Whatever happened to the 21st Century?

                       At the 1962 World's Fair we were all giddy about it: 

  

In 2001, a century arrived -- but that same century also ended in that year. For my entire conscious life, I would turn glassy eyed at the mere mention of "the 21st Century." It meant sleekness, ingenuity, innovation, and silver suits with V-necks. It meant, well, the future.

Today, one-fifth the way through it, you almost never hear "the 21st Century" used to describe our time.

That term died the very year it was becoming reality -- as airplanes were crashed into the World Trade Towers -- because the fanfare surrounding the new century ceased at that moment. Today nearly the only time you hear "The 21st Century" used is on retro videos from the 20th Century gushing over the wonderful times just ahead.

When we look back at our often impetuous, giddy projections of what the upcoming 21st Century would be like, we call the picture that was painted "Retrofuturism." And thanks to the internet, there's no hiding the paintings.

Today, we're blasé about the present that was long awaited so eagerly. Perhaps that’s because we’re overwhelmed with details 24-7, we work such irregular hours, we grapple with crises happening like clockwork, and we've been collectively stabbed in the back by so many once-trusted institutions. 

Fifty and 60 years ago, the expression “This is the 20^th Century” was constantly used -- and favorably, to denote modernity and open-mindedness, or to prod someone to get with it and be modern.

Moreover, back in the 1960s and ‘70s when I was coming of age, the term “The Twenty-First Century” left us spellbound with anticipation. But then, at one time, so did awaiting a trip on the Titanic’s maiden voyage.

And today as we huddle shivering in the lifeboat of our $1,200 Covid-19 stimulus checks and had to fight furiously to avoid capsizing in another stolen election in 2020, we realize that we are never going to use the term “21^st Century,” at least not in the tones of awe we did for so long.

As said, the 21^st Century was a phenomenon of the 20^th. And would you believe it, they both ended,  in differing senses, with jet  airliners being crashed into skyscrapers killing 2,800 people. The same year HAL killing four innocents was supposed to be the extent of the carnage.

The deaths shown in “2001: A Space Odyssey” took a back seat in the consciousness of most viewers to the grandeur of dazzling technology, esoteric ideas and unencumbered space travel. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s NASA-assisted 1968 movie masterpiece launched into hyperdrive the eagerness to reach the 2000s, as did Walter Cronkite’s 1967 TV series “The 21^st Century.”

Both were made in the middle of the decade that amounted to the crux of the 20^th Century’s baffling combination of great progress and atrocious horrors. The 20^th was a century to revere and revile. The 21^st, we had a feeling, would be all the good, with the bad eliminated. More a hope than a hypothesis.

It seems that sci-fi about the future is always utopian or dystopian – and with companies like GE, Union Carbide, and Philco-Ford underwriting Cronkite’s TV series and NASA contractors and other tech giants helping with Kubrick and Clarke’s movie, the awe factor triumphed over the worries about the century to come. 

We didn't yet associate these corporations with Neutron Jack Welch or the Bhopal catastrophe. Space Odyssey fans realized that the homicidal HAL wouldn't really happen, but the Howard Johnson's Earthlight room in the 1-G comfort space station evidently would.
So, the 21^st Century is gonna be a joy, folks. Get ready to luxuriate in it!

“One government report projects that by the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacation as the rule,” Cronkite tells us while lounging in a mock-up 21st Century living room designed by Philco-Ford in a March 1967 episode of his TV series named for that century. “A lot of this new free time will be spent at home.”

The iconic CBS anchorman then demonstrates how people will spend it by calling up the latest news, weather and music on separate desk top computers and wide screen TVs, then cooking in microwave ovens. Oh, and many will do their weekly 30 hours of work by those computers, in their homes.

“We may not have to go to work. The work would come to us,” Cronkite exuberantly says.

The same living room set is used in a 1967 film by Philco-Ford itself showing a household in 1999. The man (curiously, played by game show host Wink Martindale) pays the bills on a home computer and the Laura Petrie-like woman, still wearing a mid-60s bouffant flip, shops online and dutifully serves the family meals recommended by the computer based on the nutritional needs of the couple and their son Jamie, who is educated at home online.

 

The mother is played by Marj Dusay, best known for stealing Spock's brain in an infamously off-the-rails episode of the someday-retrofuturist Star Trek.

