Those are nasa engineers over there and this was the world that was normal to them and that the wives tried very hard to keep normal and grounded. You kind of alluded to how much the wives seem to change after the Apollo Program and i was wondering if you could share some of the astronauts of the wives thoughts on what was it like when that ended and did they feel like it should continue and almost is there almost is there a sense of ptsd among the families . Yeah, i think everyone is pretty sad when nixon ended the Apollo Program and these wives kyc today and i think in history they will continue to be seen. Ive told this to them as sort of our pioneer space women. They were the pioneers. Their husbands were doing something we had never done before. You know, just the surreal moments of going out in your backyard as jane conrad remember to me when her husband was up there on apollo 12 Walking Around the moon and a house that just cleared out. She had all the wives over for a party. It was about 5 30 in the morning and she wandered out by the pool. She looked at the moon and just sort of stared at it. I think we can all feel this when we look at the moon and think wow we went up there as a country, as human beings. She said wow. She looked at them and then suddenly remembered when she was a little girl how she used to look for the man in the moon. Then she said this is trippy. My husband is the man in the moon, you know . She said for this one moment she had almost this mystical feeling of clarity. After all this was the late 60s. People were into that spiritual stuff. She said it basically vanished in a moment and there she was going inside to do the dishes. So moments like that but to get back to the fallout after the Apollo Program, i think probably the most prominent example is looking at buzz aldrin and his wife joan. Buzz like many of the guys had a very hard time coming back from the moon after the flight the families of the crewmembers and their their wives would go in these taboos around the world tours especially after apollo 11. They went all over the world presenting moon rocks and lucite cases. The queen of england ephedra, heads of state and while they were on the steward joan shared her diary with me that she kept. She starts seeing buzz spiraling out of control. He has been outspoken about his alcoholism and depression that he dealt with after coming back from the moon and that was something john felt acutely changed her life. She and those ended up getting divorced. They have three kids. She has this one entry in her diary where she says you know, shes trying to tell buzz i think our lives will eventually return to normal and buzz just look at her and he said joan, i have been to the moon. Nothing is ever going to be the same. I think that was true for many of the families. Lily when we were in the book tent yesterday we saw the new book youre talking about and you mentioned how you flipped a page in a magazine in the story came to life. If you have a moment at the end will you talk about the red leather diary and the incident that caused you to almost flip the page and find a a book theyre . Sure, i will. I will say that for a moment. I havent read the book but i look forward to reading it. My question, dont know the ages of the woman you are referring to but that my question is in your research with them to the idea ever come up for the conversation of the commercialization with space travel and would any of them end up touting the galactica, would they do that themselves . We should send these astrowives into space. A great idea. It has many of them what they thought about going into space because back in the 60s, i spent a lot of time with my life magazine of course then you have these articles about you know we are going to be putting up the hilton out there in a couple of the astronauts have the crackpot scheme that they would open a chain of a w wrote their stance on the moon when we eventually colonize. Some of the wives will sound like a former tough morning. A woman named below Cunningham Said i would have gone up there in a heartbeat. Trudy cooper who was an early pilot who ended up flying in a power puff derby would have been up there in a minute but some of the wives are like are you kidding . I want to stay down here with my feet on the ground or you know 0g for me and of course they all hoped we would continue to explore space and push the envelope as their husbands used to say. I will just mention very briefly the red leather diary. My first book because i think it reflects on why i want to tell this kind of story. I grew up in chicago and moved to new york to go to bernard which is the Womens College of columbia university. It was really in new york. Im a city girl and my husband is from georgia so we absolutely love savannah. It was in new york with that density of people and i think Walking Around and looking at these Old Buildings and all these windows that led up that i realized sort of naively i guess a young woman, just the incredible amount of Untold Stories and how everybody has a story and somehow i just wanted to be able to reveal some of those distant stars i guess. Very serendipitously i have to say i feel quite lucky. One of our dogs is named lucky but strange things happen to me. Or maybe i see the world in a different way and so i notice things that seem almost fairytale like like they are meant to be. I came out of my first Apartment Building in new york shortly after he graduated and was working at a news clerk at the New York Times which i would say is like the Devil Wears Prada but without the product. Lots of bowties and the oldschool newsman who would give me bits of advice. I really wanted to be a novelist which im actually going to return to for my next project which is going to be fiction. I came out of a building and there were something to do to resist which was a dumpster. Not an ordinary dumpster because it was filled i could see with about 50 old steamer trunks. These are the old kinds that were brought on the titanic. Vintage labels from paris and monaco and the french line. Listen i am not a dumpster diver by trade