NASA Petrash, Edward - May 20, 1999
Interview with Edward Petrash
Interviewer: Stephanie Ulrich
Date of Interview: May 20, 1999
Location: Petrash home, San Antonio, Texas
This interview was conducted by Stephanie Ulrich on May 20, 1999, in San Antonio, Texas at the home of Mr. Edward Petrash.
ULRICH: First, this interview will be used for NASA and SWT purposes and it is just a research interview and we are conducting an oral history of all the employees of NASA to get a good solid background. Do you agree to being audio taped?
PETRASH: Okay, sure.
ULRICH: Okay, Mr. Petrash, I would like you to start off with a brief biographical description of yourself and your family.
PETRASH: Okay. I was born in 1919, November 1, in Moulton, Texas, and I lived there until I graduated from high school and then I worked around several places for a couple of years and finally got enough money together to go to Texas A&M [Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College in College Station, Texas]. I went through A&M and graduated from there in ’42.
So much for that bracket of time about me. Let me tell you a little about my family. My family all descended from Czechoslovakia. My four grandparents came over directly from there and my parents were both born here in Texas, about one hundred miles from here [in a] little old town called Praha. Named after Prague in Czechoslovakia. And my mother was born there also. My dad was born in Wallace, Texas, which is near Houston. And they met in Praha and got married there. My parents moved to Moulton before they had any kids and I had one brother and one sister that were older than I am. My brother was thirteen years older and my sister was eleven years older. Then I had another brother and another sister between my sister and me that died before I was born. So I only knew the two.
But anyway, that is the way I got started and I graduated from Texas A&M as an electrical engineer in May of ‘42 and I was a graduate one day and the next day I was a second lieutenant in the Army. And I was on the way to what was then Perrin Field later became Perrin Air Force Base and I think it is close up now. But I went there to get all my finally processing and get a physical exam and then I went to Fort Minemyth [Monmouth?], New Jersey [door squeaking]. I became a part of the Army Signal Corps.
I served during World War II. I stayed in the states most of the time. They’d sent me to school; I was an electronic specialist. I had a pretty good background in it. So I immediately went to radar school and when I got through with school I started teaching it and I taught it for a while then they sent me to another school [to] learn another set and so I could teach that. That kept on for a while at Fort Minemyth and then at Camp Murphy, Florida. Then from there I went to New York. Went to fixed station radio school. Am I being too detailed?
ULRICH: No.
BRAND: No. Go ahead.
PETRASH: So I went through fixed station radio school which was the high power stuff like you’d have at a regular big broadcast station and learned how to maintain and operate the radios. I also became a radio telegrapher, another words I learned how to send Morse code. I learned that when I was at A&M, and I got better at it after I got in the Army. But anyway, I did a lot of teaching about ten years of my twenty on active duty I’ve been in the teaching field.
I’m not a war hero. I’ve been overseas several times, but I’ve never heard a hostile shot fired from either side. I was I guess you might say lucky. [laughter] But, I went where they sent me and did what I was told to do. So here I am. And I went on through the army and I got married in 1947. Right after WWII II I had a two-year break. I got out. Came here to San Antonio and went to work for a consulting engineering firm, Baker Engineering Inc., I worked for them for about two years and our boss underbid a big contract; the firm went under. So I said this isn’t the kind of work for me I’m going back in the Army. So I did. Meantime I had married my boss’s secretary [laughter].
ULRICH: Uh-oh
PETRASH: And so she became my wife in June of ’47 and we’d lived together for forty-one fairly happy years, had four sons. She had one by a previous marriage and then three by me. A pair of twins and one more.
ULRICH: Are they identical or
PETRASH: They’re identical. I can show you their picture after awhile
ULRICH: Okay
PETRASH: They are like in their fifties. Now they are fifty-one. The twins are and my youngest is going to be fifty in 2000 February. And my oldest one was three years old when I met him, and I married his mother in June and he became four in August. The day after we were married he was ready to call me daddy. He looked forward to having a daddy. So we get along fine. All four of them are doing pretty well.
