I don’t ever recall asking NASA for permission to race cars, but I don’t think I kept it a secret either. It was just something I did when I had the free time. Everyone knew that the four of us raced, and neither Deke nor Al ever said anything to me. The feeling was that we were all big boys, and while racing was not against the rules, they expected us to be careful.
Later on, when I was assigned to a backup crew for a space mission, Deke did tell me, “Don’t do anything that will take you out. Don’t hurt yourself. When you get to a point where you think you are doing something too dangerous, then get out of it.” He was right: it was more important to stay healthy and on a crew than to have fun on weekends.
Perhaps I should have listened earlier; I finally did have an accident at a racetrack. There was a driver we used to race against all the time who also worked as an undertaker. He would come to all the events with his race car inside the back of a hearse. He had a hard time staying away from other cars on the track and had bumped or wrecked a car in each of his last three races. We all hoped we wouldn’t be the next driver he’d crash into. The morning of one race he came up to me and said, “Al, I have a feeling that today is your day.” That was an ominous thing to hear, but I decided to race anyway.
The track was an old World War II runway, which had been surfaced with a mix of asphalt and seashells. Over the years the seashells had worked loose, and they formed a loose, slippery coating on the top of the track. If you stayed on the main track it wasn’t too slippery, but toward the edges it was easy to skid. As the undertaker and I came around the first turn together, he went wide and started rotating as he slid on the shells. Yet he never took his foot off the gas. As soon as his car gained traction again, he shot across the track, right at me. There was nothing I could do. With a loud crunch he slammed right into the back of my car and almost tore the end off.
Although I escaped injury, the danger was clear. If I kept racing I might lose my chance to fly in space. Nothing was worth taking that risk, so with regret I sold my car and quit the sport altogether. Although I believe Pete Conrad continued to race a little longer, the team soon broke up.
Gordo Cooper wasn’t so lucky. He was one of my best friends by then, but I also knew he was bad news. He taunted authority. Deke pulled him out of a race at the Daytona racetrack, insisting that Gordo focus on spacecraft checkout work. Gordo had always pushed the rules a little, and this edict annoyed him no end. I think it had a lot to do with his leaving NASA altogether; he and the agency never recovered their faith in each other.
Car racing wasn’t my only leisure pastime. I played handball with Mike Collins, raced speedboats, and also found time to water-ski. My home was only a short stroll away from a little bay that opened onto Clear Lake, and I water-skied down there almost every weekend to relieve tension and forget about work.
Many people assumed that astronauts needed to be in top physical condition, and that NASA had some kind of exercise plan we all had to follow. Not true. Our bosses believed we were grown-ups who knew we had to stay in shape, and they allowed us to follow our individual sports and exercise pursuits. Ironically, we had some pretty unhealthy habits. For example, just about everybody smoked back then. It was not frowned on like it is today.
I’m still smoking today. In fact I am probably the only person in the whole goddamn program who hasn’t given it up. I have managed to kick the habit for a couple of years at a time, but never completely. I smoked all the way through NASA, and so did almost everybody I ever shared an office with. If I could have worked out how to do it safely, I’d have smoked all the way to the moon and back.
To keep up the waterskiing, I eventually bought a boat with one of the instructor pilots for NASA’s airplanes out at nearby Ellington Field. Another astronaut named Walt Cunningham soon joined us. Walt and I also began playing handball two or three times a week, and we became very competitive, which really kept me on my toes. The Ellington instructor who joined us was competitive, too, but in a way that eventually took a dark turn.
This guy was always jealous of the various perks that we received as astronauts. He could never understand why he wasn’t included in deals such as the Corvette leases. After all, he was one of our instructors, so he believed that he must be better than, or at least equal to us, and deserved any astronaut perks. Sadly, behind our backs, he turned to illegal activity to keep up with our lifestyles.
He started flying an airplane to help smuggle marijuana across the Mexican border. Eventually, of course, he was caught and sent to jail. Because of his jealousy, he lost everything. Ironically, he would have made a great astronaut. He was a talented pilot and very bright. Yet he wasn’t smart enough to see that smuggling wasn’t the way to make money and keep pace with us. It was a sad situation: a guy rubbing shoulders with NASA’s astronauts one day and the next day frozen out forever. We had to forget about him and move on with our careers.
Academic classes and weekend activities weren’t the only things we new guys were doing in our early years at NASA. When it fit around other activities, we did survival training. A spacecraft might have to come down almost anywhere on Earth in an emergency. We could spend days, or even weeks, on our own before help came, with only the items in our spacecraft for survival. Rather than carry out this training all in one go, we did it whenever there was time, often with months between sessions.
NASA left us in the large, arid deserts of eastern Washington State for around five days, giving us spacecraft parachutes and a basic survival kit, but not much else. Working in groups of three just like an Apollo crew, we’d make tents and clothes out of the parachutes, and construct solar stills to collect water. More exciting, however, was when they sent us down to the air force’s survival school in the jungles of Panama.
In the classroom for our initial briefing, I surveyed the room. Dozens of stuffed animal heads were mounted on the walls. Studying the decorations a little closer, I spotted something odd: some of them were moving. Each one had a live boa constrictor wrapped around it. This training would be quite an experience. The day grew even odder when the instructors grabbed one of the boas, then skinned and cooked it. This, we were told, was our lunch.
After some classes on edible jungle plants and animals, a helicopter dropped us off in the rain forest with some air force survival instructors, and we set up camp for a couple of days. The jungle turned out to be quite different from my expectations. A real jungle doesn’t have any undergrowth, because little sunlight makes it through the thick tree canopy. The trees were nearly a hundred feet tall, and we could see for more than half a mile under them.
Once again, we only had the same equipment stowed on an Apollo spacecraft. We made hammocks, slung between two trees to keep us off the wet ground. Not surprisingly for a rain forest, it rained on us a lot, which made conditions pretty miserable. Soon we all stripped down to our long johns; we must have looked pretty amusing. We ate emergency rations and monkeypod tree seed pods, which had a sweet edible pulp.
On the last day, we broke camp and trudged down a path to the nearby river. On the way, one of our instructors showed us how to milk the venom from a fer-de-lance snake, which is an extremely venomous creature. Lord knows what he was thinking, but Bruce McCandless then grabbed the snake and stuffed it in a burlap sack.
We put on life preservers, jumped into rafts and floated downstream to a Chocó Indian village, with Bruce still holding his bag. The Chocó put on a grand welcome. We made our way up through the bamboo houses to the chief’s hut. Four live iguanas, their legs tied behind them so they couldn’t move, lay in a corner. Guess what we had for lunch? The roast iguana was actually very good; it tasted exactly like chicken. The meal was better than I thought it would be, and a suitable feast to end our time in Panama. The survival practice was a learning experience we hoped we’d never have to carry out for real. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun, an escape from the technical work we did back in the States.