later met the lady and her name was, when you spelled it, it was Alotoflove. Her mother told her she said “Now I named you that so that you’d remember you’ve got to give a lot of love to your children” [laughter]. So she and I made it on real well to work together from Houston to Fort Worth and I enjoyed that. I had a lot of difficult problems, but everybody was willing to tell me what they knew and what they had brought with them from Virginia, or what they had brought with them from Alabama or whatever where we could integrate what we had so I think they have, I’m not bragging, but I think that they’ve got a pretty good record up to when I left there. Now I left over three hundred boxes that were ready to go to Fort Worth, but the Fort Worth van had not come to pick up them up. So I don’t know if they got there or not, but it was fun getting them ready to go there.
BRAND: We’ve been reading a lot of books and watching a few movies about NASA during the Apollo program and it just seemed like from what we’ve heard from most people…well we went to NASA and they were telling us that the workload during that period was…you know…that the days were intense I mean there was such tension around or during that time. How . . .?
NORMAND: Everybody made tension for themselves. It had started before I left there. They had built a new part of the University of Houston was right on the edge of NASA property and everybody kind of made a bigger spot for themselves. It got to the point you’ve got to have a bachelor’s. You’ve got to have a master’s. No, we can’t hire you unless you’ve got a doctorate degree. Everybody trying to be more important than the other person and really not caring about the development. They had engineers that were in the BA division who did the hard work. The rest of them just, I’m sorry, but it was just people paid. It started before I left, but I still had the old timers who were having to bring it down from Virginia and remember what it was.
BRAND: What were your hours like when you were working and people around you were working on a project and did you have to stay until [laughter]…?
NORMAND: When computers first came in, the old EAM computers, I was preparing a document to publish and I worked straight through fourteen hours doing the EAM work because there wasn’t anybody that knew what I wanted.
BRAND: What is EAM?
NORMAND: That’s one of the first computers that came out. It was where you worked with the cards and you had to run them through, put them in the order where you want them, reprogram your deck, I mean your EAM machine to start with and then put your deck in the right direction where it would come out ready to print in the order that you wanted. So I was on my feet about fourteen hours that day altogether, but I got my book published in order.
BRAND: What was that like? Bringing computers into NASA and trying to…?
NORMAND: Let’s don’t get into that. I wasn’t employed by the computer division bless his heart. He came from Kelley. He was used to the old civilian military and not the independent agency and he had a hard time getting the computer program up to where it could be. I hope that it got through it alright and I’m sure one way or the other I just hope the record wound up in the proper place because I’d like for somebody a hundred years from now to be able to go through and get a continuous line on whatever they are researching. But I don’t know because it’s kind of rough getting things organized.
BRAND: What do you believe you contributed in your position to NASA and to the overall team experience?
NORMAND: Knowledge of getting records out to everybody without having to do everything for each individual. The book was the culmination of proving to the chiefs that they could go through that and pull pictures that they need to enlighten or enlarge their presentation without having to come over and individually tell him well I need so and so. And we’d spend time trying to find the pictures where they could sit at their desk, get their report together, turn me in a list of numbers because every photograph, well not every photograph, but almost every photograph that was made or taken had its own number so, therefore, they’d make a list of numbers and we had their speech ready to go and so I think, I don’t know what they have now, because I finally convinced them to cancel that because computers had grown enough that the tapes were there instead of the old EAM machines and so forth and so on. And so they needed someone if they were going to do it that way, the records where people could use them and have use of them without using a whole department and themselves away from their job to make a speech. And I kept all of the publications, the paperwork that went into assembling the publications. They were kept in my office so if somebody else wanted to use this part on another document to bring up, we had it. They didn’t have to remake it because we had it stored. I don’t know what happened to them, but they had built me several extra-large cabinets for filing those publications. The paperwork in one document was filed with anything so that you could open the box up and grab a publication while one of us stood like a hawk and made sure that you put the book back. [laughter]. That’s it.
BRAND: Well we were… we’ve been learning that during the Apollo missions there was a sense of team work, patriotism, pride at NASA in trying to get a man to the moon. Did you feel that same pride when you were there and how would you describe it?
NORMAND: Oh yes. Absolutely. All the way to the point that it was such an interesting, and everybody was so caring until nobody can really understand how they worried about how I was supposed to have a girl I said and they were determined it was going to be a boy. And you should have heard the arguments of these boys who worked with the space crews designing this, that, and the other…what they needed and they’d get in an argument the difference between a boy and a girl and who needed what. And when I had a girl they just couldn’t believe it. They were determined I was going to have a boy [laughter]. If I have a chance, I’ll introduce you to my daughter Anna Lou Normand. She’s a female [laughter].