but i do love vintage clothing and a good story. What do i do . At 10 00 in the morning. I literally climb on top of this dumpster and you are all looking at me very oddly. I start going to these things and their old flapper dresses on the vintage collection of handbags and among the sort of urban treasure rack was a red leather diary kept by a woman from 1929 to 1934 at the height of the depression. A long true fairytale short i ended up tracking down the diarys owner at 90 with the help of a private investigator and befriending her. She had wanted to be a writer. She hosted a literary salon. She was a renaissance woman who had love affairs with men and women as a young woman. Her story had spoken to me so much that i ended up telling the story of how this chronicle made its way back to her and was sort of given as a gift to the rest of the world. I think telling that forgotten womans story was very intriguing to me. Little things i remember from professors saying to me at school the good stories often little margins are footnotes that decide the page. Its not the typical heroic motto but its the other side of the coin. I think certainly it was that tradition and that desire and hunger to tell redemptive women stories. Telling an untold story but there is also an emotional catharsis for the subject when their story which has been sort of under the radar is finally revealed to the world. I know from speaking to the wives that not only did this book taken back in time but i think that they feel very gratified that people care about their story and i dont think many of them call themselves heroes. They were so in support of their husbands and were saying that as is arrogant and inappropriate. I certainly see them as heroines myself. I think they have the right stuff. So im going to end there and thank you so much. [applause] host hi i Michael Neufeld and i am at carrier at the space museum and im here to talk to jay barbree about his book shepard by referee on the space program. Its very nice to talk to you. Guest thank you very much. Host why did you decide to write this book . Guest neil and i talked about it for about 20 years because we had been Close Friends for half a century. I did a book with Alan Shepherd called moonshot. It was on the New York Times bestsellers list and he did the introduction of that. So we had talked because he wanted to come he want a biography. He wanted a story of his life a flight. He felt that anything he did any of the other astronauts could do especially jim lovell or tom stafford. He was one of them to get equal credit. He never thought of himself as being anything special but he wanted the story of the flight told than we were going to do it and when he passed away we have already worked one chapter out and i decided to go ahead because you know and do the flight. Suddenly it made sense. I looked around and all the people from apollo practically all all of them are gone. We have to realize that over half the people on the planet where you can hear when he walked on the moon. Anyone less than 45 years old because the 45th anniversary is coming up this next week. So anyway they were saying to me the other astronauts jay if you dont do it whos going to do it . So we need neil story. Jim lovell calls it a great book and the answer to neils legacy. We did our level best to try to get this done. We have had a heavy library sale advance sale so thats great. We were trying to get neil story in the libraries for history and hopefully we have taken a shot at it and hopefully we have done good. Host there was one earlier biography the first man. Guest as the official, thats his official biography. Hes signed to do that and this is not a biography. Its her recreation of his story on direct observation and research generally referred to as a repertoire. That is what it is. I hate biographies. Host you have already done to better cause i biography somewhere between biography and autobiography. The other was the shepherd book. Guest that was the moonshot i was talking about. Host in terms of how you started this book was that because you had a friendship with Neil Armstrong going back a long time and when did you meet him . Guest i met him in 1962 when he came in with the gemini 9 the second groups of astronauts. There were a couple of personal things in 1964. He lost a young girl, karen and she died of a brain tumor at the age of two. It was really difficult for neil. I lost a young son and one morning he came into the Howard Johnson on cocoa beach. This was 1964 and i was talking with wally sharad. My wife was in the hospital and he looked and he said who shot your dog . I told them i said well i told him about it. He and i got to talking about it. Most people didnt know he even had a daughter let alone that he had lost her. That was while he was flying the x15 out of edwards which is now named after Neil Armstrong. Its been Neil Armstrong research center. So anyway we just got to a point that we were trusted friends is what i like to say. The ap people say you were neils best friend and i say i wasnt neils best friend. I dont know who the heck neils best friend was. We were trusted friends and we work together. When the challenger blew up he was called to be the vice chairman to actually do the investigation. I broke the story two days later on the tom brokaw show and the first person to comment when i got off the air was neil. He said what do you know that you didnt tell brokaw . I said i told brokaw everything. We worked together on that in all through in a couple of times wanted to get started on the book and never did. There was nothing special about it until that morning. The two children. Right. Then it grew. I, i would like to give the viewer just a little background. He started when . I started for nbc news 1958. Ahead been covering the launch is that since april of 58. Also, i was a veteran when alan shepard flew. 1961. I didnt set out to do it, but i wound up covering every flight by american astronauts. There have been 166 of them. Was fortunate enough if the look on the inside, the cover of the book youll see a picture of me on the air when kneele