In 1999, this family drives a bubbletop car that combines Mustang informality with Jetsons tech.

             ___________________________  

 

General Motors had legendary narrator Alexander Scourby nearly hyperventilating while celebrating what we now call Rainforest Depletion. In fairness, though, this ride got some forecasts right:

 

                         _____________________________________ 

 

So, how did Walter, Philco-Ford, GM, Clarke and Kubrick do at forecasting such a carefree congruent 21^st Century? Yes on home shopping, microwave ovens, and online school, but OMG did they ever not foresee the feminist movement!

And getting 30 hours of work per week means you’re heading for a shelter, not a month-long vacation! Far from ensuring that Jamie and his parents eat healthfully, high tech in the hands of the food industry has steered us to sugary, high-carb foods we overeat due to the effects on our brains of the high fructose corn syrup used widely. 

The Mom-Dad parental unit is yielding to child-care cooperatives and grandparents, and gasoline prices would make Dusay and Martindale’s 1967 eyes pop out, so forget about the Mustang-Jetsonmobile.

                   In 1974, the Internet foreseen, gender equity not. 

 
Of course, all predictions and forecasts involve the risk that one’s legacy will be to provoke ridicule, counterbalanced with the chance of being hailed as a visionary genius. So, give ‘em credit for putting themselves out there.

 

A tiny ember of that sleek Century 21 look and feel can be seen in Apple stores:

                        

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One of the most respected, if today lesser recognized forecasters of the future was Athelstan Spilhaus, the dean of the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology. He wrote “Our New Age,” an internationally syndicated weekly comic strip from 1957 to ’73 designed to get the youthful Beetle Bailey and Dick Tracy crowd more interested in science.

Athelstan Spilhaus and one of his "Our New Age" visions he published in Sunday comic sections.

Spilhaus, who helped plan the acclaimed Minneapolis and St. Paul downtown pedestrian skyways, wrote in a 1962 “Our New Age” strip illustrated with a person looking at text on a video screen:

 

“Researchers, thousands of miles away, may consult books in the Library of Congress or the British Museum.”

You bet your net he was right, but three years later, an “Our New Age” feature showed a man with his head connected to a cap hooked up to wires and declared:

 

“In 2016, man’s intelligence and intellect will be able to be increased by drugs and by linking human brains directly to computers.”

Yes, 2016 – the time of the Tide Pod challenge, flat-Earthers and a chronically bankrupt, non-literate, groping thug succeeding a Harvard lawyer and model husband and parent as Chief-Executive. Bring on those computers, Dr. Spilhaus – and those drugs!

                                   ______________________

 

Brian Arbenz, who lives in Louisville, Ky. USA, likes to revisit the 21st Century of his youth when he feels nostalgic.

BONUS: The Internet in Phoenix, better houses, and food you plug in -- Click below for a full "21st Century" episode. CAUTION: at 15:16, don't eat the package:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__MGYrcapdk&t=2s

The Amazing Contradiction -- What did and didn't upset Americans

One night in 2013, TV viewers of CBS’ Amazing Race saw a few minutes of the reality show’s contestants on a stop in Hanoi, Vietnam searching for clues that had been placed around a memorial to Vietnamese who died from U.S. bombing during the war four decades earlier.

The memorial was fashioned from wreckage of a downed American B-52 bomber, which was primarily what sparked an instant online protest, including the comment: "My father's friend was on that plane…. (I)t glorifies the death and killing of our men."

The VFW’s national commander wrote to CBS President Les Moonves charging that "the B-52 scene, as well as the young people singing a propaganda song, was totally unnecessary to the show's plot, which speaks volumes about naïve producers who think they're in charge when they are not."

Amazing Race contestants in Hanoi in 2013.

CBS, at the start of the next Amazing Race episode, apologized “to veterans, particularly those who served in Vietnam, as well as to their families and any viewers who were offended by the broadcast."

This single scene on CBS in 2013 brought forth from the grass roots of America what 168 half-hour shows on that network from 1965 to 1971 could not prompt.

Hogan’s Heroes, a CBS sitcom about American, British and French World War II Prisoners of War in the fictional German camp Stalag 13, was a huge hit during a period when TV comedies were silly escapism (talking horses, flying nuns).