BRAND: What did you experience as a woman working at a male-dominated NASA?
NORMAND: Well I had a background that I really didn’t know the difference in working with a man and working with a woman. My household that I grew up in was peculiar. I had a great-uncle that acted as a father. I had a grandfather that acted like a father and I had never seen or heard the word spoken of my father. When a little boy pushed me into the creek because his mother had called me a bastard and he repeated it and kicked me into the creek and I kicked him in the gut and his mother came to get me a whipping from my mother and so there was a wedding picture up on the piano, but this woman had never been in my home because my father never left Florida. And there were problems between grandmother and son-in-law. And so fathers just weren’t in my . . . men being different from women were not part of my being brought up. We all worked together and every man in the neighborhood that knew mother . . . they treated me as their daughter to be protected. If they didn’t like the boy I was talking to they didn’t mind coming up and chasing him off.
So I did not grow up with the difference of male female, male female departments. That’s the way I grew up. Everybody pulling to do the same thing so there was no battling between me, a woman records officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Navy who had a department down there at, well, at NASA or a little, red-headed shop man that knew that federal . . . certain things were classified. There was no battle. It was a case of pulling together, getting it together, holding it within the grade where it should be. And I really can’t say what they have now because there were offices that were being established because NASA was growing at about forty people a day. So that’s a lot of new people coming on board, a lot of new buildings being built and there was a lot of jealousies and spites that I wasn’t involved in because I had already gotten the records established before the spite came along.
BRAND: So you felt like you were an equal member of the team…
NORMAND: Yeah. I had absolutely no . . . no feeling of walking in and asking the biggest boss and I was the lowest one on his record you know and I had no of qualms walking in and saying can you help me? And everything, I have no complaint about bosses who thought they were too good to be talked to, but I met a few before I left.
BRAND: What was that like?
NORMAND: You really don’t want to know. Some of them are still working down there. [laughter]
BRAND: Then never mind. Were there any NASA women’s organizations?
NORMAND: No.
BRAND: No women’s clubs?
NORMAND: No. They hadn’t even got around to building the Gilruth building and women’s tennis clubs and women’s horseback riding and thing like…No, it was work and that’s what we went there for and it was work. I get the NASA paper every two weeks when it comes in so every once in a while, I’ll run across pictures of people who I worked with that some of them are still alive and some aren’t [shuffling papers]. That’s Chris Kraft, there [shows picture of Kraft]. They had a review on him. And here’s Dr. Kraft again, but there’s one of them that’s still, that is still working . . . as you can see I have magazines and I have papers all over the place and I’m as proud of these Round Ups as anything else. I thought I had another picture to show you, but apparently I already stored it. I have boxes on top of boxes in my triple garage – out there is my library. These just haven’t gotten in their proper place to be stored. That’s the main thing [papers shuffling].
BRAND: Did you ever meet or work with Chris Kraft?
NORMAND: Yes, I met Dr. Kraft. My daughter went to school with his children. We were all … we had one high school, but it was mainly Central because the most of us lived in Friendswood. And so my daughter knew them, I didn’t. I had talked to the daughter on the phone. Dr. Kraft…we were all nod your head and smile as you go by because you knew them all. You knew everybody. That’s why I said there was no, no pride or no [unintelligible] and everybody was . . . , they knew the only way they’d get promoted was by accomplishing the job they had been assigned. There was no if I can buddy up with so and so then I’ll get to buddy up with so and so and maybe I’ll get back to Virginia. We didn’t…we didn’t have that. And, so, as I said, I enjoyed every minute of it.
BRAND: I’m going to shift gears a little bit here. You lived in Friendswood when you worked at NASA?
NORMAND: I lived in Friendswood.
BRAND: Well how…what was Friendswood like? How did the town change as NASA grew?
