The Last Man on the Moon Read online

  He leaned forward, elbows on the stiff, white tablecloth, dominating us with his stare and confident words. Don’t worry about getting to the Moon, he said, almost casually. A large hand waved aside the problems which were consuming so much time, effort, and money as merely a set of technical matters that would be overcome. Ideas spilled out of him and flowed over us.

  My buddies, busy talking to each other about one of von Braun’s predictions, faded into the background when he turned that piercing gaze on me. “It’s your turn now, Gene,” he said. “You must carry on the dream.” I must have gulped in astonishment, because he laughed. “You are to be one of the explorers, and I envy you.”

  I stared in disbelief, wondering whether the man was a real genius or real crazy. The director of the Marshall Spacecraft Center envied me? But it was logical. I was training to eventually fly to the Moon aboard his giant Saturn V rocket, while the only similar experience he ever had was as a kid, when he attached a bunch of skyrockets to a wagon, lit them and went on a wild ride. Von Braun would have to live his dreams vicariously, through our journeys into space.

  He adjusted his chair and reached for a small object at the center of the table. “The true importance will come from what you do when you get to the Moon,” he said. It wouldn’t be enough to just go up, land, and return home. “Lindbergh didn’t fly the Atlantic to get to Paris.” An exploratory voyage must expand the universe of knowledge, a job without end.

  Von Braun nudged a silver-topped saltshaker, as if pushing a toy. “Gene, you are going to need mobility. We will provide a car.” In his mind, we would leave the Moon lander, get out, and explore the un-tracked and unknown dirt of an alien landscape.

  Since I was in my mode of respectful worship, I didn’t say, “Whoa up there, Wernher. A car? Come on. We’re barely able to get a spacecraft into Earth orbit to practice basic rendezvous techniques, and you’re saying I’ll be cruising the craters in a Moon buggy?” I couldn’t imagine this concept. But I said nothing, and it was good that I kept my mouth shut, for on Apollo 17, I would do exactly as von Braun predicted, and take a lunar rover on jaunts miles away from my spacecraft.

  I HAD BEEN DISTANTLY linked with von Braun’s work almost from my birth on March 14, 1934, at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Chicago. When I was little, my big sister, Dolores, kept me in line by whispering that I had better be good, because I wasn’t really part of the family, and that she had just gone down to St. Anthony’s and bought me from the nuns for a couple of dollars.

  The fact that Andrew George and Rose Cernan had produced a second child passed unnoticed except for family members and neighbors around our home in the Chicago suburb of Broadview. Other babies, however, did make the news that year. In May, five famous little girls, the Dionne quintuplets, filled a little farm house in Callender, Ontario, Canada. A few months later, an immigrant carpenter named Bruno Richard Haupt-mann was arrested for kidnapping and murdering the infant child of aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh. And I certainly wasn’t the biggest event that summer in my hometown, since my birth certificate didn’t state that the last man who would walk on the Moon had just been born. No, the headlines went to gangster John Dillinger, who was betrayed by the Woman in Red and shot by g-men as he left a downtown movie theater.

  Not much was being printed about events in Europe, where ominous clouds were brewing that eventually would darken the entire globe. Adolf Hitler that year murdered his Nazi Party rivals and gave himself a title the world would come to fear—Führer.

  Coming of age in Germany during that same time was a unique group of rocket scientists. Their experiments, however, were expensive, too much so for the limited private funds available for esoteric research. So the German generals offered funding, total support, and a secure place to work. The naive scientists took the deal, dismissing Hitler as a fool who would soon pass from the stage. Von Braun had been right about many things, but he was dreadfully wrong about Hitler, who cared not at all about space exploration. The scientists were swept up to become part of Germany’s war effort, and their revolutionary V-l and V-2 rockets, fitted with explosive warheads, rained down on England.

  When the war ended in 1945, Russian and United States forces raced for the rocket base in the coastal town of Peenemünde to grab its treasure trove of scientists, records and hardware. Von Braun and 117 other German rocket experts surrendered to our side, but many others were captured by the Soviet Union. That was the genesis of the space race that dominated my life.