At first, Hogan’s Heroes did draw criticism from reviewers and commentators for trivializing the suffering of prisoners of war and American World War II veterans overall. But from millions of people whose fathers really did endure the misery of fighting the Nazis – like, for instance me – came not a complaint. At least not enough to stop the show from being a ratings smash hit, and winning two Emmys during its six seasons.

In my childhood, I chuckled along with America at the hijinks of the good guy-ish American Colonel Hogan, the ineptitude of the unwittingly usurped Col. Klink, and the oafishness of the huggy rotund Sgt. Schultz, whose hilarious catch phrase was, “I know nothing, I see nothing.”

Beyond my knowledge back then was that Schultz’ constant repeating of this was his preparation for war crimes trials, and his fixation on their likelihood meant he was conceding the war, which he had no interest in waging in the first place.

John Banner, who played Schultz the harmless Nazi, was in real life almost killed by Nazis, who were anything but harmless, as European Jews such as him knew at the core of their souls.

Banner, an Austrian-born actor, by luck happened to be performing in Switzerland when the Anschluss, or forced annexation of Austria by Hitler’s Germany happened in 1938.

From Geneva, the place his theatrical troupe was staying, Banner applied for refugee status and was accepted by the United States.

Commenting on the contradiction between this personal history and his comedic portrayal of a Nazi soldier, Banner told the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1960s: “Some people ask me how we can be funny about a prison camp in the war. And I say to them, how was it possible to write about two little old ladies who killed twelve men and buried them in the basement and make it funny. Well, somebody did, and it was called Arsenic and Old Lace.”

That’s a somewhat fair comparison, because that 1941 Broadway hit was in fact inspired by a real-life couple in Connecticut who in 1917 were found to have fatally poisoned and buried male residents in their home for the elderly. And the story went from unspeakable atrocity to side-splitting comedy in a quarter century.

That’s the same elapsed time between the horrors of World War II and Americans tuning in to Col. Hogan outwitting Klink interspersed with laugh tracks and tooth paste commercials. It was as though being a POW in a German stalag was a rollicking week at summer camp.

It wasn't. "Rations were meagre. The men -- but not officers -- had to work, often at heavy labour," the website of the British Imperial War Museum said of German treatment of allied POWs. "(T)he days dragged and there was a constant battle against boredom. Prisoners tried to overcome this by staging entertainments and educating themselves. Contrary to the popular myth, most men were too weak from hunger and work to escape."

That site also said something that clashes with the one tasteful feature on Hogan's Heroes -- the progressive racial breakthrough role of actor Ivan Dixon. He played a black American POW named Kinchloe, who did secret radio surveillance for the allies, a role that launched Dixon on an acclaimed career as a director and actor. If the U.S. Army during the real World War II would not have treated an African-American fairly, the Nazis, or course, would have oppressed Kinchloe vastly worse.

The Museum's site said allied POWs from groups Nazi ideology considered "racially and politically inferior" were often starved and brutalized. 

In an American online remembrance of POWs, the National World War II Museum’s site said:

“In one of the coldest winters on record -- 23 December 1944 at Stalag Luft III in Sagan, temperatures hovered just below 0°F -- 80,000 Allied POWs were evacuated from camps on the eastern edge of German territory and forced, mainly on foot, to camps further away from the advancing Russians.”

I remember an adult leader in our Boy Scout troop, himself a World War II veteran (though not a POW), telling us circa 1970 about this brutal march of allied POWs in the snow. Yet he did not mention Hogan’s Heroes, apparently never regarding the then hit show’s lighthearted portrayal of the harsh life of POWs as a controversy.

Across America, there were no reports of angry letters to CBS about the nature of the show, no advertiser nervousness about supporting it, and very few if any complaints from Jewish or holocaust survivor organizations. Of course, POW camps, where prisoners got Red Cross packages and could write letters home, were not the same things as Hitler’s concentration camps, which were created to exterminate an entire people.

Yet, the reality of the holocaust was anything but removed from the set of this sitcom. Hogan’s Heroes cast member Robert Clary, a French-born Jew who played POW LeBeau, was a real-life survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp – a striking fact that serves both to dampen and inflame criticism of Hogan’s Heroes.

Adding to this elephant in the living room, actor Leon Askin, whose recurring role was no Schultz or Klink, but a real Nazi Gen. Burkhalter, was Jewish and a refugee from Vienna; and Werner Klemperer, who played Klink, was European-born to a Jewish father and gentile mother.

