Remembering Tom Moffett: 94 years for racial justice, peace, and red sweaters

Tom Moffett, sans a red sweater but with his classic
tartan hat, taking a bus to a protest circa 2015.

Louisville anti-racist and peace activist Tom Moffett was an accountant, scholar and ordained Presbyterian minister, but as his careers changed, his unrelenting work to help people overcome oppression never wavered.

Born in 1924 the youngest of five children of an American Presbyterian missionary in Pyongyang, in Japanese-occupied Korea, where he lived until age 12, Tom died in May 2018 in Louisville, where had lived since 1966. Here and in previous hometowns of Kansas City, Mo., Wheeling, W. Va. and other places from Los Angeles to New Jersey, Tom daily would march, speak, organize and learn on the matters of racial justice, international disarmament, LGBT rights and justice for workers – always while maintaining a lively and fun demeanor.

Tom also served as the unofficial fashion leader of Louisville’s left, known as the dapper red-sweater and Tartan hat-clad protestor, a style that made him a recognized character at rallies, government meetings, marches, and on frequent city bus rides he would take alone on into his 90s to attend progressive actions wherever he was needed.

The sweater, and passionate 

arguments for justice marked 

Tom Moffett's City Hall visits.

A resident of the African-American section West Louisville during most of his more than 50 years in the city, Tom came here during the rising Civil Rights tide of the ‘60s to pastor a then-integrated Presbyterian church.

Tom’s schooling also was an eclectic mix. After childhood education in the missionary community of Pyongyang (which today is North Korea’s capital), he attended high schools in low, middle and upper income areas from California to New Jersey, then studied Christian theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey and Wheaton College in the Chicago area, and accounting at Jefferson Community College and the University of Louisville.

Tom, the son of Madison, Ind. native Samuel A. Moffett and Lucia Hester Fish Moffett of Santa Barbara, Cal., talked in 2015 about his life and activism with FORsooth editor emeritus Brian Arbenz.

            Brian Arbenz: How did spending your first 12 years in Korea shape your teen and adult life in the United States, including your work against oppression here in Louisville?

            Tom Moffett: I grew up in an occupied country, like the West Bank and Gaza.

            Korea… had always been a small beleaguered country between China and Japan, the giants, and fought over.

            There was a war where China and Japan were fighting. There was a war where Russia and Japan were fighting.

            My father was there right in the center of it. Those wars tended to center in Pyongyang.

            He moved there in 1890…. He had already achieved some degree of acceptance by the Koreans, and he solidified that because… he took sides very strongly with the people, supporting them when they were oppressed by whichever power.

            And so they saw him and Americans as their friends.

            It gave me a really different perspective on the world. I intuitively knew that the United States was not the center of the universe -- even though I thought it was the best country in the world and I was glad to be an American. And my folks were there for reasons of caring about everybody in the world.

            BA: Did you learn Korean and do you currently speak any of the language?

            TM: No. By the time I was born, there were a relatively large number of Americans and other missionaries in Korea, and particularly in the city where we lived…. We were pretty well a self-contained community.

            But there was also a school that drew children from all over Korea and North China. It was a small school and it was right across the street from where we lived.

            BA: You moved to your family’s native U.S. at age 12 in the mid-1930s. What was the transition like, and how did you develop social justice concerns in America?

            TM: My first experience in America was four years in… Monrovia, Calif., which was just 18 miles outside of L.A.  The first day I went to school in Monrovia, in the 7^th grade, they asked me where I was from. I said, Korea. They said, ‘What state is that in?’

            I was interested in sports so I started listening to UCLA football games. They had a star running back who was African-American, and that, at that time, was noteworthy, because most of the country didn’t have integrated sports.

            Kenny Washington was kind of a lightning rod for the African-American community. Because of my natural interest in minorities, I just became fascinated with that. And we had one football and one basketball star of African-American descent in our high school.

            We moved to Newark, N.J. [six years later]. Newark was a somewhat segregated city, not rigidly…. I graduated one of the top people in the class.

            After a couple of months, I did well on some test, and got some attention.

            One of my classmates said, ‘Congratulations. I’m glad you got it. I’m glad a Christian got it.’ I thought to myself, how does he know I’m a Christian? Then, I realized all of a sudden, three quarters or more of the students were Jewish.

