It was 35 years ago today that Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Edward White died in the capsule of the Apollo 1. I hadn't even been conceived yet, but my parents were living in Huntsville, Alabama at the time, home to Space Camp now.
My dad worked on all the Apollo missions, and the Saturn missions before that, through subcontracting at IBM. We had all the Apollo mission patches on the wall when I was growing up, and some Saturn ones and a picture of a Saturn launch. Later, we had some Skylab patches, but I don't know if my dad actually worked on that or just got the patches.
My dad died on July 4, 1984, in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I had a French exchange student staying with me for a month or so that summer too, and this was about three-quarters of the way through her stay.
Looking back, I wish I'd gotten to know my dad better. He was a private man, not one for sharing (which is pretty surprising, since he had 7 children *chuckle*), and I was a kid, the sixth of the seven. He'd shown me how to change the oil on the cars, put the lights on the Christmas tree, how to navigate using the map on road trips, how to not step on my younger sister when she was sleeping in the bean bag chair (the one and only time I can remember being spanked).
But I never asked him what he did at his job, or if I did, I don't remember it. We rarely talked; it just wasn't his way, or mine at the time. I've picked up one of his bad habits - we used to have to stand in front of him and the television to tell him that dinner was ready if Mom asked us to; shouting never mattered. He'd tune us out and only breaking his view was the only way to catch his attention. I do that now, though not just with TV, with anything that has my attention at the moment, even my own thoughts.
I wish I had gotten to know him better. Asked him about the Apollo missions (I know what part he worked on - in all those "view back at the Earth" shots where the huge black ring spins away -- the instrument section -- that was what he worked on), about what he did as an engineer for IBM, working on the Trident submarines (the reason why we moved to Rhode Island, he worked out of the Navy base in Middletown). He was smart and talented and my father.
And I miss him terribly.