In the last 40 years, Clary has spoken about the holocaust on tours organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, appeared as himself in a 1982 movie about survivors gathering in Israel, and worked with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation archiving recordings of survivors’ recollections.

“Inevitably, at his lectures someone would ask Clary how he could work on Hogan’s Heroes after what he went through during World War II,” entertainment writer Brenda Scott Royce said in her book, Hogan’s Heroes – Behind the Scenes at Stalag 13. “He is weary of repeating himself.”

Clary told Royce: “Really, with the students, it’s the first  question they ask."  Royce's book says that among Clary’s responses are: POW camps were not death camps, the character Louis LeBeau was not Jewish, and most overridingly: “I’m an actor.”

Clary does not try to frame Hogan’s Heroes as anti-fascist commentary, or poetic justice by a troupe of European Jewish performers.

“We did not deal, really, with Nazism…. As a comedy, you cannot do that,” he said in Royce’s book. “I played Louis LeBeau… and I enjoyed it.”

And so did we, for six years.

Yet flashforward to our era, and a few minutes in Hanoi is widely condemned as cold disregard for the sufferings of POWs four decades earlier.

What explains this drastic difference in the public’s perceptions? Are we wiser? Hypersensitive? Oversaturated with 24-hour opportunities to crusade instantly with the clicking of a key? We used to leave that letter of protest sitting overnight by the car keys, enabling us to reconsider our visceral reactions before mailing it in the morning.

Today, we are lumped into algorithms and echo chambers to make online marketing more precise, and we are inflamed with catchphrases of fury to make partisan fundraisers produce more cash. Paul Ryan lied repeatedly during his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican convention and both parties watched and learned as Ipad and laptop money donations surged with each false incendiary statement about President Obama.

In 2018, spending for those crucial midterm elections, CNN reported, tallied $5.7 billion. Compare to 1966’s midterms, when war, racial equality, immigration policy, and a backlash against a president drove donors to give $24.5 million. (Adjusted for inflation and population size, that’s about 5 percent as much.)

The 24.5 million figure was considered alarmingly high back then, but in 1966 when we got all worked up about largely the same issues as today, we still had the time – or was it the callousness – to laugh it up over POWs.

Are You a Whit Spotter? Viewers of TV and movies from the 1950s through the '70s probably are

An ambassador in Star Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles,” the technocrat who ran The Time Tunnel, a conniving U.S. senator in the tense political movie, “7 Days in May” – all these screen roles highlighted the tightly wired officiousness yet lilting voice that were hallmarks of the man who played them.

Whit Bissell was one of the most prolific character actors, those performers you recognize, yet don’t. Bissell preferred the term “supporting player,” to “character actor,” but either way, he excelled at projecting his own mellow and soothing qualities into a scene, then practicing that courtesy of a character actor by bowing out to let the big stars, or younger hot-shots do the iconic parts that made their names household words.

But then if you were born Whitner Nutting Bissell, vocal and facial gifts, rather than your name, likely would be your performing strengths.

An awkward moniker and intense administrator roles belie Whit Bissell’s real-life relaxed, charming and well-read nature. Still, friend Bernie Shine wrote on Leonard Maltin’s entertainment web site that it took some tenacity by Bissell, the son of a New York City physician, to break into the business.

"He told me that when he was starting out he found himself on the opposite side of the desk of a famous Hollywood mogul who bluntly told him that he didn’t have what it takes to be a leading man, stating, ‘I don’t see any women burning with desire when they see you,’ “ Shine wrote. “Whit responded, ‘Perhaps not, but I do think I could make them feel other emotions, such as laughing, crying, or caring.’ ”

Indeed, character actors may be told early in their careers they don’t have the sizzle or the physical stature to be heartthrobs or heroes. But after years of frequent, often brief appearances, the masterful facial skills and appealing voices of the most successful make them recognized, or even craved.

A character actor’s constant moving from one production to another to play unrelated roles makes casting and filming for TV and movies less costly, and it makes the actor something of a rolling stone.

But they can gather the moss of recognition if they achieve long professional life. Many character actors, or supporting players, have sub-cultures of close followers and appreciation of their skills has grown due to the Internet. 

