End of an amazing era...

I was in my office this morning and looked on my wall and noticed some things that I really hadn't paid much attention to lately. It's rather remarkable that I had "forgotten" about them with the latest news and headlines concerning the Space Shuttles' last voyage. I've noted in previous blogs that I've been extremely lucky in life both through the friendships I've made and events I've witnessed or been a part of. In 1980 one of my friends and the owner of one of my commercial accounts, Art Swenson, alerted me about a fund raiser the Kansas City Philharmonic was having. One of the movers and shakers in K.C. had come up with the idea of filling an L 1011 airplane with passengers to fly to Orlando the day before the first launch of the Columbia, Americas first Space Shuttle, and witness history in the making. The plan was to fly from K.C. to Orlando, check into Disney World, relax, have a social hour, dinner with a talk about the space program, and then be turned loose on the park for a night of having fun. We were cautioned however, to get to bed early as the wake up call would be at three am and we would depart Disney for Cape Canaveral an hour later. They would wait for no one.

As a kid I had been mesmerized by flying, rockets, and the Space program, starting with the hearing the testing of rocket engines at "Rocketdyne Industries" which was several miles from a Boy Scout camp I attended in the summer. We could hear the roar of the thrust of the engines during the tests and my imagination conjured up images of men in space suits conducting the tests with clipboards and some kind of thruster packs on their back. It was SPACE......RIGHT !! Suddenly I was in Florida, about to witness the launch of Americas' first Space Shuttle.....how could this be. I couldn't sleep.

We left Disney World at four as promised, but what style. We consisted of a motorcade of Limos, lead by a pair of Highway Patrol cars in front of us, using both lanes heading for the Cape. Obviously someone had really thought this out because as we drew nearer to Cape Kennedy and the launch site, the traffic slowed and then stopped. This was a California style traffic jam. The Patrol cars did the only thing they could to keep us moving. The entire motorcade switched onto the other side of the four lane, the lanes coming FROM Kennedy, where there was absolutely NO traffic, and we sailed onto the site.

Daylight was breaking and we were let out of the Limos, and gathered in the Launch Vehicle Staging area. We got a tour of the facility and then were escorted to the V.I.P section about a half mile from the launch pad. In the short distance the Columbia was poised pointed to the sky.

( to be continued )