I was born on January 31, 1935, near Bay St. Louis, a small town of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. My brother, Keith, and I were the only children of a French-Catholic father and an English-Protestant mother. My father, a veterinarian, was separated from our family for the first six years of my life. As a government inspector, he spent most of his time traveling in California, keeping in touch with us by letters and rare visits back home to South Mississippi. My childhood was spent with mother's family in the seclusion of a small family farm, near Kiln, Mississippi. We grew up isolated from the outside world by thick forests and nearly impassable country roads.

Mother's strict discipline and ambition for us offset the influence of our seldom-seen father and our fun loving French relatives with their laissez faire attitude. When our father did return home, he seemed dismayed by our lack of interest in such practical pursuits as sheep dipping and hog killing. In his view, our interest in books, machines and the natural world was a weakness that only hard work and strict discipline could cure. His flamboyant, hard-drinking, hell-raising style was in such contrast to our own personalities that it made for constant conflict.

I attended a country school at Kiln--a small, sawmill town that had dried up when the timber mills closed. Afterwards, during my years there, it went through a brief revival as the Moonshine Capital of the South. I grew up among some pretty tough kids--one of my schoolmates even went to the electric chair. In high school, I was a rebellious, stubborn teenager, never far from trouble. Fortunately, my mother and a couple of concerned teachers still exercised a little control over me. Their influence and my growing interest in natural science inspired me to continue my education.

My first experience in higher education was Pearl River Junior College, a regimented, little, bible-belt school, at Poplarville, Mississippi. My natural companions were the freethinkers, the rebels and the troublemakers. We were a group of misfits, but we were also studious misfits, interested in science and the wonders of the world. An exceptional teacher focused my interest toward mathematics and physics. I struggled to develop the self-discipline and study habits that were essential for my academic survival, as the golden road of pure science seemed to open up before me.

I endured tough, hot summers with the Marine Reserves at Parris Island and Quantico, Virginia, then, equally trying times in the cold, impersonal classrooms and laboratories at Mississippi State University. I was under constant, stress, giving up all social life and most holidays to keep up with my better-prepared classmates. The two years before graduation seemed like a lifetime. I thought I would never go back inside a classroom again, but the following fall, I found myself following a friend into graduate school at Louisiana State University.

The uncertainties of modern physics were disillusioning, and I couldn't study because of a persistent illness. I knew that I was physically drained and mentally burned out. While I was considering my options, a team of recruiters came to the campus searching for technical people to staff the rocket development program that was just then getting underway at Huntsville, Alabama. A career in missile technology with a future promise of space flight was just what I wanted.

I went to work with the Von Braun rocket team of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in 1958, about the time they put up the first American satellite. The excitement of those pioneering years with the original German engineers set me firmly on a career in aerospace. I served on the launch crew at Cape Canaveral, working day and night in the blockhouses or out on the test towers. My good fortune continued after NASA was formed. I found the camaraderie and mutual respect that made every day seem like a great adventure. I was assigned to positions of increasing responsibility, becoming leader of a team that tested the flight computer and guidance software for the Saturn rockets.

Even as I married and started a family, my life, my time, my interest was totally consumed by space technology. These were the Kennedy years when everything seemed possible--even the lunar landing. Apollo, the program that would carry men to the moon, was all we ever thought about, the one goal that we all worked toward. The actual landing was an unbelievable triumph, but afterwards, there was not much we could do for an encore. Congress was tired of supporting the space program, and bureaucrats swarmed aboard to grab whatever tidbits of funding and glory were left.

After Apollo my career sank rapidly away, along with the fortunes of the space program. The forces of greed and self-interest soon turned us into another bumbling bureaucracy. The Germans were forced out while opportunists poured in to take prestigious management jobs. As the groundwork was being laid for such blunders as the Challenger disaster and a half-blind Space Telescope, I struggled unsuccessfully to change careers. Unfortunately, I had reached the time of my life when such changes were not easy. I watched in dismay as our center changed to a pretentious and closed society--a citadel of science that had become a monastery for opportunists.

I stayed with NASA, but my interest in aerospace was dead. I formed an electronic security company, Skybolt, in 1976, hoping to get away from the make-believe world of government bureaucracy. Business was cutthroat, but Skybolt achieved instant success. I found myself working sixteen hour days, dealing with a different class of people: businessmen, politicians, policemen, and old-town aristocrats. Unfortunately, my early success did not hold. A plague of misfortunes descended upon me that threatened to destroy both the company and me. My marriage failed, and I lived under almost unbearable stress to keep the company alive and my life on track. Because of the financial and emotional burdens, and drain on my health, the situation was hopeless. I eventually had to sell the company.

My son, Robert, grew up during this turbulent period when I hardly had time for anything except business and lawsuits. When it was over, he had grown into a seldom-seen teenager, and I found myself back in the world of aerospace. From the perspective of my previous life, it was clear what a meaningless, muddling, make-believe world it had become. The laboratories that had once surged with the activity of taking men to the moon were almost like graveyards. For the most part, the team of dedicated engineers that had built the Saturn rockets had moved on or retired.