posted 11-19-2006 09:44 AM               

It contains an unsourced and exceedingly caustic anecdote about Carpenter that also has the misfortune of being untrue. You read it and it has all the finesse of a shiv.

I remember family accounts (incredulity) about the story, which was published the year Carpenter left NASA. So it was interesting to see it in 2006.

Reading it, I remembered seeing Carpenter speak to a group of oceanographers together with Sylvia Earle. This was perhaps in 1989 in northern Calif.

Who should appear but Bergman, who seemed undone as he stood up and shouted out an unintelligible question. He was escorted out rather quickly...

Thought to ask here. I'll develop this story a bit and link it with other similar and early storytelling viruses that seem to attach themselves to MA-7.

posted 11-19-2006 11:31 AM               

quote:

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Jules Bergman died on February 11, 1987, after suffering from a series of brain tumors and seizures.

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posted 11-19-2006 03:13 PM               

As a result, I'm very much interested in anything y'all find out and would be willing to share. Maybe not all of it would be Wikipedia material, but as someone who makes her living off a knowledge of media history, I'd sure love to know about it.

All I remember of Bergman from personal experience is that when I was but a wee lassie, he used to scare the dickens out of me when he'd appear on the television. That voice and those eyes!

posted 11-20-2006 10:57 AM               

Regarding Bergman's "dark" style, I have DVDs with extended segments of the ABC coverage from November 22, 1963, and our beloved Science Editor does a report from Times Square. In that familiar voice, he talks about "people milling about as if it's the night before the end of the world," and finishes his report with a furious comment about how it's "all thanks to a lone psychopath with a ten-dollar mail-order rifle, and a ten-cent cartridge."

There's also a story that William Burroughs recounts in "This New Ocean," about Bergman getting into a little scrap at a press conference prior to ASTP regarding the place names "Baikonur" and "Tyuratam." You can read it here.

It's one page-scroll down on my computer (it's the quote with notation 72 on it). According to Burroughs, that ellipse between "arrive at a" and "name for it" almost certainly represents a seven-letter word we can't say on a family website.

posted 11-20-2006 12:38 PM               

As for the Reader's Digest article, I photocopied it when I was at the NASA history office, with the thought that I could develop a little story about how historical counter-narratives (in this case, regarding the flight of Aurora 7) are created over time. Not a big deal. Just interesting to me.

You can actually determine storytelling parentage with a little research:

• 1967 Reader's Digest, author Jules Bergman, using unnamed sources and traffics in rumor.

• in 1971 the rumor moves up the literary ladder a rung or two with a free-wheeling 1971 Esquire magazine account of same M-G-A era, punches up the new counter-narrative, with the additional detail: the bogeyman-hippie astronauts.

• this account in Esquire gives way 30 years later to a cloned version (same exact words, same storyteller?) on p. 87 in Kranz's Failure Is Not an Option.

posted 11-20-2006 05:37 PM               

Regarding narratives and their parentage, I wrongly conflated the Jules Bergman tale in Reader's Digest with the Esquire/Kranz anecdote.

They are not the same. The Bergman story simply relates a fiction that the night before his flight, Carpenter was out partying hard. This is the "some say" kind of assertion responsible for so much mischief in the world.

My sense is that Bergman's intent was to suggest that the rumor was endeavoring to explain that the overshoot was caused by a hungover astronaut. Or something.

Silly, I know. Especially if you're familiar with the NASA photo of a terry-robed Carpenter rubbing sleep from his eyes at 1:15 a.m. to prepare for his flight later that morning.

posted 11-21-2006 12:09 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by KC Stoever:
It depicts Carpenter only as a guitar-playing proto-hippie.

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posted 11-21-2006 11:23 AM               

"He really didn't like me," Carpenter said, "and was accusing me of all sorts of things." Carpenter asked him to wait until his address was over, out of deference to those present for the talk (and not for the heckling). And my sense is that Bergman eventually sat down or left.

Carpenter later thought that he had somehow offended Bergman after calling him "Jules-babe"--or something like that, as he was told was Bergman's moniker at the Cape.

But in the end, Carpenter professed incomprehension at Bergman's strong feelings.

posted 11-21-2006 07:55 PM               

As I read about the "Jules-babe" comment, it reminded me of the footage I saw of Bergman covering Evel Knievel's attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon, which was shown on "Classic Wide World of Sports" on ESPN Classic a few years back. I distinctly remember Knievel calling Bergman either "Julie-baby" or "Julie" or some form of that at one point after something went wrong. (It was half as interesting watching Bergman cover this event with a straight face as it was watching Knievel's antics.)

That jumped to mind when I read what the DP remembers. Thank you very much for sharing that -- it's helping me peel another layer off this onion of a subject. (Lousy metaphor, I know, but the best I can do on a moment's notice.)

posted 12-01-2006 04:13 PM               

I was lucky enough to meet Jules Bergman at Indiana University in South Bend one night. He was here for a lecture, must have been 1971 or 1972, got an autograph afterward on an Apollo 11 first day cover.

As per usual at that time, there was a small reception after the talk next door. An anti-war (Vietnam) guy walked up to him and started spewing anti-war hate talk. Bergmann patiently listened, I snapped a couple of pictures, and they went their separate ways. I am sure the "kid" was attacking the ABC newsman for the "bias of the media" sort of thing, I don't distinctly recall their conversation, and I sure do not think that the guy was a student.

There were a few pre-lecture posters up around the campus... nice heavy cardboard signs with a glossy picture of Bergman glued onto them. I snatched one of those for my space collection.