So I stayed in the Army until February of 1964. I got out and about three weeks later I went to work for the Johnson Space Center [JSC]. I joined NASA as part of the recovery operations branch right about half way between the Mercury and the Gemini Programs. The Mercury program, of course you know, was one astronaut at a time in the Mercury capsule or spacecraft. I shouldn’t call it capsule. But then we went into the Gemini Program and my job primarily for the first ten years was to help locate astronauts and their spacecraft, of course. If it came down out of sight, and most of them did, then we located them electronically. And I flew with either the Navy or the Air Force as part of the working part of their crew for each mission. Recovery engineers were deployed primarily to the aircraft carrier and to contingency Air Force bases around the orbital path around the world. The Air Force supported Navy ships. They were out there in the contingency area to pick up the space craft if they have to come down in an emergency landing area as opposed to their regular assigned pattern, landing pattern.
So I spent most of my time either doing it or teaching Navy people teaching Air Force people to operate the NASA locator equipment, which was much more sensitive than the regular locator equipment on the air craft. Cause we only had about a one-watt and that is a very low power transmitter which the astronauts turned on the spacecraft when they were coming down on the parachute. They turned it on at about 10,000 feet and if a helicopter is up at about 8,000 feet at that point we can see them 150 miles away or so. Pick them up and then we head the aircraft to them and home.
ULRICH: Did you actually go out and get the astronauts or you
PETRASH: We flew to them and then we had other aircraft that had recovery teams on them. They had Navy seals or Army para-rescue people who were trained [they] were good swimmers. They put a collar on the spacecraft and checked the astronauts. We had a doctor that usually flew to them after they had the collar on checked the astronauts up and see if they were fit to be picked up in the harness off the raft or collar and put them in the helicopter and flew them back to the air craft carrier.
ULRICH: Could you spell Praha for me?
PETRASH: P-R-A-H-A
ULRICH: Oh okay alright then, that was easy. You mention that you taught before you went into NASA. What did you teach?
PETRASH: I taught four years of ROTC at Oklahoma A&M as part of my Army career. I taught at the Army Signal school at Fort Mindmyth, New Jersey. I taught at the Army Signal School at Ansbach, Germany which is not far from Nuremberg. I spent three years there teaching.
ULRICH: Do you have any idea how you spell those names?
PETRASH: yes, E-N-S-B-A-C-H, N-U-R-N-B-E-R-G, I think
ULRICH: okay
PETRASH: You best check that on a map.
ULRICH: Okay. That’s fine
PETRASH: And I was also stationed in Kipzingen [Kitzingen?] and Stuttgart on another tour. I was there in Germany twice. Once from ’49 to ’52 and my youngest son incidentally was born in Nurnberg, Germany in the 15th Evac Hospital while we were in Germany. He had a German birth certificate before he ever had an American one.
ULRICH: Do you know how to spell those two names, by any chance?
PETRASH: K-P-Z-I-N-G-E-N, I think. S-T-U-T-G-A-R-D-T, I believe it is.
ULRICH: Did you enjoy it?
PETRASH: Oh yeah. I’ve had a very interesting, pretty happy life.
ULRICH: That is good.
PETRASH: I’ve been a little ill along the way once, but I made it over the hill all right. But I don’t want to go into that.
ULRICH: What was the town like—Clear Lake? What was that like?
PETRASH: Clear Lake was just a small town that kinda sprung up when they built the Johnson Spacecraft Center down there. Before NASA that was all open field except for right along the beach. Clear Lake is just right off the Galveston Bay complex. There is a big creek that flows through there called Clear Creek and they called it Clear Lake Village and Clear Lake is where most of the people, a lot of the people, that worked for NASA made their homes. Later it became part of Houston. After they got it pretty well developed Houston annexed it.
ULRICH: How did you and your family cope with the long hours and the stresses that became associated with being a part of NASA.
PETRASH: Well we were pretty well used to it having been an Army family to begin with. I was away from home quite a bit both while I was working for NASA [and in the Army]. Both of us were pretty well used to shift duties. I had done shift work in the Army and my wife had done shift work also during her lifetime. You just kind of have to bend with the wind and do what you have to do.