                      2 scenes of Whit in charge of "The Time Tunnel," 1966:

  

A certain studious air helped land the bespectacled Bissell parts as scientists in many of the best sci-fi movies of the 1950s through the early ‘70s, including “I was a Teenage Frankenstein,” “Soylent Green,” “I was a Teenage Werewolf,” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” He also had roles in “The Magnificent Seven” and “Pete ‘n’ Tillie,” and appeared in such stalwart TV series as McCloud, Land of the Giants, Here’s Lucy, Gomer Pyle: USMC, Kojak, Cannon, Marcus Welby, M.D. and Ben Casey, generally playing trusted figures like doctors, chaplains and professors.

                                 On the witness stand in The Cain Mutiny, 1954:

 Of Whit Bissell, a post on Silverscreenoasis.com said:

“I've often thought of Whit as something of a second-tier Hume Cronyn. I've always liked his speaking voice, which I think very rich, mellow, and distinctive.”

Another on that site summed up the value of the supporting player genre to which Whit Bissell devoted his life:

“ ‘Character actor' isn't a good enough term to describe Whit’s talents, so, for many years now, I have referred to any reliable character actor that happens to pop up as a ‘Whit.’ It’s an honorific term, meant to notice and celebrate his and other actors' contributions as support in countless films…. One of the pleasures of watching TV with friends in the 70s was to do ‘Whit-spotting’ and point him out to others. 'Oh yeah! I've seen that guy before!' was the usual response.”

                                              __________________________

Brian Arbenz of Louisville, Ky. USA has been spotting Whit all his life, but has been aware of it only since becoming fascinated with the movie "7 Days in May" in the 1990s. 

 

Bonus footage: Whit Bissell in a 1965 Profiles in Courage re-enactment of President Woodrow Wilson appointing Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court. It's rather high school civics tame, but displays Whit's skills:

 

Nurturing Children, Training a Voice, Roughing up a Barber -- Reta Shaw Could Do It All Convincingly

No two characters seen on The Andy Griffith Show were more different than Big Maude, the escaped convict who gleefully dominates Barney Fife, and Eleanora Poultice, the overly sentimental music teacher who wills herself to hear greatness in the deputy's awful singing voice.

One has no sensitivity; the other is overflowing with it. And devoted viewers of the show revel in the hilarious opposite extremes of both women – probably without even realizing they are watching the same performer.

That testifies to the greatness of Reta Shaw. The daughter of a New England orchestra leader, she was one of television’s best character actors – that breed of performer who takes home less money and far less name recognition than an Andy Griffith or a Hope Lang. But knowing you are indispensable to TV and movies is one of the satisfactions of the character actor craft.

"People love to laugh," Shaw said in a 1968 interview. "They love to be entertained. If I can bring a laugh, or please someone, I have accomplished something."

Shaw was deft at the routine of pouring her heart into a role, then moving on, making television programs and movies feasible by being dependable, then expendable. A character actor’s ability to focus like a laser on one or two scenes, then quickly move to another unrelated production also gives her or him a mobility that the wealthy screen idol can’t match.

Reta consoles Will Robinson in a Lost in Space episode that is lost in time, and Vermont's politics 

 

Shaw was famous, yet anonymous – always playing characters with delightfully overstated charm, enunciating each syllable with an evangelical passion. That may have been residual from her one-time aspiration of becoming a religious missionary.

Of playing TV and movie characters, she said: “It's different from feeding souls in one way, but it's feeding them in another way."

As with other successful character actors, viewers fleetingly recognize her, then return their attention to the plot.

 

     Spotting talent - that no one else in Mayberry does

 

 

 

        But as a convict, Reta dances to a different tune

 

 

Shaw’s persuasive, husky style, though never used to preach religious messages, proved perfect for playing people with connections to spirits of another sort. She is remembered as housekeeper Martha Grant on the 1968-70 sitcom The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, an acclaimed show based on the 1940s novel about a widow and her family who move into a seaside mansion which turned out to be haunted by the ghost of the sea captain who once owned it.

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Acne and house calls aren't what they seem to be in Rita's brief role in the 1971 made for TV movie "Murder Once Removed," a love triangle murder tale.

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Prior to Mrs. Muir having a TV house guest from the afterlife, Shaw played Mrs. Halcyon Maxwell in Alan Rafkin’s movie "The Ghost And Mr. Chicken." In Bewitched, she had a recurring role as Samantha’s Aunt Hagatha. One of Shaw's most beloved movie roles was in the 1957 musical "The Pajama Game."

