Often overlooked in the media frenzy over the 50th anniversary of Ohioan Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the moon is the story of another hardworking Ohioan who was at the core of the Apollo 11 mission.
NASA’s legendary flight director, Gene Kranz, was born in Toledo in 1933, grew up in the shadows of the old Willys-Overland Jeep plant, delivered newspapers for both The Blade and the old Toledo Times (quitting one of those jobs when he got the chance to work as a stock boy at a neighborhood A&P grocery store), and set off on his highly unpredictable-yet-incredible career path upon graduation from Central Catholic High School in 1951.
As flight director for several of the manned Gemini and Apollo missions — including the first moon landing — Mr. Kranz had his own kind of cockpit. He was seated in the heart of NASA’s mission control center at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, a room that recently got a $5 million face lift so it can be preserved as a national historic site.
Think of him as NASA’s quarterback, someone calling shots from the ground and in direct control of the famous Apollo 11 trio in outer space — Mr. Armstrong, and fellow astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — who together, with support from Mr. Kranz and hundreds of other NASA engineers, operators, and technicians — pulled off what has been called one of the most important achievements of mankind’s history.
First, a little more about those Toledo roots ...
Mr. Kranz hoisted sacks of newspapers across his shoulders and delivered them on West Toledo porches daily for reasons other than wanting to make a little cash so he could buy candy or to take in an occasional movie.
His father died at age 7. He was out earning money to help support his mother.
In a recent telephone interview from his home in the Houston suburb of Dickinson, Tex., Mr. Kranz, who retired in the late 1990s and is now 85, fondly recalled his Toledo childhood in detail, down to how he delivered newspapers on his bicycle with his trusty mutt, Skippy, trotting alongside him on his three-mile route.
“It was really a marvelous, fun life,” he said, though almost making a wincing sound when talking about how nearly all of customers insisted on having their newspapers delivered on their front porches.
“I would occasionally knock off milk bottles,” he said, chuckling. “That was the hardest thing, trying to throw the newspaper over those milk bottles.”
There was a bit of a scamp in him, too.
Mr. Kranz’s mother moved the family from South Toledo into a three-bedroom West Toledo home along Berkley Drive near Phillips Avenue shortly after World War II began. She had multiple kids in one bedroom with her and rented out the other two to anywhere from three to six military personnel at a time.
That home, he said, was close enough to the Jeep plant that, when he and his buddies got to be about 12 or 13 years old, they would sneak onto the far end of the factory parking lot and test-drive vehicles that had just come off the assembly line, challenging security guards to go after them.
“We’d drive Jeeps around and they’d chase us,” Mr. Kranz said. “That’s how all of us kids learned how to drive stick shifts.”
He called his mother, Margaret Kranz, the first in a succession of great leaders who blessed him during his life.
“She was a great leader because she taught what manhood was about,” Mr. Kranz said. “Nuns taught me about resilience. I had all of these great leaders who basically trained me.”
Many people associate Mr. Armstrong with Wapakoneta, Ohio, a little town about 95 miles southwest of Toledo. That’s where he was born in 1930. That’s where he spent much of his youth, and where there’s a museum that bears his name, the Armstrong Air & Space Museum.
But his father, who worked for the state of Ohio as an auditor, moved the family to 16 towns around Ohio over one 14-year stretch before moving back to Wapakoneta. One of those many towns was Upper Sandusky, which also is in northwest Ohio, and is about 75 miles southeast of Toledo.
Later in life, Neil Armstrong moved to a house along Drake Road in the Cincinnati suburb of Indian Hill, Ohio.
He died at age 82 of a heart condition on Aug. 25, 2012.
U.S. Sen. Rob Portman (R., Ohio), a friend of the Armstrong family, told The Blade he watched the moon landing from a live television broadcast in Sweden as a 13-year-old, when he was staying with a host family in that country as part of an exchange program operated through Cincinnati Gardens.
“My very fond memory was feeling immense pride for our country. Those days were difficult for our country. That was a moment when the country came together,” he said. “It was a patriotic and proud moment for all of us. My Swede family was very supportive and proud.”
America was, of course, locked in its Cold War with the former Soviet Union back then.
“At that time, America was an ascending power. But we were not the great superpower we were about to become,” Mr. Portman said. “The Vietnam failure — the political and military failure — there were a lot of people questioning America's future. This was a breakthrough technologically but also in America's can-do spirit.”
During a 2017 keynote speech at an Ohio State University event that served as a reunion for several Apollo astronauts, the senator said that Mr. Armstrong — though a modest Midwesterner — was not at all the recluse he was portrayed as in the national media after taking his historic first step on the moon.