ULRICH: What was a typical day like?
PETRASH: When? You talking about at NASA?
ULRICH: Yeah.
PETRASH: Okay, are we at Houston or at a job?
ULRICH: At Houston.
PETRASH: Okay, in the landing and recovery division we were testing and checking the equipment we used during missions. When we were not flying a spacecraft, we would check out all the equipment and make sure it worked and then got it ready to deploy. We would then ship it to the helicopter squadrons, or the Air Force squadrons that were going to support us for a particular upcoming mission. They would in turn get it installed in their aircraft and then we would go over there and teach them how to use it either prior to a mission or in between missions. My job in between missions was to learn about the spacecraft so that if we had to service any part of it after it was recovered we all chipped in and you might say processed the spacecraft—get it ready to ship back to the states. Get all the pyrogenic fuel off of it and that kind of stuff.
ULRICH: Did you have to spend long hours working with NASA because we had heard that a lot of employees spent twelve and thirteen hours?
PETRASH: Quite often we did work overtime if we got into a test or something. My long hours of service in the Houston area came about after they quit landing on the water and started landing on the ground with the shuttle spacecraft. But the longest hours I guess came during my early career when the landing/recovery division would fly from Houston to Honolulu and then go right to work pretty quick and work some more after we got there or with very little sleep in between. Then the same way coming home. We would travel long hours after having worked maybe a full day on board ship on the spacecraft getting ready to come home. Then while we were on ship you just worked until you were finished. Sometimes that meant twelve hours.
ULRICH: How was that—working twelve hours?
PETRASH: Well, you get tired but you can do it.
ULRICH: Did you ever go to splashdown parties?
PETRASH: No. I was always somewhere out in the Atlantic or Pacific oceans when the party went on.
ULRICH: So you weren’t there.
PETRASH: The people that stayed at the control center in Houston went to them.
ULRICH: Did your family ever go.
PETRASH: No, they didn’t participate because I wasn’t there.
ULRICH: [Laughing] They missed you.
PETRASH: Uh-huh.
ULRICH: What was it like working within a group? The group mentality, how was that?
PETRASH: Well, there were a bunch of engineers. You worked with your peers and everybody speaks the same language so it makes it pretty easy.
ULRICH: Was there any conflict like one person wanted to do it one way and one person wanted to do it another way?
PETRASH: Oh we could work that out. There wasn’t any real conflict, maybe a little argument here, there and yonder. Sometimes a supervisor would have to get in the middle but not anything of consequence. At least I never had [one].
ULRICH: Did you feel at the time that you were well paid for the job you were doing?
PETRASH: Yes. It was the type of job [that] if I had been financially able to do, I would have been one of Uncle Sam’s dollar a year men if I had to, to do the job. They paid me to do something I loved to do.
ULRICH: Oh really, that’s really good.
PETRASH: I [got] to go to Honolulu and go down to the beach once in a while and go different places and they paid me to go do it. [laughter] They paid my hotel; paid my transportation.
ULRICH: Wasn’t that nice?
PETRASH: I even took my wife overseas with me for one month one time—to Honolulu. We went over there to train sailors at Pearl Harbor. We trained for two weeks and then we on a two week mission. My wife spent the whole month—two weeks with me and then two weeks with another officers’ wife, I mean another engineer’s wife. They toured Oahu while we were out to sea on the aircraft carrier.
ULRICH: What other neat places did you go to?
PETRASH: Well, that’s a long list.
ULRICH: Oh [laughing]. Well give me a few.
PETRASH: Okay. I’ve been to Boston. I’ve been to New Hampshire, to an Air Force base up there. I’ve been to Bermuda. I’ve been to the Azores. I’ve been to Portugal. I’ve been to Ramstein, Germany again even after having been there during my Army career. On the Pacific side, I’ve been to Honolulu I’d say about eighteen times. I’ve even hit Christmas Island but that’s not very neat--that’s an atoll. I’ve been to the Philippines. There’s one I’m trying to think of. It’s south of the equator and I went there for Apollo 11. We’ll have to come back to that.