On Andy Griffith, Shaw played those opposite personality types, but the roles were similar in that Big Maude was outside the bounds of the law and Eleanora Poultice was outside the bounds of common sense in seeing Barney Fife as musically talented, going with her heart instead of her ears.

And Shaw played in a chronologically confusing Lost in Space episode in the mid-1960s, which took place of course in the 90s, but with the unique setting of a tiny hamlet in Vermont.

Will Robinson is unintentionally whisked back to Earth, only to long to rejoin his family in the distant cosmos. Vermont is shown as a place of crank telephones, high water pants and backward bumpkins. In this anachronistic portrayal of the Green Mountain State, Reta Shaw plays a folksy, caring aunt-figure for the boy.

Had this Lost In Space episode's conception of 1990s Vermont included the true-to-life socialist in Congress, same-sex civil unions and -- especially -- Ben And Jerry's, what kid Will's age wouldn't have figured they'd landed in paradise? 

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA... As a bonus, he links to Reta Shaw singing and dancing in the musical "The Pajama Game":

A FATAL MOMENT IN THE CLOUDS... Remembering Elliot See and Charles Bassett

By Brian Arbenz
Was it bad weather, pilot error, or an excessive need to prove critics wrong that caused two astronauts to die 53 years ago near the Saint Louis airport?
In 1966, as the United States space program finally was poised to pass a Soviet Union the U.S. had trailed for eight years, a sense of “Go Fever” gripped the tens of thousands of NASA and contractor workers from Cape Canaveral to Houston.
And on the morning of Feb. 28 that year, another place was central to that eager spirit. In a cold and intermittently snowy and rainy Saint Louis, Mo., the Gemini spacecraft manufacturer McDonnell Aircraft Corp.’s Building 101 contained the Gemini IX.
Inside that craft, astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett were to orbit the Earth in May of that year and dock with a drone Agena craft. Bassett would perform a spacewalk.

Elliot See (left), and Charles Bassett in their NASA

Gemini IX crew photo, weeks before their deaths.

A docking and spacewalk had to be mastered if we were eventually to go to the moon. The two maneuvers had not yet been done successfully on any single U.S. space flight, making Gemini IX a pivotal moment in the moon race. The rookie astronauts See and Bassett took off from Houston at 7:41 a.m. Central Time Feb. 28 in a T-38 jet piloted by See for a 90-minute flight to Saint Louis’ Lambert Field airport. The airport is adjacent to McDonnell, where in Building 101, Bassett and See would undergo mission training inside the Gemini IX.
Fine weather in Houston turned cold and cloudy above Arkansas and by the time the jet was over Missouri, conditions were overcast with rain and snow mixed. Just off the Lambert Field runway where See and Bassett were to land, hundreds of McDonnell workers in Building 101 were busily putting final touches on Gemini IX and assembling the nearby Gemini X, which would fly later in the year.
Gemini IX backup crew members Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan flew the route from Houston to Lambert in a separate T-38 jet.
It was the very picture of a space project proceeding briskly and competently; the flying mastery of astronauts in the air and diligence and organization of workers inside the Building 101 the planes were nearing.
Then, in a hellacious instant, all that skill and savvy gave way to chaos that revealed to the public the imperfect nature of exploring space and of the people who go there.
Foggy conditions dictated that the T-38 planes made a second landing approach, this time using instruments to assure a safe landing.
Stafford, piloting the backup crew plane, started to do just that, then was baffled to observe See’s plane making a turn to approach the runway – without instruments.
Stafford could be heard on radio asking, “Goddammit, where’s HE going?” On his next attempt, Stafford landed safely, with no knowledge of exactly what had resulted from pilot See’s risky maneuver.
Just before Stafford and Cernan landed, a confused ground crew asked the two to identify themselves, unsure which plane was which. Stafford then complained that his radio communications had not been returned by the Lambert tower during an approach made tense by bad weather and low fuel.
The frustration of the twangy-voiced Oklahoma native Stafford continued as his plane came to a halt and he and Cernan opened its canopy, but a minute later all was forgiven.
It was immediately clear that something was up as McDonnell Aircraft founder James McDonnell made the unusual move of coming outside to talk in person to Stafford and Cernan. He somberly informed them that the other plane had crashed into the roof of Building 101, instantly killing Elliot See and Charles Bassett.