NORMAND: [laughter] Okay. I’m driving to Friendswood on the last weekend before the movers moved the furniture down to the house. There was a car in trouble between Alvin and Friendswood, man and woman standing out beside it. I stopped to pick them up and it was Mayor Low and his wife had had a flat and stopped, take them home. That was my first introduction, introduction to anybody who lived in Friendswood that I knew. Pick up the mayor and his wife and take him home at midnight. The mayor, always, when he sees you he knows you [laughter]. So it was a good introduction. It was a very small town and he and I had quite a laugh every time we saw each other because the census on the road had been changed on the weekend. The weekend before it had been 1,112 and as I stopped to pick them up, I had a new sign greeting me on the head count 3,000 something. And I asked him were all those kids his [laughter]? That was our introduction was Friendswood grew 2,000 in one week. Actually, it was just the road getting around, coming up to date. But that was my introduction to Friendswood.
It had one grocery store. It had the Post Office. We had the Lemon Drop, which was the hang out for the school kids. And we had …did I say café?…We had a delightful, small café and the only thing that made it bad was there were bookoos of fig trees and when they go to steaming them to can them it’s not a pleasant smell. That’s the only…it was a lovely, little place, but it was a little place. It was more or less a three street whereas now they…. I think it covers about ten miles every inch they can. But, I enjoyed living and I was almost right downtown. But everything was almost right downtown.
BRAND: Would you go to Clear Lake, or was there…were there more entertainment opportunities in Clear Lake or not…was Clear Lake just as small as Friendswood at that time?
NORMAND: Yeah, I had a son who . . . there were two cars almost every other weekend that was either at the coast with ski-boards at Galveston, you know what I’m talking about, with his buddies and girls and so forth and so on. Then my daughter came along eight years later so we still had two cars one of girls, one of boys going either to rodeos, to…we went to see South Pacific, all the whole mob there at South Pacific. I tried to…the kids that hung out with my kids. They had a chance at getting a broad education because that’s the way they went with my kids. We were either surfing, swimming, watching people with horses or whatever was interesting, but they have a lot more of interesting stuff. I have some cousins that live down there and anytime I call there’s three children and if it’s not they’ve gone one place, they’ve gone another place. It’s always entertainment or something between Alameda and Friendswood and Sugarland…not Sugarland. I lost it. One right straight north of Friendswood. It’s where the jeweler is…my jeweler was where some of the better mechanical equipment shops. I can’t think of it. I can take you all the way from there around to Alvin and on down to Lake Jackson . . .
BRAND: Is it League City?
NORMAND: No, League City was that of way. [Normand points behind her, laughter] I can’t think of it.
BRAND: What did you do when you had…when you actually did have time off from NASA? What did you do for fun?
NORMAND: My family.
BRAND: Your family?
NORMAND: My family. I had the boy and the girl eight years apart and my husband who was more interested in the functions of church than we were. Yes we went to Sunday school and my daughter and I belonged to the Methodist Church in Friendswood, but he was the one you met if you were a constant church-goers. But my daughter, my son, whatever was going that weekend or that month or whatever I tried to keep them into everything where they could choose their life and religious life just as my husband did. But then entertainment wasn’t much back then you had to go into San Antonio…I mean into Houston. The Little Theater had just . . . what is the Alley Theater . . .that’s what it is…had just been built [bird chirping] had just opened up. That tells you how long ago that was and …but went to see South Pacific and it was one of the first ones and …but it was [unintelligible] . . .Anyway, he was a good baritone singer. That’s it. Entertainment just was not [available], other than with the family. That was it.
BRAND: We also heard a lot about Splashdown Parties and things like that…
NORMAND: Oh, that came later.
BRAND: That came later?
NORMAND: That came later. We had one thing so far as a NASA entertainment. We had a NASA picnic. And there were very few people that were there except the bosses. They showed up, but the working people, they had kids and something else [to do]. Picnics were just getting started and that was all NASA had. Then they got together and decided they would build a rec…where you could have your exercise. Exercise became a big thing. So that’s when they built Doctor Gilruth-they named it Gilruth . . . what was it? It wasn’t a party house it was …anyway where they had . . . where you could have your meetings, you could have this and that, but I was up to almost leaving by the time they started that.
There was none of this party time. It was work. That’s what we went down there to do was work. And you didn’t have to get together every other two weeks to keep from having a fight in the office. You know that was what started this was trying to make people be friends and they lived so far apart and traveled. Some of those people were driving twenty-five or thirty miles one way to come to work. So you didn’t have any time to socialize and if you got cross wise there was no way to work it out and so many of the bosses had been promoted so fast until they didn’t have the working knowledge of how to get people together in the office and talk things out. It just wasn’t there at that time.
BRAND: Under what terms did you leave NASA?
NORMAND: Hmmm?
BRAND: Under what terms did you leave NASA?