            BA: Did that further energize you about the issue of discrimination?

            TM: I wouldn’t say that it consciously did. None of this up to that point consciously did.

            BA: What did energize you?

            TM: I followed my older brother to Princeton Seminary…. In my senior year at Princeton I had an ethics course.

            I was assigned to write a paper on the view of private property in the Old Testament. I didn’t know a thing about that.

            And I discovered that the Bible, the Old Testament, has a number of chapters… built around the idea that there really is no such thing as private property. It doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to God, and we are the stewards of it.

            The principle that was very clearly spelled out in The Bible was: no matter what happens… you don’t get permanent title to [land] just by buying it. It belongs to God, and it belongs to the people. I had grown up a Christian who took the Bible very seriously, but I had never come across that idea before.

            BA: How did these Biblical principles play out in the West Virginia communities where you served early in your church ministry work?

            TM: That started my real social consciousness, you might say, with help from what happened before. I served four different mine camps. There could be 500 people in the mine camp.

            They were in a battle for respect and decent treatment by the mine owners.

            The black miners were relegated to the less attractive houses on the top row. The others were sorted by authority and so forth among the other rows, with the managers getting the big houses on the bottom row. This was my first direct experience with racial and class segregation, and also of the industrial labor relations aspects of the working people of America…. In Wheeling, it was similar, but in a metropolitan sense.

            And it was a very different experience. I grew up a privileged white person in a Republican, relatively wealthy family, well educated. Both my mother and father were college educated, had advanced degrees.

            BA: When you moved to Louisville in 1966, what was it like?

            TM: During that period, from ’66 to ’72, the whole dynamic of the civil rights movement was changing from, let’s see if we can integrate, to: let’s build our own, let’s be ourselves. The temporary existence of integrated congregations in white churches came to an abrupt closure.

            BA: Was this a big part of why you decided to leave the ministry?

            TM: No, that was only a small part of it. I was not especially successful as a pastor.

            I hadn’t really been that good a counselor as a pastor. I’d been more of an organizer.

            I said to myself, if you’re having trouble achieving what you set out to do, maybe you ought to see if maybe that’s not what you are the best at…. I not only resigned as pastor. I demitted as a minister. I preferred being a church member to being the ex-pastor.

            I’d always been good at math. Even as a pastor, I’d always paid attention to the finances of the church…. So I took accounting classes.

            I was at the zoo with my daughter and someone I knew came up to me and said: ‘The place where I work, the Park DuValle Health Center, is looking for an accountant.’.... And its purpose was not just to provide health care, but job training for underemployed African-Americans, or anybody. That just appealed to everything I was involved in.

            I was immediately hired as a junior accountant.

            That was my day job. I felt much more on top of it than I had been as a pastor…. But I still had plenty of time to be active in the church and active in the community. I quickly became active in the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

Then in ’75 busing came to Louisville and I hooked up with Progress in Education, which was the local response to the anti-busing protests which erupted very big. And it was thanks to PIE and the Black Protective Parents and the other forward thinking people in the African-American and white communities that we were able to, rather quickly, put down that violent negativity and move ahead with busing.

            Black Protective Parents was a black organization that formed to protect their children in this situation. And PIE and Black Protective Parents worked very closely together. Progress in Education was black and white.

            Busing has not been without its problems, but it has been more successful in Louisville than in most of the country.

            Although we won the battle against the violent protests… we didn’t win the battle in the schools. Resistance continues to this day. African-American children in integrated schools still get the shaft and have not benefited in the same way as white children have.

            The main benefit of busing in this community has been for whites and the greater community, not the black children. White children have discovered the world, the way it is. They didn’t have any clue.

            Black children already knew…. And they have had to bear the brunt of it, because to keep (busing) going, every compromise has been in favor of the whites.

            BA: Ending wars and excessive military spending is a cause that has brought you to the streets as much as racial justice. How much is militarism tied in with domestic social justice?

            TM: It is totally tied in.

            The use of military force for ‘America’ to dominate the world is not really for ‘America’ to dominate the world, it’s for multi-national global corporate interests to dominate the world…. It hinders every effort at social justice.

            BA: Why is it so hard to get global peace activism included with activism on domestic issues?

            TM: The repression against that has been greater than anything else.