 
A NASA dot gov history page said: “The aircraft struck the roof of the building and crashed into a courtyard…. An investigative board chaired by astronaut Alan B. Shepherd attributed the crash to weather and pilot error on See's part in choosing to keep his plane so low.”

The site AmericaSpace dot com described the fatal moment this way: “Descending through the cloud deck, the two jets appeared directly over the centerline of the southwest runway at 8:55 a.m. Both were much too low and traveling much too fast to achieve a landing. Stafford had remained in position on See’s right wing, but decided to ascend and perform a flyaround for another approach. He assumed that See would do the same. Inexplicably, though, See executed a tight turn to reach the runway.

“Years later, the only explanation for why he did this was that he wanted to beat the backup crew to the ground; an unusual act for a pilot who had earned a reputation for being both careful and judicious.”

No communications were heard from See or Bassett during the seconds leading up to the disaster. But one last act by See – performed the moment he saw he was dangerously low -- was an historically influential deed. See fired his afterburner engines in a belated attempt to rise fast enough to clear the suddenly visible Building 101, and though this desperate maneuver was too late to save himself or Bassett, the small jump in altitude that resulted caused the T-38 to braze the roof, rather than strike the mid portion of the building. Far from being a minor difference, this last-second alteration in the plane’s path actually saved the Gemini project and President Kennedy’s goal of getting to the moon by the end of the 1960s.

As AmericaSpace dot com explained: “If their T-38 had been a little lower when it hit Building 101, See and Bassett would have ploughed straight into the assembly line, destroying Gemini IX and X and probably killing hundreds of McDonnell’s skilled spacecraft construction workers.”

Tom Stafford, in his memoir called We Have Capture, wrote: “Had they hit a couple of hundred feet earlier, they would have hit the side and roof of the building, instead of just the end of the roof, and wiped out the whole Gemini program.”
Project Gemini was indispensable in advancing from the short if dramatic one-person Earth orbital Mercury flights to the complex, eight-to-10-day Apollo moon flights.
No Gemini, no Apollo.
AmericaSpace added: “Miracles seemed far from St Louis during that gloomy, overcast day on which See and Bassett breathed their last, but it is quite remarkable that no one on the ground was seriously injured and their spacecraft, Gemini IX, survived.”

Tail wreckage of See and

Bassett's T-38 jet.

Behind is the gash made 

in the roof.

AmericaSpace said that though the steep last second climb saved Building 101 and two Gemini craft, workers inside scrambled in fear, diving for cover under benches as “as a sheet of flame rippled across the corrugated iron roof,” and fragments from the T-38’s shattered wing flooded into the building, hitting the Gemini X spacecraft. “Other workers heard noises which they variously described as resembling sonic booms or the echo of thunder, as well as sudden flashes of fire and the manifestation of clouds of dust and fumes. Around a dozen McDonnell employees were injured by ceiling debris, including 19-year-old production worker Clyde Ethridge, who sustained a serious back injury.”