ULRICH: Okay, that’s fine. In your opinion, have events been portrayed accurately in the books and movies?
PETRASH: Pretty much. I think some of them are a little — shall we say, try to make them a little more interesting than they would be to the average observer. But basically, yes.
ULRICH: Is there anything that you would put in them to make them more accurate?
PETRASH: Not that I can think of right now, and I haven’t been involved with them since I retired.
ULRICH: Okay.
PETRASH: I haven’t been involved too much with them since I retired.
ULRICH: And when did you retire?
PETRASH: I retired in January of 1982.
ULRICH: Under what terms did you leave NASA? Was it good?
PETRASH: Fine. They were trying to have a reduction in force. They had to many people and they had to cut down on spending. So to accomplish that those of us who were eligible for retirement were requested to retire early. So I did.
ULRICH: That was nice.
PETRASH: So I had worked for them at that point for about eighteen years.
ULRICH: Wow. How did you feel or what type of celebration did you have when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon?
PETRASH: Let’s see. I was on this island we were talking about. We didn’t really do anything like big celebrating. We didn’t have time.
ULRICH: Because you were busy getting ready for the splashdown?
PETRASH: Ya.
ULRICH: Do you remember how you felt?
PETRASH: Oh we were all elated of course. We thought it was all very interesting, too. We were kept pretty well posted by radio.
ULRICH: What about Apollo 13?
PETRASH: I was in Houston for that-- in the operations center.
ULRICH: What was going on in your mind during all that?
PETRASH: Just how are we going to fix this thing. I didn’t play a great big part in bringing them back. Of course that’s out of my particular line.
ULRICH: How do you think the Cold War affected your drive and NASA’s drive to land on the moon and beat the Soviet Union?
PETRASH: Will you say that again?
ULRICH: How did the Cold War affect your drive and NASA’s drive to land on the moon?
PETRASH: I think it helped a whole lot to speed it up. Yes. First, starting with [President John F.] Kennedy and then with [President Richard M.] Nixon.
ULRICH: Why is that do you think?
PETRASH: We just didn’t want to let them get ahead of us. We couldn’t afford to. And they were ahead of us when they launched Sputnik by a long way. We failed to get anything in orbit for quite some time but we finally did.
ULRICH: Did you feel it was a patriotic duty to join NASA because you wanted to help them in the Cold War?
PETRASH: No. I just wanted to get into the space program. I thought it was very interesting. I was more interested in the technical aspect than I was [the patriotic part]. In fact, if I had wanted to be patriotic-- I was in the Army at the time the Cold War started. When Korea broke out I was in Germany. When I retired things were still going on and if I wanted to be real patriotic, the Army invited me to stay but I retired anyway.
ULRICH: So you retired from the Army and then joined NASA?
PETRASH: Yes. I retired about two weeks before.
PETRASH: Are you going to do the transcribing or who does it?
ULRICH: I do. So if there are mistakes its my fault.
PETRASH: [laughing] Well, let me read your transcript before you publish it if you can and I can maybe help you with it. I’m a good editor. My main job is editing reports other engineers write, I’m chief engineer in the company.
ULRICH: So after NASA you went to this engineering firm and you edit?
PETRASH: Well I retired for about three years and then I joined forces with my present boss through a mutual friend. He needed a registered professional engineer to open up his firm that he wanted to open. A mutual friend brought us together. He with the capital and the drive to run the company and me with my engineering know-how to furnish my license to make it legal to call ourselves engineers. So I’ve been with him since July of 1985.
ULRICH: That’s not much of a retirement. You were only retired for three years and then you go back to work?
PETRASH: Well, supposedly it was part-time. For the first five years while we were building up the company it was almost full-time for me, but I didn’t mind because I was real interested in doing it too.
ULRICH: How many hours a week do you work now?
PETRASH: Oh, anywhere between zero and twenty.
ULRICH: Wow.
PETRASH: It just depends on what comes up. What we do mostly is investigate cases involving insurance or court trials. We’re expert witnesses.
ULRICH: Oh, okay.