            That’s what made Martin Luther King so courageous.  We have to keep working for that. We can’t give up.

            BA: Through all your public commitment to intense issues, your dress and manner also are well known. One person in a letter to the editor upon your 90^th birthday referred to Tom Moffett as ‘the man in the red sweater.’

            TM: I like red and I got a sweater like this a long time ago and I wore it occasionally, and then within the last 10 years or so I had gotten another one like it.

            I discovered it has pockets, which some of my sweaters don’t have…. I’ll take out my hearing aid and I’d just get frantic because I could not find what I had done with it. I’ve acquired the system of always putting it into this pocket.

            After I discovered that, the red sweater became not just a trademark that people recognize me with, but it became a necessity in my life.

            BA: Have you always worn the Scottish Tartan hats?

            TM: I just happened to pick up a similar one about 15 or 20 years ago…. It wore out. It was kind of floppy.

            I had gotten so that I liked it and my daughter had noticed that, so she said ‘would you like to have another one like it?’ It took her almost a year to find one!

                              ____________________________________________

 

            Brian Arbenz was an assistant editor and editor emeritus of FORsooth when he interviewed Tom Moffett for the Louisville progressive newspaper in 2015.

When Your Crush Becomes a Climate Change Denier

A dusty and triumphant
Harrison "Jack" Schmitt
after one of his three
Apollo 17 moon walks
in December 1972.

As the airliner crossed the Sandia Mountains, rattling from heat waves rising off the sensually tan, sagebrush dotted terrain that seemed close enough to touch, I knew I was back in New Mexico.

I was 20 and was making my third trip to Albuquerque, and my first in 12 years. This was the city where my parents had lived for four years just before I was born.

I had visited the Land of Enchantment twice in the 1960s and now in the summer of 1979, I felt a familiarity with so much in this state – the Socorro sand dunes, Carlsbad’s massive caverns, the adobe houses of Albuquerque’s sun splashed thoroughfares, and the delectable sopapillas served in the restaurants along them.

Yet there was one thing in Albuquerque with which I was not well familiar -- my own father. He had moved back to Albuquerque after my parents' divorce when I was two and one-half, and I saw him infrequently growing up -- I mean once or twice a decade.

So I do not at all identify with Robert Bly's assertion that males are collectively wounded by the transition to industrial society that resulted in their fathers leaving home for eight hours a day.

These dads came back each evening, right, Mr. Bly?

But at 20, on the advice of a sibling, I decided to give a father-son relationship another try. And on this brilliant July day, minutes after the jet passed over the “thermals,” the heat bubbles causing it to rattle about every 30 seconds, I would shortly be walking through the Albuquerque Sunport and -- perhaps at the same spot where I had bid him farewell in 1967 -- be greeted by George Morrison.

He was my father, but anyone who lived in New Mexico in the 1950s and ‘60s knew him better than I did. The man who was my dad also for 10 years had been that state's best-known television news anchorman, delivering daily 6 and 11 pm newscasts which -- for the lack of another TV market in New Mexico during many of those years -- were beamed statewide. That's a territory that would stretch from Louisville to Minnesota.

New Mexicans also knew my father for his articulate charm, occasional outspoken commentaries, his piloting jets in the New Mexico Air National Guard, and his closeness to eminent politicians. 

But the TV screen could not nearly contain Dad’s abilities.

After he earned a law degree circa 1970, he left the news business, but remained highly recognized while serving as assistant district attorney for Albuquerque, regularly talking on the air about high profile cases. In a final career, Dad, in his last seven years, wrote and self-published three books, involving his life, broadcasting years and sometimes stormy family background in West Virginia and Kentucky.

Two of Dad’s close friends were author William Eastlake -- whom Dad had helped choose the title of his signature book Castle Keep -- and Clarence Birdseye Jr., whose father’s invention of frozen foods still determines the itinerary of your grocery trips.

In a room filled with my dad’s friends from New Mexico, it seems the only one the 20-year-old me wouldn’t already know the life story of was the one who had sired me.

Dad reports the day's news
 on KOB-TV in Albuquerque,
mid 1950s.

I knew he was a Democrat and had from time to time been mentioned as a possible candidate for governor, a quest which could have succeeded before Watergate gave media the mandate to report on personal missteps such as the philandering and heavy drinking my father did until his early 50s.