NORMAND: I retired. I had medical retirement. I’d have to go get my purse, get out my information sheet to turn over on what they retired me. Big long word. I had it, I retired, I lived with it. Its been too many years and this brain has been damaged too much [laughter]. So right now I couldn’t tell you.
BRAND: But you left with good memories?
NORMAND: Oh yes! Absolutely. I carried boxes out on this publication. I was kind of proud of that publication. It was really one . . . it was really the only place that I got associated with anything other than going in and showing the other person how to do it and then hoping they did and didn’t go back to check on them until another time for another review-record review. And when I was leaving I was taking out some of the publications, the ones that stacked one on top of the other, and how I had bought them where you didn’t have to republish the whole book. It might read pages 104 through 17 and the last part of it you might have to republish everything but the insert pages. And we made up the three-ring notebooks. I don’t know where they all went when I left, but every book was in its own three-ring binder. And we took care of all of it and I accomplished that and outside of setting up record books, getting away from the old Dewey Decimal System, the old Army Dewey Decimal System that went back to World War I. And the records for the federal records had been changed, but they brought the Dewey Decimal System with them and they were still using Dewey Decimal. So I was having to try and change, teach them, that you don’t need to go to the fourteenth point on records. And so that was…that was about it. It was work and when you accomplished one office you were proud of yourself and you had fixed it where they could work with it instead of hunt all the time. And so that was it.
BRAND: That’s quite an accomplishment.
NORMAND: I think it was. It was my doing. In other words, I did the work that I set up to do. I had to be my own supervisor and make sure that I got…that when someone came down to ask about it, they could see a in-order setup accomplishment and think that it had been there from the beginning. And, as I said, I enjoyed every day I was there.
BRAND: After you stopped working at NASA what did you do?
NORMAND: Go crazy [laughter] . Literally. Here I had worked since I was sixteen and gone to school at night when I had two children. Kept them …interested in education and even that took time. My hus . . . , my son decided he did not want to learn how to spell and the assignment for that Friday’s spelling test was “capacity” and he was not going to learn it. So the way we learned, we broke it down to “cap” “a” “city.” You spelled “capacity” if you could spell those three words. Don’t tell me you can’t [laughter]. So I was busy on the job and then of course my son had grown up. He was eight years older and his education, he had done as much as he wanted and then he had gone his way. And my daughter got to that point of whether she didn’t know whether she wanted to go to college or just what she wanted to do. So I had her for a while, but I was still going nuts. I’d of much rather gotten up and gone to work because you stay in that mold when you come home and if you want to enjoy your children, your husband, your work, and your home you work under the same organized function system, but you don’t make the kids [unintelligible]. They are the thing when you are with them. You hear of this “quality time,” you hear of all of this kind of stuff, but there was no such thing. You just incorporated everything together and when you were with the kid whether it was at two o’clock in the morning when he was sick or whether it was nine o’clock at night and you decided to go in and give him a little kiss caused you loved him so and he was asleep. That was quality time. We don’t have it broken down. We did not have it, neither did we have time to have it broken down like you wasted so . . .. So many mothers waste so much time until the fathers don’t even have a chance to be with the kids because mothers have got them organized and tucked into their little coat.
BRAND: Exactly what did your husband do?
NORMAND: He was a precision dye and tool maker. That means he could take a sheet of …see those …where are they…there are two lighthouses over here on this side [points to two, six-inch high silver lighthouses]. Okay, he made those. That’s the type of work he did with any type from a lathe, to a joiner, to whatever type of machine that you needed to make a metal, work a metal piece. Now that…those lighthouses unscrew, each part of them unscrew and its quite a complicated thing when you pick one of them up and look at it and take it apart. And it has lights down there where you have the red and green lights flashing. Of course I don’t have them plugged in. Everything is a mess because I had to take everything down off the walls because we’re putting a new roof on they would’ve bounced down here. The carpet’s pretty thick, but I don’t think it’d stop all that cut glass from breaking. See that’s what all of that is …antiques. That’s what that is. That’s what we’ve collected during my husband and I on our vacations. While the kids had their good times, we had our times walking through antique shops. That was antique days [laughter]. There were still things to find. Go ahead.
BRAND: I was going to ask what’s your most memorable experience at NASA and if you could choose one moment what would you…?
