Here's one of the 40,000 who dealt with the racial problem and got on with the job of seeing that astronauts could get on and off the moon:
First On The Moon – A Voyage With Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., written with Gene Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin, Epilogue by Arthur C. Clarke – Michael Joseph, London (1970)
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North Amityville, Long Island, New York
Still another man had a right to consider Apollo 11 — or at least a piece of it — "his." His name was Herman Clark. He was a black man, born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1932. He was a quality control inspector for Grumman in Bethpage, Long Island, and lunar module No. 5 — for Apollo 11 — was "his." He had had it from the very beginning: "We made all the bulkheads and the skins, the docking tunnel. We built it. We saw it when it was nothing but a big hulking piece of metal. On LM 5 I had a particular interest because I had looked at every damned hole on that thing, and every joint. The quality control inspector is a sort of nitpicker. We're the ball breakers, in plain English. We're the most unwanted people. The quality control man,
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the inspector, is a guy that not many people like because it's his job to criticize another man. And when you criticize another man, it's rough. There are ways of doing it where you can be diplomatic about it, but in this program, there is one way — you know. You do it by the book. There's no other way. You've got to have almost one hundred percent traceability, all items. Every discrepancy, every scratch, every dent that occurs during the manufacturing of this product has to be recorded and documented. The smallest scratch. We have to find it. To me it's money because if the product gets out — well, then, I get paid. But I also have to realize, as a QC, which is drummed into our heads, that the product is the important part. Yes, we have a schedule, but I don't have a schedule to follow. All I'm responsible for is that the product be right. If that product's not right, you can bet I'm going to hear about it.
"I am the only Negro in my area — in the inspection part — and I direct a number of white people, and I get damned good cooperation from these guys. My outlook on the racial problem is — I don't have to win your heart, but I will win your respect. I think the guys respect me. And the way a man respects a guy is because I fight for him. The way I fight for him is that whenever there is a disagreement I stick up for him. Our section of the plant is separated from the rest of the plant. We have over there a pretty good relationship going. The people who work on that project, on the LM, take pride in it. The guys there are not there to fight a racial problem. If you've got a problem, take it out of here..."
Herman Clark was not too concerned about liftoff — rather, he thought in advance that he would not be too concerned. Then NASA asked him and his wife Rosa to be guests at the launch. They stayed at a motel, got up early each day and — like Jay Marks, the Texas automobile dealer — skipped the Cocoa Beach nightlife. On launch morning they wound up in a viewing site about a thousand feet from a man they recognized as former President Johnson. Rosa Clark struck up a conversation with a man next to her who was dressed in sports clothes and was fiddling with some camera equipment. Herman Clark did a double take and said to Rosa, "Do you know who you're talking to? You're talking to Barry Goldwater!"
Herman Clark had not checked out the spacecraft; that was up to other people. Nor had he checked out the Saturn V boosters. He was thinking ahead — to the time when Armstrong and Aldrin would separate from the mother spacecraft and fly Eagle, Herman Clark's LM No. 5, down to the surface of the moon. He was thinking about that ascent engine, the only one they had, which had to fire to get the two men off the moon again. Weeks in advance he had acquired goose pimples about that moment: "I mean, you've got two guys sitting there and just the idea..."
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To a quality control inspector like Grumman's Herman Clark life seemed to be one constant fight: "Just to give you an idea, there's this stress corrosion problem. There's a lot of liquid shimming [joining] done on this. We have two joints. Say you have a gap between those two joints. The maximum we can permit is under two-thousandths of an inch. And we liquid shim it. This is a headache, because the mechanic is under pressure from his lead man to get that job done. If he could just drill it up and put the rivets in, he could have it done in half an hour. But to liquid shim — it might take him all day, because you have to let the liquid cure, or harden, which takes two hours. If a quality control inspector criticizes the job, some guy is on edge. A lot of times he will say, 'What's wrong with the job?' Well, our responsibility is to write a discrepancy on the crab sheet — a minor discrepancy, that is. If it's a major discrepancy we write it on a tag. And then I usually end up in fights with the foreman, who has to side with his mechanics because he is obligated to a schedule." So we get into fights all the time. It's just a constant thing — especially when you run into opinion-type crabs. When it's a cut-and-dried discrepancy, that's no problem. You just do it over."
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Charlie Duke, who had been agonizing over those 12 02 alarms, also found it hard to comprehend: "When I heard Buzz say 'Engine stop' it was hard for me to believe that they were there. Later Chris Kraft told me, 'Boy, Charlie, I thought we were gone when they had those things' [the 12 02 alarms]. On my way home I was saying, 'Well, they've actually done it.' But it sort of boggled the mind to think that the thing had been accomplished. There had been no time to react."
In North Amityville, Long Island, Herman Clark, the quality control inspector who had checked out the ascent engine of Apollo 11's lunar module, found that his own emotional reaction had just begun. Armstrong and Aldrin were on the moon, but the engine he had checked out still had to get them off. And if it failed...
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North Amityville, Long Island
Herman Clark, the Grumman quality control inspector who had checked out lunar module No. 5 for the flight of Apollo 11, felt intensely emotional and a little apprehensive. "Here we were working on a piece of hardware," he said, "but when I knew they had landed the reaction really started." He enjoyed watching Armstrong and Aldrin bounce around on the moon ("They were really having a ball"), but he wished that the television reception could have been better. He badly wanted to have a good look at the LM. The astronauts said that it was in good condition, but Clark wished that he could see for himself. He thought of the things that had happened during the two years he had been working on LM No. 5, the arguments he had had, things that could have gone wrong, mistakes that had been caught; and he desperately hoped that he and his men had caught them all. There was the time the wrong kind of primer paint nearly got used on some machine parts which were going inside the cabin: "Somehow this engineering order hadn't gone the right route. Then my group leader started questioning and I said yeah, could be. So we sent a report over to the laboratory requesting the lab to run a test, and we found out that stuff was highly toxic and it would have an outgassing effect out in space where there's no atmosphere, or where you have almost a complete oxygen atmosphere. If it had got into the vehicle it could have killed the guys. Maybe this would have been picked up by somebody else; we don't know. But we did pick it up." As he waited for the ascent engine to fire, Herman Clark thought it was just as well to do a little praying.
[Following lunar liftoff]
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On Long Island, Grumman's Herman Clark had literally been holding his breath. With liftoff confirmed, he said to himself: "Okay. Job well done QC-wise!" Now it was time to go back to work and see if he and his men could do the job again. Perhaps, Clark reflected, they would feel more confident after the third or fourth lunar landing; each lunar module had been "tighter" and more "leakproof" than its predecessor...