  I AM A SECOND-GENERATION American of Czech and Slovak descent. Rozalii and Frantisek Cihlar, and Stefan and Anna Cernan came to America before the start of World War I and, like many Czechs and Slovaks, settled around Chicago.

  My mother’s family, the Cihlars, from the Bohemian town of Tábor, about 100 miles south of Prague, were considered cultured and talented. My grandfather changed his name to Frank, found work in a coal yard, and courted and wed Rozalii Peterka—a pretty girl who had Americanized her own name to “Rose”—in Braidwood, Illinois. My mother, born in 1903, was also called Rose, and grew into a beautiful, dark-eyed woman depicted in photographs as being slim and smiling in the “flapper” outfits popular in the 1920s. My maternal grandparents both died by the time I was a year old.

  Whereas the Czechs, such as my mother’s family, were considered among their homeland’s elite, Stefan and Anna Cernan were peasants from a hardscrabble Slovak mill town called Vysoká nad Kysucou, some two dozen miles south of the Polish border. Stefan stood only four feet eleven and one-half inches tall and weighed but 120 pounds, but it was he who gave me the gift of determination and the strong will needed to succeed against all odds.

  He came to the United States first, and brought his bride, Anna Lu-can, to these shores at the age of twenty-two. She gave birth to my father, Andrew, in 1904. They later had a second son, my uncle Steve, the American version of Stefan. Grandpa Cernan took a job in a coal mine and put away enough cash to buy a little home on Hoyne Avenue, on the south side of Chicago. But his lungs, battered by the suffocating work, forced him to make another change, and in 1930, he and Grandma left Chicago for the clear air on a farm in the north woods of Antigo, Wisconsin.

  It was almost as if they had not just moved to another state but had emigrated back to the Old World. In Chicago they had the conveniences of industrialized life, such as electricity, running water, and a coal-burning furnace. On the farm, such things did not exist and frugality was a way of life. If something needed to be done, they did it themselves. I would one day touch the future and live an existence found only in science fiction, but as a youngster, trudging up the mile-long gravel road from the mailbox to my grandparents’ farm was like making a trip backward in time.

  Grandpa Cernan, tiny and gnomish, had thick muscles lacing his arms, and helped only by his two horses, Dolly and Prince, he cleared eighty acres of land, piling up the huge rocks and stumps yanked from the rich dirt to make room for rows of corn. When my dad tried to bring electricity to the farm, Grandpa adamantly refused. What could electricity do that he couldn’t? And some people wonder where I got my stubborn streak.

  Behind the closed doors of the two-story farmhouse, my smiling Grandma, a classic Old-World peasant woman who wore long dresses and a babushka on her head, ruled a neat kingdom. Doilies on the solid, massive furniture were always clean, almost sterile, as were the floors. Boots came off before coming inside. At nights, as a pendulum clock ticked away on the wall, we read by kerosene lamplight and listened to platter-sized polka recordings on a windup Victrola, while on a wood-burning kitchen stove, Grandma would create miracles. With a butcher knife, she would cut strips from a roll of homemade dough, boil them into noodles, and I would sprinkle on some salt and eat them by the handful. A dinner of pot roast or chicken and sweet corn could be followed by shiski, Slovak fried cakes coated with sugar and raisins. Grandma would brew beer on the back porch and store it down in a cool, mysterious cellar among heaping sacks of potatoes.

  Baths were
infrequent, and taken in a large galvanized tub on the linoleum-covered kitchen floor, the water carried in by the bucket and heated on the wood-burning stove. During the brutal winters, we slept in a four-bed, unfinished attic, beneath thick eiderdown quilts with the heat rising from the stove downstairs to help keep us warm.

  Pitching hay, tending the animals, and doing chores built my own muscles, although I often wished Grandpa was more reasonable about using labor-saving devices. It was a nineteenth-century existence. The one job that made me cringe, but built character, was helping clean the two-hole outhouse. And each spring, Dolores and I were banished to the attic while Grandpa and Dad butchered a squealing calf so we would have meat to take home for the summer. To this day, Dee cannot eat veal.