made the step of the month. You can see him across Mission Control stepping off on the surface of the moon. I knew some things. You know, he told me some things. Even though he is passed on, will not break that confidence. We had a working agreement. Being a reporter generally if i say to you, the discussion is not off the record. But with kneele you had that there to protect. So before i would use anything and will say, pillhead. Yet we never had a situation where he fully chose to me. I was lucky that i got a lot of reports from kneele behind the scenes. And he was investigating the challenger accident as vice chairman he and i talked a couple of times a week. Captain up today on what i had and all of that choice. Did you know, we work together. He came, forays into the way nbc decided to give me. [indiscernible] they said to me you cant invite anybody because the wheels are coming down from nbc in new york. Finally they called me and said, you can invite three astronauts. Okay. I invited kneele and john glenn. And they were in the book of pictures of him. It went through general training together. That is where their started even though there were from the same state. So alan shepard was dead. I could not invite alan shepard. I invited commercial spirit of three of them came. I was very lucky. Kneele did go anywhere. But he came down. He and john had earlier that year ask me to come up to cleveland and keynote what they called the 500 club. They had all 19 after runs from ohio. I did the keynote. We just had a great time. Theres a picture in the beginning, the introduction to the book. My wife and myself and kneele sitting at the table laughing. John glenn was up to extend up, the. Anyway, that was sort of the way things went. But i never did anything on the air without saying, hey, i want to do this. And that was the relationship you established early on, released after the 1964 encounter. Before that time he just was kind of anonymous to most people. Of course he was terribly shy maybe its too strong, but he was certainly very reserved and private. He was a very private person. He would think everything out. If you ask him a question he would think it through before he would answer to make sure he did not give you an answer that wasnt true that he would have to change later. He was called the quickest pilot that ever lived and the slowest person ever to answer you. So you probably know the mercury astronauts very well at the time of the fed chairman 99. Yes. Of those guys in those days and the press corps, the astronauts. There were no others. Was there any pump in the road in the transition, interbreeding nine new guys into already a wellestablished group . Several. We got a great chapter in there. It involves kneele and tom, the innkeeper down there. These guys are sort of standoffish. The after air way into the club. So, you know what you guys need to do. You need to throw a dinner for the. Naked black tie. Show the respect and all of this. He said, put it together. Well, anyway, the first words that came out of his mouth were, who is going to pay for this . Is said, well, the hotel will pay for it. Tom went to the Naval Academy of scholarship. I even though he went in the air force and became a threestar general, he retired as a threestar general afterwards. But his mother had to borrow. His father was dead and his mother had to borrow the money to buy the bus ticket to send him to the full scholarship to annapolis. He was very tight with money. And as one of the jokes, he said the last time the stafford picked up a check she was hitchhiking. They get together and cut to the chase on it. They brought in guys in taxes, the best of wines. When they sat down for dinner, you know, they brought it out. It was supposed to be fried feel with of ron potatoes. What it was, it was fried cardboard. The silence had been sitting in the son of the. They all had a big laugh. This culture,. Oh, but thats the pilots. They always did that. Practical jokes. And the turtle club. I will not surrender that . I was reading about someone the other day. You had to answer. If he didnt yet to by everybody drink. No matter if the priest was standing there not. So why was he chosen as one of the nine . Were the qualities he had . Well, he was a Fighter Pilot in the carrying war. He came back. The god end of this program that they had to my training program. I forget the name he had done the scholarship. Hear what they were to do, part of the rotc, naval rotc program. It was special program. Its in the book. Anyway, he had gotten in and was supposed to spend two years at perdue. Then he was to go for training and and come back. Well, after he had been there about three years the navy needed pilots says. The pluck them out. So he actually went over. A Fighter Pilot on the s6. He had not gotten his bars yet. He had his wings. One of the few that flew as a midshipman. Come so on september 3rd 1951, born august 5th. And so he was whatever, that much over his 21st birthday. And they went on our run. When they went down for the second pass he released his last ball. He was flying the wing of major john carpenter. The division lead. And as kneele came a about 500 feet off the ground here was this anti aircraft cable jeff kopp was. He had to fight to keep it going the use tram. Over a 350 not. About 20 feet off the ground and came back. He managed to now sit back up. He can land on the carrier because he could not slow it down enough without rolling. He stayed with the men arrested back to a marine base in korea. He ejected just as it went out over the cn came down and landed. They got it back. But when the navy put out the story, the Navy Public Affairs put out that the in the cable, a guide wire is what they put out to a powerful. And it took about 3 feet of his wingtips. He kept trying to get that changed. He did work to lord added because he didnt talk that much to begin with. He did the stars and stripes. And so he just said, i brought this up. About 3 feet. Six to 8 feet. He says, yall. It was an antiaircraft table. So that my we were talking and a few other things happen. So anyway, he told me, i wou