NORMAND: The day I signed in. They…personnel did not know what a Federal Records Officer was. They, Mrs. Flenora, did not have an extra desk in her office. So where did I go? Who did I report to? I never had such a day in my life because I had always transferred from one office to another as I moved up in Kelley Field for the twenty years I was there and so it was the day that I checked in was not magnanimous, they were not playing bands, they were not doing anything, but I was sitting there shaking my head most of the day. This can’t be true [laughter]. But it really was. And when I’d get a little bit confused, I just stopped at the entrance to Building Two and think for a minute or two. Get my head together and go off. It wasn’t that big a problem. I had the biggest one the day I checked in [laughter]. That was it.
BRAND: Are there any humorous stories you might be able to share? Any funny things that happened around the office?
NORMAND: Well, when I had my office over in one of the buildings that was mostly contractors and they were making information movies that were borrowed by various schools and I was going up and down the stairs from the first to the second floor which it seemed like…they had an elevator, but it was too slow. And it seemed like I lived on the steps, on the stairs. I looked around and here was an actor that had been in, hadn’t been on TV or anything else for a long time. I can’t think of his name. I can’t even think of the show he was on, but it was a prisoner group in Germany. German prisoners and so forth and so on. I walked in and told…I was going upstairs when I saw him…I walked in and told a girl, I said so and so from such and such is downstairs. Really? Come introduce me. [laughter] I said here we go. Four of us. I said I hope he’s still there. I don’t want to have to go in every door to find him. He’s still standing there. He’s waiting for them to come back and tell him what room to go in for the little part he was playing in this educational movie and I think he was as pleased and as shocked as they were and they couldn’t believe that they had just left their office to go and meet someone.
And, I don’t know, I love to give people a break because I found even back then most people were bored on the job. They just, they couldn’t see the fun side. They couldn’t laugh. They were bored and you give them a little bit of a break and that’s all they talk about for the rest of the day and they do twice as much work. But that day when there was an actor there who I had never watched the show that’s why I can’t remember the name of it, but I had never watched it, but I had seen it as my kids would be turning by the TV and he played one of the German guards.
But that’s one of the…I can remember every time I’d go in for a week, “Is he still here?” [laughter] I don’t know. I haven’t seen anybody. But that was wonderful. What I like is pleasure. I don’t like to jump on people. I don’t like to throw papers and start all over again. But if you can just give somebody a little bit of pleasure. I didn’t know it was going to upset the whole upstairs floor [laughter]. But, anyway, yes, that’s the type of pleasures in life.
BRAND: If you were interviewing a NASA employee from your generation, what question would you ask that maybe I’ve left off?
NORMAND: Just did you like your work? Watch their eyes. Watch the tilt of their shoulders. And if it all fits together, you know they’re telling you… if they say yes…then you know their telling the truth. Because you won’t…there are very few people, when you have to get out after the years of work, can like it. They’re unhappy. They had to change and turn their hat around when they retired or when the job went out or whatever. They can’t remember the good things and that’s what I like to remember.
Hanging on my wall over there for anyone who comes in is a …little tiles…that have been painted from a old-timey churches that have to do with my generation and three generations before me, but there’s also outhouses. If you look real close, you’ll see that there’s the necessary bathrooms that were still in effect. So, I like humor, and I like other people to see humor. And if that’s not funny to them, go hang your pictures up in your living room [laughter] I’ll hang mine up. Those were made for me and they had pictures from my photographs and here’s one that’s got a star and got a moon on them. If you’ll look to see that there is a difference in male and female bathrooms even back in that day [laughter]. And that’s why it’s all mixed together.
The church and the outhouse were actually the two points, centers of attraction, in the years before then … you stop to think …they took off from hard labor…whatever they were doing…they went to church except in Florida where my grandparents and great-grandparents came from. There weren’t many people. Most everything was bog. You had very low places where you could barely travel and in fact my cousin’s husband had never been farther than forty-five miles from [passing car makes words unintelligible] in his life. I carried him to the Gulf Coast and he’d never seen so much water in his life. And he just…went 57 miles that day and he just could not believe it. And I couldn’t believe that since cars had been invented that he hadn’t been farther than that from home. But there’s no entertainment. They had singings, all-night singings and all-day singings and things like that once in a while, but nothing was farther than thirty miles from home and usually it was less than that because you figured on a horse if you were traveling…you had seven miles and then a town. You had to stop, give your horse hay and give yourself some refreshments. So, if you’ll notice when you’re traveling in Texas the old towns, if you go the old roads, towns are seven miles apart because that’s the way. If you’re going into town on Saturday you load the kids on the wagon, you went into town, they got an ice cream cone and ran the streets and made all the dogs howl and all of that. Then seven miles back home in time to …There was always another job to do. So really, the outhouse and church were the points of entertainment.