  Perhaps the best thing on the farm stayed out an old shed. There among the tools, covered with a horse blanket, sitting on blocks and smelling of hay, was a Model A Ford with spoked wheels and a rumble seat, a car that would become a major part of my life.

  MY MOTHER AND FATHER, Rose and Andy, both grew up in the Chicago area and met at a dance to which they had gone with other dates, but switched partners shortly after being introduced. Mom became a June bride in 1925. Money-conscious, responsible, and trained to work hard by their parents, the young Cernans saved up enough to buy a house on Eighteenth Avenue in Broadview, Illinois, in 1928, and the next year, Dee became the first baby born in that new suburb. A few years after that, just as economic times were really getting tough in America, I entered the world, an unplanned Depression baby. The last thing anyone wanted at the time was another mouth to feed, but, particularly since my sister said she spent cold, hard cash for me, the family was sort of stuck.

  My father had been working for an enameling business headquartered in Kansas, and with the aftermath of the Depression, the business folded, Dad lost his job, and then they lost the house. Forced to move, we rented a house on Twenty-third Avenue in nearby Bellwood, and my main memories there are from the time when I about three years old. Dee survived a bout of scarlet fever. For my part, Dad kept a propane gas stove in the workshop to heat his soldering iron, and such stoves were not as safe then as the sort we routinely use today on camping trips. This one exploded. I caught fire and Dad flung me outside, where he rolled his burning son around on the grass to smother the flames. I emerged without a scar, managed to survive the rest of our year-long stay on Twenty-third Avenue and at that point, when I was about the age of four, we moved for several years into another rental house at South Twenty-first Avenue in May-wood, paying the astonishing sum of thirty-five dollars a month.

  THERE WERE NO ADMIRALS or generals in my family to guide my footsteps toward military ambition. My mother’s father had been an Austrian Army conscript way back in 1853, and few relatives wore uniforms during World War II. Dad was too young for the first war and too old for the second, so soldiering had almost no impact on me as a child.

  In 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the U.S. entered World War II, I was only seven years old and in the second grade at Roosevelt Elementary School. The war meant new jobs for both of my parents. Dad was working for the American Can Company, and when it opened a depot to make torpedoes for the Navy, he went to the new operation on a split-shift schedule. Mom took a job with Jefferson Electric in Bellwood. Every day she would sit on a stool before a large bench and patiently stretch thin strands of wire with her slim fingers before tightly winding them around a ceramic core to make a transformer. At the end of the day, her heavy gloves, and the skin beneath, looked as if they had been sliced by sharp knives.

  I was constantly called upon to help my father in his big garden and the garage, where he taught me how machines worked, how to plant tomatoes, how things were put together. He could do anything from repairing a toilet to overhauling an engine. If Dad picked up a hammer, Gene picked up a hammer, and I was always pushed to always do my best at whatever I put my hand to. If I bent a nail while pounding it carelessly into a board, Dad would make me pull it out, straighten it, and drive that same nail back in properly. If you’re going to do it, do it right or not at all, he insisted.

  THE WAR YEARS PLANTED the germ of an important idea when the family went, as we did frequently, to one of the nearby suburbs to see a double feature at the movie theater. I found myself paying attention to the Movietone news, a black and white tapestry of world happenings that is not that much different from many of today’s television news programs. What fascinated me were reports from the war in the Pacific, battles at magical places like Wake Island, Midway, and Guadalcanal. Brave pilots of the U.S. Navy flew out to attack the foe, shot their way to victory, and then flew back to a bobbing, weaving aircraft carrier, the speedy Hellcats and gull-winged Corsairs nosing over slightly when their tailhooks caught the landing wires on the huge, flat deck. Now that looked like fun. I pushed my feet on the seat before me in the theater, pulling back imaginary controls, fighting my way to a safe landing along with the pilots on the screen, and it dawned on me: That’s what I want to do!

