Years of intense training meant I already knew the spacecraft inside out. However, there was no end to the geology and science experiment knowledge I could absorb. I happily soaked it up once again as I rejoined the training routine.
Dave and Jim were less keen. Dave told me he was eager to get another flight, and I sensed he didn’t want to wait until the shuttle flew. The crews for the Skylab space station missions were already assigned: no chance to fly there. But one last Apollo flight was planned after that. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project would be the first joint mission with the Soviet Union. Dave naturally expressed interest in it. Command of the first international spaceflight would be the crowning glory of his space career. Of course, there was no shortage of contenders for that seat. But with three flights now under his belt, Dave had increasing influence in the office politics that could decide the issue.
Jim wasn’t interested in Apollo 17 for a different reason: he was ready to quit. After the relentless pace of moving from Apollo 12 right into Apollo 15, he had no interest in the training grind again. Worse, he was the backup for Jack Schmitt, the only professional geologist assigned to a lunar landing. The scientific community had pushed for Schmitt to walk on the moon for years. If Jack caught a cold, we had the feeling that Jim wouldn’t replace him. Instead, NASA would spend millions of dollars delaying the mission until Jack was better. Jim had no chance to fly again. His heart wasn’t in it.
A couple of years older than me and Dave, Jim had already put in twenty years with the air force, meaning he could retire from military life and draw an air force pension. Dave and I still had a couple of years to go before we could do that. So Jim began to look for something else to do. He found it in religion.
When Jim began to talk about how he had felt the presence of God on the moon, I was confused. For one thing, Jim hadn’t shared this experience during the flight or on the world tour. Secondly, I just couldn’t understand why, if someone felt that God was all around him in everything he did, they’d be closer to God on the moon than on Earth. I had long talks with Jim as I tried to puzzle out what he meant. The general public frequently asked us about spiritual experiences in the otherworldly realm of space, and Jim’s response seemed to answer that constant inquiry a little too neatly for me. But the more we talked, the more I understood he was firm about rededicating his life to this new, spiritual direction. I hadn’t felt any connection to a spiritual deity when I was in space. But if Jim said he had, then that was fine by me.
Jim grew close to a minister at the local Baptist church in Nassau Bay and began to give religious speeches around Houston in his free time. He had a direction. So did Dave, it seemed. I wasn’t sure what I might do. I could stick around and one day command a space shuttle flight. Or I could go into private industry and put all of my aerospace engineering experience to good use. For now, however, I wanted to make Apollo 17 as good a flight as possible.
Then that promising world crumbled and slipped out of my grasp.
In the fall of 1971, right after the flight, I had sent Herrick his forty-four covers, keeping to our understanding. I expected him to keep his word and not sell them. Additionally, at some point during our busy travel schedule when my mind was elsewhere, Herrick called to ask what I was doing with my own covers. They were sitting on my office desk, I told him. He suggested that, for safekeeping, I send them to him so he could look after them for me in his safety deposit box. I trusted him and followed his suggestion. I was a fool.
My arrangement with Herrick was completely within NASA rules. The other deal, with Eiermann, was also under way. I understood that Dave had, as he agreed, sent a hundred covers to Eiermann, who in turn passed them to Sieger. Soon afterward, I received a German bank book in the mail with the agreed amount in it. So did Jim and Dave. I didn’t give it much thought, figuring the money was safely out of the country in a foreign bank, and that I could forget about it for a few years, until Merrill and Alison were ready to go to college. I’d been assured, after all, that the covers would only be discreetly sold many years after we were out of public life.
Then I heard a disturbing report that Herrick had begun to publicly sell his covers through a stamp dealer in Connecticut. Worst of all, the news came from Deke. He had received a letter from a stamp-collecting company asking him for confirmation that the covers now on the market were genuine. Deke, of course, asked me what this was all about. I calmly told him. With the Herrick arrangement, I had nothing to hide; I had worked completely within NASA’s rules.
Privately, however, I hit the roof. Herrick had betrayed me. I wrote him a scathing letter and demanded to know what the hell he was doing, explaining that he might destroy my career with his actions. I never received any explanation. Whether he meant to do this to me all along, I can only speculate. All I knew was that our verbal agreement had been extremely clear, and I should never have trusted a guy I now realized I hadn’t known at all. After all, I didn’t even know his first name—and I still don’t. My gut feeling about him had been completely wrong.
I didn’t think it could get worse. Then it did—much worse. The covers in Germany began to hit the stamp-collecting market, too.
To this day, I don’t know why for sure, because my involvement in that deal was limited to nodding my head at a dinner meeting. I heard later that Eiermann had never instructed Sieger to delay the sales for a few years, so Sieger began to sell them almost immediately to his list of private clients.
Dave did the right thing. In the spring of 1972, he told Sieger to forget the whole thing. Keep the covers, cancel the bank accounts, keep the money. The three of us wanted nothing more to do with this. We each returned the bank books. We lost the twenty-one thousand dollars by doing so. And, I should stress, we did this before NASA asked us anything about a deal with Sieger—before NASA even knew about it. The whole world of postal covers felt seedier with every passing day, but I could at least maintain a scrap of moral pride, knowing we were out of it without being told by officials to cancel the deal.
Yet we were not out of it. It didn’t take too long for Deke to also get word about the German covers. While I was busy with Apollo 17 training around the country he began calling me regularly, asking me for details.
I told him everything about the Herrick deal, and suggested that the Sieger deal was best explained by Dave. Apparently Jim told Deke exactly the same thing.
But Deke kept coming back to me. “I understand that you are the stamp collector on the crew,” he’d tell me, strongly implying that I arranged both cover deals. I could only explain the Herrick deal again—embarrassing, unfortunate, but I had done nothing wrong—and advise him to ask Dave about the rest.
Then Deke dropped another bombshell. He told me that Dave had said I was the stamp collector on the crew and that all questions about all covers should be referred to me.
What was going on? Did Dave tell Deke that I had also arranged the deal with Sieger? Or was Deke just seeing what I would say when accused? I guess I’ll never know. I never questioned Dave about it. At the time, the three of us didn’t talk much about the covers with each other. I think we were all trying to keep our heads in the sand, stay away from the issue as much as we could, and hope it would blow over. Plus, Dave was my trusted commander, and I assumed he would take care of me and Jim. I didn’t want to believe he would say such a thing.