What kind of Democrat was he? I heard him say good things about civil rights (he had once served as the legal counsel for the Zuni Indian tribe), but overall supportive things about the Vietnam War (he told me of a passionate argument with the very anti-war Eastlake).

An English lit degree holder from the University of Louisville, Dad was by any standard pro-civil liberties and he once oversaw the consumer protection division of Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County -- but knowing he came of age in the 1930s and 40s, can you wager a guess about which issue would prompt this otherwise enlightened intellectual to lapse into bigotry at the drop of a hat?

Or, more precisely, at a gesture or an enunciation that struck him as effeminate?

I don’t mean my father would ridicule anyone in their presence, but while at his apartment during my 1979 visit, I saw him launch into a tirade of insults while we were watching a brief TV segment featuring an interview with a man he figured was gay. Suddenly, I saw the Louisville high school football standout and World War II veteran my father also had been.

But there was one more famous person for Dad to introduce me to on this trip. I asked if he knew U.S. Sen. Harrison Schmitt, a first-term New Mexico Republican.

In keeping with Dad’s Robin Leach-like knack for associating with the famous, yes, he in fact worked down the hall from and occasionally chatted with Schmitt, who went by his nickname Jack. Dad said he would be glad to try to arrange a meeting.

The senator, my father added, was a political wunderkind, winning election in 1976 as a dogmatic conservative counterpoised to unions in such a pro-labor state. Of course, four years before that, the geologist Jack Schmitt had walked on the moon on Apollo 17, the grandest and most successful of the six lunar landing missions.

Extra terrestrial glory can obscure a clash in political philosophies -- or as in the case of John Glenn, even ease the effects of being mired in the S & L scandal. 

      A nearly perfect final Apollo moon mission concludes in the Pacific.

So Schmitt wasn’t that extremist out to break your union. He was a space hero, who had turned moon dust into politically magic dust.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the ex-senator Jack Schmitt has become a climate change denier, (in a video, he used the term “denier,” between spoken quote marks, to describe himself) repeatedly condemning the theory of human causes of global warming as fiction by an environmental movement he casts as surreptitious.

Yet, Schmitt's speaking style is even tempered and refreshingly civil in a time of absolutist polemics. In interviews, he is friendly and upbeat describing how important reading was while he was growing up in Silver City, N.M., and calling for more emphasis on reading in his state’s public schools.

His spoken criticisms of the climate action movement are free of the threatening, fist-shaking jeremiad tone of today’s far right. He is more like the Gerald Ford we miss than the Donald Trump we’re sick of. Nonetheless, the substance of Schmitt’s climate message is often extreme, cherry-picked, and unnuanced about the relationship between ideology and pollution. 

In 2011, Schmitt, recalling the opening of the Berlin Wall, said: “[T]he great champion of the opponents of liberty, namely communism, had to find some other place to go and they basically went into the environmental movement.”

Flat out contradicting this is the fact that Communist East Germany in 1984 was rated the most polluted country in Europe, largely because its government powered the nation on Lignite, a far dirtier coal than was used in the capitalist west. LINK to 1984 Christian Science Monitor story on this.

In 2014, Scientific American reported that in the 10 years after the opening of the Berlin Wall, carbon pollution in the former East Germany dropped by 15 percent. By 2013, SA reported, the territory that was East Germany used renewable sources for 40 percent of its electricity.

These are inconvenient truths for anyone who would condemn environmentalism by comparing it to the Marxism-Leninism of Eastern Europe – or for that matter, who would champion Marxism-Leninism as better for the environment than capitalism.

The environmental policies which were really behind the Berlin Wall are not the only facts Harrison Schmitt simply can’t be bothered with.

Just before the 2016 election, he co-authored a Wall Street Journal piece titled “The Phony War Against C02," in which he and Rodney Nichols asserted that the warming underway could be beneficial for agriculture, citing the website of the anti-climate action CO2 Coalition, which says:

"The costs of emissions regulations, which will be paid by everyone, will be punishingly high and will provide no benefits to most people anywhere in the world.”

On a site called Climate Feedback, six scientists analyzed Nichols' and Schmitt's article, concluding that the authors rely heavily on ideologically slanted, rather than respected scientific sources. One of the six, University of Utah associate professor William Anderegg, wrote:

“The conclusions on CO2 uniformly benefiting agriculture are simply misleading—yes, CO2 can help plants but higher temperatures and more drought and pests with climate change also hurt plants.”