PETRASH: We investigate fires. In my case I’ve investigated several electrocutions where people got killed in somebody’s house or with somebody’s machine. Why did he get killed? What shocked him? Whose fault was it? Okay?
ULRICH: Okay. I think I understand.
PETRASH: That’s what we’re in business for is to do those types of investigations.
ULRICH: Are there any questions that you think I should have asked or anything that you would like to tell me?
PETRASH: Well, as I mention when we started, I don’t have any questions but as you see I did not do anything spectacular that would have made headlines, but I feel like I contributed my fair share to my Uncle Sam.
ULRICH: You’re part of the team.
PETRASH: Yea and I have some paperwork here you should look at if you want some pictures.
ULRICH: What is your most memorable experience at NASA?
PETRASH: Oh, there’s too many of them. There are a lot of memorable ones. I guess that month I spend in Honolulu training so forth and I had my wife over there. It was one of the most pleasant months I had ever spent because it was good duty and I was able to stay with her for two weeks. It cost me two dollars extra to put her in my room in the hotel a night [laughing] at the time. [laughing] I still can’t think the name of that island.
ULRICH: When we leave you are going to think of it.
PETRASH: Yea. I’ve got your phone number, I’ll call you and you can put it where you need it in the tape.
ULRICH: Okay. So anything else you would like to share with us?
PETRASH: My pictures, if you’d want to look at them.
ULRICH: Yea, but on the tape.
PETRASH: Not that I can think of, how about you do you have any questions?
Brand: I’m observing. [laughing] Not right now
PETRASH: Oh, are you a graduate student also?
Brand: Yes sir. Yes sir [clock ringing]
PETRASH: I have a book [about] NASA’s history up to a point that I am going to show you here in a few minutes.
PETRASH: I mentioned to you while we were between tapes that I had been to Japan. I ended WWII in Honolulu at Fort Shafter. We were on the verge of loading up the ship with all of our equipment. I had three radar maintenance units with me. Three teams to go out and repair gun laying radar equipment if necessary. And I understand that we were standing by in Honolulu at Fort Shafter. We had all of our equipment in grease paper, crated, loaded on trucks ready to go aboard ship to do the invasion of Japan, when the atom bomb happened. That prevented [the invasion] from happening. Otherwise, I may not be sitting here.
So the end of the war was a highlight in my career at that time. I got thrown into a water fountain as part of the celebration. We did have something bigger than a splashdown party when that happened. Everybody celebrated; the whole town celebrated. I understand that people here in San Antonio and everywhere else did a lot of celebrating too. So I went over after the war was over in August. I remained at Fort Shafter until November and they flew us over to Japan.
I was stationed right near MacArthur’s headquarters, and I actually worked on the top floor of the same building he did. I had a bunch of, what was the predecessor to today’s microwave systems, I had several of them on top of that building. My team operated them for military communication purposes. We tied MacArthur’s headquarters to Tachikawa Air Force base and don’t ask me to spell that one [laughing]. T-A-C-H-I-K-A-W-A and when you let me edit it I’ll look up the spelling. Hiremnagawa was another Air Force base over there the Americans had. We had a big receiver installation for fixed station radio that was for long haul communications. That was another site. We tied all those in with MacArthur’s headquarters with our equipment up there. I spent the rest of my Army wartime career right there at MacArthur’s headquarters. Then I went home to get out. I was at home about a month and I went to work for this firm here in San Antonio. After that fizzled out I went back in the Army. Meantime, I could have gone to work for Westinghouse if I had wanted to quit the firm I had just joined. I often wondered what would have happened if I had gone that route instead of the military. I’m comfortable now. I’ve got medical care and everything else. That’s why I live in San Antonio now—to take advantage of my military retirement benefits that save me a lot of money. The Army takes care of its own. I’ll give them a plug, too.
ULRICH: I have only one more question. Do you think in this society we could do what you all did with Apollo and Mercury today?
PETRASH: What do you mean? If we had to start over?
ULRICH: If that never happened do you think we could do this now?
