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'I worked with NASA, not for NASA' (cont'd)
Schirra was indeed selected as one of the Mercury 7 astronauts, and he accepted the offer. The program he now found himself in was somewhat confusing to him - though amongst military test pilots, he was expected to look and act far more like a civilian.
"There were no civilians in the initial candidacy. As a result, I guess I had the opinion that only military were eligible. But then once we were selected, the word came down from Eisenhower, they will not wear uniforms. We were to do things without the appearance of being military. Eisenhower also fought to have all the spaceflights publically acknowledged and observed, in contrast to the Soviets being very secretive."
 In one area, Schirra did already look more like a civilian - his haircut. The others all had military-style buzzcuts, but Schirra kept his hair longer.
"I didn't feel I had to be a Marine! I kidded the others about that. I kept the same haircut."
Schirra found that he had much in common with the other Mercury astronauts. As well as being test pilots, they were all from similar, in some cases sheltered backgrounds, with a similar set of values.
"All of us were small-town boys. In my little town I knew the police chief, all the policemen, the firemen - they were surrogate fathers. If I ever did anything wrong, one of them would be on my case, and if they ever came to the door, I knew I was in deep trouble. Today, people look at a police car and get worried. They get annoyed when they have to get out of the way of a fire truck - it's terrible. The police now are being harassed all the time. It's just a very sad transition. Talking about a small town, I played English football - soccer - instead of American football, because we couldn't afford the equipment. We just had shoes and shorts and you were in."
"I went to high school in Englewood, New Jersey. When I was 17, driving home at night, I stopped in a roadside diner and was having some eggs, and bacon and toast, and there was this black guy - the first time I'd ever seen one. He was having bacon and eggs. I looked over, and after a while he said, 'What do you expect, some grits and watermelon?' And I laughed, and he laughed - it was the perfect introduction to a black man. That was the first time I'd even seen one. You can just imagine the expressions, but he handled it so beautifully."
Schirra's upbringing and military background had given him little experience to cope with the instant fame and attention of being an astronaut. It took some time to adjust to his new role in the limelight. Each of the new astronauts handled it differently.
"I learned to live with it, and even have fun with it. But in quieter times, we really wanted to get away from it. Occasionally, when I am eating in public, I'm about ready to cut into this gorgeous entree, and somebody comes up and says, 'Wally, will you please sign this autograph for my son, he'll kill me if I come home without it.' My fantasy was to say, 'Don't tell the little bastard you saw me!' You have to learn to be tolerant of it. Shepard wasn't until his later years, then he became more mellow. I guess I was more outgoing. Shepard was what we called the icy commander. He wasn't like that with any of us, but with strangers he was that way. Much like Neil Armstrong is today - you'll find he's a lovely guy, a very nice man, but pretty much a recluse. Neil has handled the fame very well."
"John Glenn craved the publicity. I think even John would admit that. When he went into politics, that became pretty obvious! We all saw that he knew how to do public relations from that original press conference. We weren't prepared for that at all - we were all looking over, thinking, what is this guy saying? We finally did adapt."
The seven astronauts soon realized that they could be powerfully influential as a group. If they all agreed that something needed to be changed, and presented the idea to management as a unified group, it usually was changed.
"Walt Williams, our Mercury Operations Director, used the term 'seance' to refer to what we did. When we came out of there, we would have a unanimous opinion, a couple of black eyes, and a few bruised shoulders! But we did it very rarely, we didn't overuse it. It wasn't like in 'The Right Stuff' movie - that was just for entertainment."
Schirra was already used to trusting his life to other test pilots when it came to big decisions. He has described test piloting and the space program as the ultimate peer programs - you had to rely on your fellow pilots all the time.
"I think that is part of the game. When a test pilot comes off a flight, there is typically another pilot who is going to take it up, and he believes in the debriefing. You don't keep something to yourself. Within NASA, there were lots of things that were not appropriate to bring out to the public, because the press did not handle it well half the time. But within ourselves, we'd tell it all."
While the group had this deep level of trust, they could also be fiercely competitive with each other, each trying to prove that they were the best at everything. No weaknesses would be admitted to. For example, Deke Slayton began scuba training without revealing that he could not swim.
"Deke Slayton was the best diver we had - he went right to the bottom! Gus Grissom and I had to pull him off the bottom, and help him tread water. In the movie 'The Right Stuff', they showed him cavorting with some girls in a water tank in a bar - the last person you'd really have put in that tank would be Deke Slayton! He was a farm boy out of Wisconsin. A river or a cistern was about the nearest thing he saw with water.
"Our competition was like sibling rivalry almost, but we bonded completely, and forever. We are still very close - I am currently furious at Chris Kraft for giving Scott Carpenter such a hard time in his book. I'm giving Chris a hard time back, which I normally would not do."
Schirra was always careful to give the impression of being unfazed by anything, no matter how hard the training got. When a centrifuge Schirra was riding span out of control, and others were worried he would be injured, he emerged with a grin on his face.
"That story was a little overstated, but it was a very high G load. The centrifuge ran away, it lost its braking effect of stopping at about 13 or 14 G. I think we peaked at about 18. I am sure I blacked out finally, but apparently I resolved myself to live through it. It was something I didn't need to do, and I have fought the centrifuge ever since. When I visited Star City in Russia in about 1991, I couldn't believe they still had one. I told them, you guys don't need a centrifuge, they are a waste of time. Deke Slayton said the same thing to them when he was over there for Apollo-Soyuz in 1975."
The competition between the astronauts was to try and get that coveted first spaceflight. Schirra was devastated not to be the one picked.
"We all were, I'm afraid. That was a lot of competition we had. It was just one of those philosophies that gets to you. Each test pilot I know considers him, or herself - now that there are women - to be the very best. It's very demeaning to step down the ladder once in a while. You feel filtered out. But I really think I had a better flight because of the delay."
In April 1962, before Schirra had flown, some more future competition arrived, in the form of the second group of astronauts. Some of the original seven seemed resentful to the new arrivals, and reluctant to share the benefits. Schirra was the one who went out of his way to include them and make them and subsequent groups feel welcome - even being described as a "mother hen" by one astronaut.
"I was told several times by those guys, thanks for bringing us in. Pete Conrad and Jim Lovell I knew well already as they had been classmates of mine at test pilot school - Class 20. All three of us went through those early Mercury tests together, to see which one of us would survive, and somehow I did! Pete and I waterskied a lot back then, and he and I tied for second in our test pilot class. Lovell studied, so he became first!"
"Lovell had some kind of anomaly with his liver at the time of those Mercury tests and Conrad, they felt, wasn't able to live alone in space, or endure in space. The shrinks pretty well screwed up on that one. He lived on a space station for a month and flew Gemini 5, a long duration flight! On flights like those, it's not like you can eat out! One of my favorite memories is a picture of my Mercury launch, and that second group, called The Nine, standing there looking at the launch. Pete's fingers were crossed. It is a precious picture."
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References:
Wally Schirra with Richard Billings, Schirra's Space, Bluejacket Books,
1995.
Donald Slayton with Michael Cassutt, Deke! U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the
Shuttle, Forge Books, 1994.
Walter Cunningham with Mickey Herskowitz, The All-American Boys, Macmillan,
1977.
The Astronauts, We Seven, Simon and Schuster, 1962.
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979.
My thanks to Wally and Jo Schirra, Colin Burgess, Erin French, and Jody Russell of the NASA JSC Media Resource Center, Houston, for their time and assistance with this article.
Copyright for this article is retained by Francis French. A condensed version of this interview has previously appeared in printed form.
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