The most horrible discovery came later in the day, and readers should brace themselves – Charles Bassett’s severed head was found jammed high in the rafters of Building 101. Elliot See had been thrown clear of the jet and his corpse would be found in the parking lot, with his parachute half-opened.
See, a Dallas native; and Bassett, who was from Dayton, Ohio, were buried in Arlington four days later. Both were married. See left three children; Bassett left two.
The entire NASA astronaut contingent attended the funeral, but after the day’s reverence, a NASA-military culture of finger pointing after fatal crashes took hold, and speculation about Elliot See’s fitness to fly the T-38 jet continues in space buff circles more than 50 years later.
The AmericaSpace site includes a powerful recollection by future Apollo 7 astronaut Walt Cunningham of a day in 1965, published in his memoir titled The All-American Boys. Cunningham wrote that he flew backseat in a T-38 flight with See, who wanted to fly over Taylor Lake in the Houston area and buzz his house, a common astronaut antic. At one stage, with a full load of fuel, AmericaSpace said, See brought the jet to an altitude of 50 feet (15 meters), an airspeed of 170 knots, and no flaps down. “The T-38 with a full load of fuel won’t fly a whole lot slower than 165 knots, even with the flaps down,” Cunningham wrote. “The fact that he was flying way too slow troubled me only to the extent that it could get me killed.”
Cunningham called “Hey, how about half-flaps” and See concurred, dropping half flaps, waving to his wife, and flying away.
That hair-raising episode, AmericaSpace said, “would be brought home to Cunningham with a horrifying sharpness, less than a year later, on 28 February 1966.”
Donald K. “Deke” Slayton, writing about the crash at Building 101, remembers See having the opposite deficiency – flying with too little abandon.
Slayton, the Mercury astronaut grounded until 1975 due to a heart murmur, had the job of choosing crews for NASA flights. In his autobiography, Slayton wrote that Elliot See’s piloting skills, while highly competent, lacked military aggressiveness. He called See’s flying style “old woman-ish,” a double slur disrespecting See, and such scientific geniuses as Grace Hopper, Betty Holberton and Jean Bartik, whose pioneering of the computer, including while they were old, put America on the moon.
Slayton said a sentimental feeling that See deserved a top spot prompted the decision that he command Gemini IX, a choice Slayton later regretted, partly because in that capacity, See piloted the T-38 to Saint Louis.
But NASA legend Neil Armstrong – who like See was chosen an astronaut as a civilian -- defended See’s piloting ability, saying the disaster at Saint Louis involved events too frenetic and unknowable to show any aerial unfitness by him.
Could Slayton’s doubts be partly based on cultural bias, not just fact? Most of See’s 3,900 hours of piloting jets were during his time flying for General Electric, a huge military contractor in the 1960s – this was after his military service in U.S. Merchant Marine and the Naval Reserves Active Duty. Such a civilian flying career can be snickered at by Air Force, Marine and Navy fighter pilots.
St. Louis Magazine, in a 2006 piece on the crash, speculated that Elliot See’s actions at Lambert reflected the opposite of the cautious tentativeness of the “old woman” label.
“A talented civilian test pilot, he knew that completing such a bold maneuver in this weather would have its rewards: His Flight 901 would beat the backup crew to the ground by several minutes—and live to give them hell about it. The 38-year-old father of three still had a little vinegar in him.”
Whether due to too much confidence, or too much Aunt Bea in See’s flying instincts, the consensus is that indeed his piloting decisions led to the crash.
Lily Koppel, in her 2013 book, “The Astronaut Wives Club,” wrote that on Air Force bases and at NASA, personal relations usually can’t survive multiple fatalities attributed to pilot mistakes.
“When you’re in the program, you’re in, in, in,” Jeannie Bassett said in the book. “Then something happens and you’re out. I don’t want to hang around and be the big happy fifth wheel.” She quickly moved with her children to San Francisco after the crash.

Charles Bassett's family at his funeral.

As for Marilyn See, whose husband saved Building 101 and its Geminis, but not himself or his crewmate, she didn’t leave Houston immediately. Koppel wrote, “Marilyn See stuck it out through a year of dirty looks and hushed silences.”
More than 50 years later, much micro-critiquing of Elliot See’s suitability to fly the T-38 continues on corners of the blogosphere.
“I sometimes wonder if Elliot See was aware of the whispers being made about his skills as a pilot (Deke Slayton describing them as ‘Old woman-ish’ i.e., not forceful or aggressive enough),” a blogger who said he is a pilot wrote in 2011 on collectspace dot com. “That could have been in the back of his mind as he made the decision (to land without instruments).”
The blogger described the landing See attempted as “risky,” in bad weather, though often done successfully.
“It requires a significant amount of division of attention to keep the runway in sight, maintain the proper altitude, stay close to the runway, and fly the airplane to a normal touchdown.
“We will never know what was going through the minds of See and Bassett during the last few seconds of their lives. I still consider Elliot See one of my heroes, just like the other astronauts, but he messed up that day. He and Bassett paid the price.”
Wherever Elliot See may be thought of as being – an afterlife, or in the collective memories of space exploration aficionados – it is long past the time to let him, his relatives and ourselves rest by fully appreciating his and Charles Bassett’s contributions to humanity’s greatest endeavor.
We could talk more about how his last act was a split-second decision under duress that raised his jet’s altitude just barely enough to save hundreds of lives and allow the Apollo moon program to continue.
Or, we could just bow to the permanent reality that space exploration is a dangerous business, stop trying to get inside Elliot McKay See’s mind, and let go of a 53-year-old fatal moment in the clouds.

Brian Arbenz, who grew up passionately following space exploration, was 7 when Elliot See and Charles Bassett died.