Only two years later, in 1971, he was teaching aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati, Mr. Portman noted.
Mr. Armstrong told those close to him that being the first man to walk on the moon was an honor, a culmination of years of teamwork, and that he didn’t want to diminish the feat by trying to reap commercial gain from it.
Mr. Portman, who delivered the eulogy at Mr. Armstrong’s funeral, described his friend at that OSU event as “grace under pressure” for safely navigating the distressed Gemini 8 spacecraft back to Earth in 1966 when it had the space program’s first critical in-space system failure. The planned three-day mission was aborted after less than a day.
“He was fearless, he was unshakable, he was a patriot,” Mr. Portman said.
In his follow-up interview this month, the Ohio senator said Mr. Armstrong “carried himself with humility” and liked talking about his harrowing days as a test pilot earlier in his career.
“He was a very humble man. He had that seared into his soul early on in Wapakoneta — that it wasn't about him, it was about his country,” Mr. Portman said. “He had no fear. He had faith.”
In 2011, a year after he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Mr. Portman said he went to Mr. Armstrong with a plan to get NASA’s Plum Brook research station in Sandusky named after him. Mr. Armstrong declined, saying he still — even 42 years after his historic first step on the moon — didn’t want it to be about him.
“It was just classic Neil,” Mr. Portman said.
Ohio is one of America’s tops for producing astronauts, with 25. Those from northwest Ohio include Mr. Armstrong and Terence T. “Tom” Henricks, 64, of Woodville. Mr. Henricks served on four Space Shuttle missions, two as commander and two as pilot.
Some of the space program’s most important research is done at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, one of 10 such field centers around the country. NASA’s Plum Brook Station in Sandusky is part of NASA Glenn.
The former’s biggest contribution to the Apollo program was developing liquid hydrogen fuel for the Saturn V rockets that put astronauts into outer space. The latter was used then and is continued to be used now for rocket vibration, acoustic, strength, and temperature tests.
Louis Povinelli, NASA Glenn’s chief scientist for supersonic research, has the unique perspective of being inside the space agency since 1960, even before former President John F. Kennedy made his famous pitch to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961 of putting a man on the moon before the end of that decade.
Now 88 and a resident of Westlake, Ohio, Mr. Povinelli said he is still a full-time NASA employee who loves his job and what it represents.
“It kind of went beyond enemies,” Mr. Povinelli said of the Space Race with the former Soviet Union.
Many people disagree. But Mr. Povinelli, a Buffalo native, said he felt that a mission originally rooted in Cold War politics eventually became more of a pure scientific challenge to blaze new trails in technology, one in which he and other NASA scientists “blew up rocket engines until we learned how to do it.”
“One of the things I learned was this war-like competition between countries is not what got man on the moon. It was more of a peaceful effort,” he said. “There was a lot of excitement for obvious reasons.”
That excitement, Mr. Povinelli said, grew out of the realization that he and other scientists were engaged in activities which “to say the least would stir the imagination of the entire world.” It was a career-changer for him and others, many of whom opted to stay at NASA instead of accept less gratifying positions in the private sector, he said.
“That sense of excitement is what kept a lot of folks working here,” Mr. Povinelli said. “It got to the point of forgetting if we were competing with the Russians or not.”
Politics, he said, “sort of got wiped off the board” at NASA Glenn.
NASA Glenn historian Anne Mills agreed.
“The foundation of NASA was literally for the benefit of mankind,” she said.
Mr. Kranz, though, said he never lost sight of the Russians breathing down America’s neck after the Soviet Union shocked the world with its 1957 Sputnik mission, signaling the Space Race was on and world leadership in science and technology was at stake during the Cold War.
“A good portion of the controllers I had basically recognized it was essential for our nation to assume leadership in space,” he said. “I felt it was necessary to beat the Russians to the moon.”
Part of the problem today, he added, is that the country has become “too reticent to step forward” and “too afraid to fail.”
“We need people who are damned good risk managers,” Mr. Kranz said. “You have to learn that leadership and risk management are part of the growing process.”
Mr. Povinelli said it’s possible for NASA to recoup the public’s imagination like it did with Apollo 11, but probably not with another moon mission.
“I think they'd have to land on the Red Planet or land on Jupiter to stir the same interest again,” he said.
NASA recently announced plans to return to the moon in 2024, and has vowed to have a woman astronaut walk on the lunar surface for the first time.
It is hoping to send its first manned spacecraft to Mars by the mid-2030s, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told journalists from The Blade and other media outlets during a visit to NASA Glenn on June 10.
“The moon is not the destination. Mars is the destination,” he told reporters that day.
First Published July 14, 2019, 10:00 a.m.