BRAND: Well, what…there have been a number of movies and …getting back to NASA…and other movies on the missions from the period you worked at NASA…
NORMAND: No. They hadn’t started it.
BRAND: They hadn’t started it?
NORMAND: There was so much jealousy over Allen Sheperd and John…the one that…
BRAND: John Glenn?
NORMAND: Yeah, John Glenn. There was so much jealousy and so many splits about who’s right and who’s wrong until really they hadn’t started…even these educational films we saw…I saw…this one man. It’s a delightful point for me. There just…there wasn’t. There were spats beginning to come up between the astronauts. This one wanted to be first. This one was first, the other wouldn’t admit it. Allen Shepard was there first before John. Allen broke the sound barrier. That’s all he did. Came right back in, but by gum he did it. There’d only been a monkey to do it before him. But these splits were beginning to show up. Then they brought in another group of ten. Then they brought in another group of ten. And then you all of this, “I’m more educated than you are. I’m smarter than that. I should take that part. You should send three people for this, this, and this.” They were already beginning to divide things. Divisional, “he’s going to do so and so. This one’s going to do so and so.” And back in the days of those first astronauts when they were learning the name of the game was to do it all and you were one person, you better do it all. Cause you’d done it on the ground. If you were two people, you divided the work. Mostly, the pilot did the pilot work. And really and truly, I think that I was more pleased at leaving when I did than I would admit. And this is the first time I have ever said it because I don’t like spatting and fighting. I just don’t. Sit down and find a way to work with it or without it or work around it. And…but… they were too busy spatting about who had the most education, who’s the brightest, who did the better job. And I just, as I said, I think I was more pleased to be away from it because it was too much fighting, infighting, instead of just get it done.
BRAND: Could you tell me again what year you left?
NORMAND: Well, let’s see…’50…I went in ’60 and I left ten, eleven years later. So I think I told you ‘67 was when I went down so that would make it ’77.
BRAND: ’77?
NORMAND: Something like that.
BRAND: Okay.
NORMAND: It was eleven years, basically and I wasn’t even interested really enough to keep up with it. That’s why I have to stop and think because I turn my hat around when I walked out the door and made another life for me and for the family as it grew up. I tried to grow up with them and…but I was eleven years down there and I was twenty years at Kelley. And I got mad at Kelley one time. I left and was gone for a year [laughter]. Then one of my old bosses said come on back to work [laughter]. But that’s it. My life was built around NASA when it was fun. I was down there…I’ve been down just once to see the people that were still there when I had and it wasn’t fun anymore. “She’s not working!” they’d run and tell the boss you see. And it’s not, okay, she’s taking a breather. We’ll work like heck later. And, so, I was…I was losing the joy because of the spatting, the cryptic remarks behind people’s backs which aren’t necessary. They do not help the work and they do make enemies. Because somebody’s going to tell about what they said when she walked out or he walked out. And, so, I’m admitting, and it’s the first time I admit it, I really think that my medical problem-lupus is what I had-I really think that my disability came at the right time for me because looking back on it now, I haven’t looked back on it really, I lived today not yesterday. And the kids are doing…they’re living today. I hope they enjoy it where they can have pleasant things to tell when they’ve been out of the main job as long as I have because I remember things as I’m talking to you…I remember other things that really don’t fit-can’t be told.
BRAND: Is there any advice you could give to the current generation?
NORMAND: Yeah. Start liking your work and be honest enough that if you don’t like it go find another job. Find one you like! It may be pumping gas instead of sitting at a desk see. Go find what your physical body would do better or would enjoy doing. For instance, I was traveling and coming back and the service station closed at nine and I was on empty And I don’t see a motel. So I had to get this guy who’d already locked the pumps up…I had to get him to sell me some gas and I had no problem. The guy…one guy sat in the car and didn’t turn his head and the other said, “Sure, I’ll get you some gas!” And we wind up laughing and talking about a couple of things that had happened on the trip coming in that day and that I had to get back. And the other guy then gets out of the car to come over and try to tell some jokes and get in and he had no humor. That’s why he would not help. And we were really in trouble. And I was really desperate, but I left the other guy laughing. And that’s the way I like to close out. That’s exactly the way I like to close out leaving the other person laughing. The end.
BRAND: Thank you very much.