  Eventually, the war ended when I was eleven years old, and life returned to a state of chaotic normalcy around Chicago in 1945. The improved economy boosted our family income enough to move us into a little two-story house at 939 Marshall in Bellwood, which would be our home for many years. The Georgian-style house cost 6,500 dollars, was no more than eight-hundred square feet, not including the basement, and had a single bath. Dee and I shared a room upstairs, and for the first time, did not have to sleep in the same bed. From my youngest days and until she got married and I left for college, neither of us had a room of our own. Later, spending time cramped in small spacecraft would be a piece of cake. At least the other astronauts didn’t crowd up the place with a frilly dressing table topped by a big round mirror and laden with exotic creams, fingernail polish, and tubes of eyeliner and lipstick.

  Since I couldn’t be out there saving the world for democracy, I discovered sports. For a nickel I could ride the “el” to Wrigley Field and watch the Chicago Cubs play. They won the National League pennant in 1945 and I became a fan the next year, going with a winner, so much so that I can still name the starting lineup for the 1946 team, and still suffer the annual heartbreak of watching the Cubs fold, because they haven’t won a pennant since. On the streets and empty lots, I began to play football, basketball, and baseball and discovered I was a pretty good athlete, although I had to work at it because so many other guys seemed to have much more talent.

  On October 14, 1947, a young hotshot test pilot named Chuck Yeager, flying far away over the flat California desert, first cracked the sound barrier. Down in Texas, Wernher von Braun was writing Space Flight, a program for international scientific research. Both events were to have an impact on my life, Yeager’s accomplishment by opening a new age for jet planes and von Braun’s work by formalizing a plan to explore space. I would, in years to come, get to know them both.

  I did my seventh and eighth grade work at McKinley School in Bellwood and entered Proviso High School in the adjoining suburb of May-wood in 1948, a gawky kid who played clarinet in the band at my mother’s insistence. For my first two years, I would play football in the freshman-sophomore game, then dress in my band outfit and tootle away at halftime of the varsity game that followed. Dad’s interest was primarily on my report card, and his dream was for his son to attend the best engineering school in the country. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the premier engineering school, but was financially unreachable, and he pointed me toward Purdue, in nearby Indiana, as a solid substitute.

  By this time, while playing organized school sports, I had also discovered girls, which meant I needed some wheels, which meant I needed money. As a kid, I had worked part-time for years, from being a stock boy at Jefferson Electric to delivering the newspapers—the Chicago Tribune and the Daily News—to collecting scrap. Now in high school, I started making some big-time money. I might bring in as much as twenty-four dollars on a weekend of caddying for golfers, carrying two bag
s per round out at the Medina Country Club. The answer to my transportation dilemma was the Model A Ford that had been sitting up on blocks out in Grandpa’s barn. When I turned fifteen I got my driver’s license and my life changed. That 1931 Ford coupe needed a complete makeover; I plunged into its guts under my father’s guidance to learn how the antique four-cylinder engine worked, and got an early introduction into engineering. It had pistons as big as dinner plates. There was a rumble seat. Spare tire on the driver’s side. A windshield that could be pushed open. Mechanical brakes. I installed a radio found in a junkyard, polished the car to an ebony sheen, put on mud flaps and painted the bumper silver and whitewalls on the tires. Soon, I had guys hanging all over it and a girl or two at my side as I swept majestically around the school and to the drive-ins and teen-age hangouts. I could nurse twenty-five cents worth of gas for a week.

  The academics of high school were easy for me, but a big decision came as football season started in my junior year, when I had to choose between playing the clarinet at halftime of the varsity game or being in the game itself. I couldn’t do both, and the choice was easy. It was difficult to be an athlete, but impossible to play the clarinet. Mom didn’t like it, but I became an end on the varsity football team.

  Once I made the squad, I learned a major lesson, again guided by my dad. The other guys might be bigger, more experienced, and have more natural ability than I, but he advised me to stick to it and do my very best on every play. He was right, of course. I was never the best player, not a gifted athlete, nor the most skilled, but I worked harder than most and listened to the coaches. By my senior year, I was on the varsity basketball, baseball, and football teams, made an eighty-yard touchdown run against our cross-town rival New Trier, and was elected president of the Letterman’s Club. Dartmouth even dangled a football scholarship my way and Duke showed some interest.