PETRASH: I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t. But we wouldn’t have a lot of the things we have now. Like you wouldn’t have satellite communications for instance. You couldn’t make a twelve-cent a minute call to Germany like you can now. You’d pay four dollars a minute like we used to before NASA. There are many medical things that have been discovered through NASA’s efforts to take care of the astronauts. Velcro is a fastener which is a NASA innovation. Nylar [mylar?] is one and Teflon are all spin-offs from the NASA program.
ULRICH: What about the camaraderie that y’all had back in the sixties and seventies?
PETRASH: Well, we were all part of a big team.
ULRICH: Do you think we would have that today?
PETRASH: I don’t know. Now you’re talking about a different generation of people. You should be able to tell me the answer to that. [laughter] Do you think…?
ULRICH: I don’t think so.
PETRASH: You don’t?
ULRICH: No, I don’t.
PETRASH: Why?
ULRICH: Now the interviewer is the interviewee. [laughter]
PETRASH: Well I’m getting educated, too.
ULRICH: Well, I just don’t think that people today work as a group like they did back when you worked.
PETRASH: I think I would have to agree with you there. But if you organize a team to do a technical job—it’s just like the Spurs work as a group.
ULRICH: That’s true.
PETRASH: They can do it. All you’ve got to do is make several little groups into a big group and you’ve got a team. Except you’ve got technical people instead of athletes.
ULRICH: But they get paid millions of dollars which could be the driving factor.
PETRASH: Yah.
ULRICH: Whereas with you it wasn’t like paying millions of dollars.
PETRASH: Well that’s true, too. But I won’t comment about that.
ULRICH: [laughter] Okay.
PETRASH: Not on tape anyway.
ULRICH: [laughter] Okay. Well that’s it.
PETRASH: Now did we cover everything?
ULRICH: Oh, Nixon.
PETRASH: Oh, Richard Nixon was on board the aircraft carrier that picked up Apollo 11 with us--the first men back from the moon. All of us got to meet him and chat with him a little bit.
ULRICH: Was he nice?
PETRASH: Yah, he was real nice—friendly. I didn’t get real well acquainted with him as I have with you already here. [laughter] All of us on the team, just about, got to meet him. Only the team leader and the doctor were able to talk to the astronauts because they went immediately to a quarantine facility which was kind of like a trailer without wheels.
ULRICH: For how many days?
PETRASH: They stayed in it until they got back to Houston. We had it on board the aircraft carrier. As soon as they got on the aircraft carrier they went into this quarantine facility because they didn’t know what kind of bugs they might have picked up on the moon. And that was it was all about.
Another highlight of my career was that I brought back two loads of moon rocks from the Pacific area. I didn’t bring back any from Apollo 11 but I did get some from 12 and 14. I got half the rocks. They had to send them back by military aircraft all the way to Houston—the astronauts and the rocks. I was a courier for half the rocks and another engineer was the courier for the other half on another aircraft. So if you lost one aircraft between Samoa and Houston then you didn’t lose all the rocks. You follow? [clock ringing]
ULRICH: Uh-huh.
PETRASH: I could sit here and talk for hours if you just let me think long enough.
ULRICH: [laughter] I think that covers it.
PETRASH: Now we talked about Samoa. I remembered that for you and I told you about my career in Japan and like I said I’ve had two tours in Germany.
Brand: What did you do in Clear Lake for fun whenever you did have time off?
PETRASH: Well we had dances. Most of our fun was small, in home parties that we went to with friends just like we do now practically. We had a few big dances where you had the whole division present but that was very rare. In the military we went to the officer’s club almost every Saturday night we could but at NASA that doesn’t happen. I don’t know what they are doing now. Everybody at NASA is high-minded and pretty technical and doesn’t go for celebrating too much.
ULRICH: Were there support groups for the wives of the engineers?
PETRASH: Yah. I don’t know of any wives’ clubs. The astronaut’s wives got together quite a bit but as far as the engineer’s wives--you made your own friends and that was about it.
ULRICH: Anything else you can think of?
PETRASH: No. Not until you break the tabs out of the tape. I guess that’s it.