posted 03-07-2010 09:34 PM               

Charles "Chuck" Clary peacefully passed away on Friday, March 5, 2010 surrounded by family, good friends and loved ones. Born in Buffalo, New York in the spring of 1935, Charles parents, Fredrick and Marge, sensed from an early age that their son would inevita bly become an engineer after dissecting the family toaster at the age three...

Chuck worked the steel mills outside Niagara Falls before enlisting in the Navy in 1956. It was here, once again, where his tinkering talents shined and would later prove not only beneficial to himself, but an entire nation. Upon his honorable discharge, he headed to Florida to "escape that damn snow" and began a job at the Schlitz Brewery in Tampa, Florida. This career, however, would only last two days before he was "drafted", as a civilian, to help fix a gyroscope problem for the fledgling National Advisory Committee for Aviation.

After that successful launch, Chuck joyfully began an incredible fifty-one year love affair with NASA and the Space Coast. From loading Ham and Enos (the ape astronauts) into their Mercury capsules to being director of quality control for Lockheed's Space Shuttle program, Chuck's illustrious half-century career spanned the pantheon of America's triumphant leaps into the heavens...

His final days were proudly spent advising "those young rocket jocks" at United Space Alliance.

Chuck Clary was a NASA experimental electronic instrument maker assigned to the Sigma 7 capsule. Now working part time for United Space Alliance, he recalled: "We built a special instrumentation box for this capsule to take additional temperature and pressure readings. Since it was not a part of the original drawings, we designed it on our desk pads.

"The box is still visible in the capsule, which is on display at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville," Clary explained.