Undaunted, Harrison Schmitt was a signatory of a petition organized by Cato Institute fellow Richard Lindzen urging then President Donald Trump to pull the United States out of the United Nations international convention on climate change. Oh, it was that same United Nations that issued the 1984 report shaming East Germany as an environmental criminal regime.

Back in 1979, climate change was a vague issue, but Schmitt's staunch conservatism on economics, contrasted with my enthusiastic belief in socialism (I mean real socialism, not that East German-style state capitalism) still should make for quite a chasm to bridge when I shake hands with the senator. Could it get tense?

No. My fascination with space would make meeting Jack Schmitt an apolitical thrill.

And if memories of his three walks on Taurus-Littrow weren’t enough, there was another reason why meeting Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt would be memorable: He also had been my first same-sex crush.

I mean minutes after the Apollo 17 crew returned from the moon in December 1972, splashing down near Samoa, I saw him without his helmet for the first time and… well, he had just returned, and I was now off to the moon.

That was the instant I, as a 14-year-old, knew I was bisexual. I never told my father of this, and didn’t care to seven years later during my 1979 visit, but wouldn’t Schmitt’s office have been a bizarre venue for that? Imagine coming out to your father, a senator, an astronaut, a veteran journalist, a Republican, a Democrat, an anti-environmentalist and a homophobic district attorney all at once!

I don’t know whether I would have been prosecuted, disinherited, evicted or pepper sprayed.

This explosive moment of familial and political drama never happened, though. Schmitt wasn’t in town during my visit.

That is not surprising. You see, the senator went on to be defeated in 1982, the first time a U.S. astronaut lost a general election in five races. The big issue raised by Democrat Jeff Bingaman (and yes, Dad knew him, too) was the fact that the incumbent seemed never to be in the state, physically or ideologically. Schmitt was constantly touring, speaking about the cause of mining the moon, an issue which was absolutely irrelevant during a severe recession in 1982 which had focused voters’ attention on the here and now, not on rocks a quarter-million miles away.

“What on Earth has he done for you lately?” was the highly effective catch phrase of Bingaman’s TV ads.

Today, Schmitt’s status as a private citizen gives him the mobility to challenge without electoral consequence the overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming and to press for his still passionate cause of building a thriving lunar extraction industry.

If on global warming scientific opinion has steadily turned heavily against the view of Schmitt and other conservatives, on the matter of mining the moon, he is gaining allies.

How we could mine the moon

                     ----------------------------

But is it ours for the taking?

   ---------------------------

I long thought the idea was pie-in-the-sky, but I’ve recently checked some trustworthy sources, and my view on lunar extraction has altered. 

A NASA website explains several technologically feasible and financially efficient arrangements for mining and manufacturing on the moon, then shipping the finished products to Earth. They could involve robots or humans, and would use 3-D printing to build facilities.

Of foremost importance, NASA says, is the moon’s abundance of an element called Helium-3 which we could use to generate pollution-free fusion electricity, and Rare Earth Minerals we’re expected to run out of on our planet in about 20 years, and which are crucial in making computers, cell phones and medical equipment.

But the site acknowledges many obstacles to lunar extraction – financial, diplomatic and aesthetic. Would our parents have fallen in love on romantic mine-lit walks?

Yes, whereas NASA estimated that only about 1 percent of the lunar mass would be removed in 220 years of proposed mining methods (and ocean tides would not be affected), an infographic suggested that centuries down the road pockmarking of the moon’s surface could be evident from Earth.

Would we lose the “Silvery Moon” to keep charging up our cell phones? Let’s remember our responsibility to our descendants.

And speaking of romantic feelings and the matter of surface attractiveness, Harrison Schmitt, the dashing, dark-haired apple of my eye in the early 1970s, is 83 now. He still looks appealing and has a listenable voice, but there is the political clash. 

Besides, a 14-year-old’s passions last about as long as a moonbeam.

                  ____________________________________

Brian Arbenz follows space exploration and supports climate action from his home in Louisville, Ky. USA

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.

"MERTON THIS, MERTON THAT." A great writer, mystic, activist -- and recently revealed to be fully human

Connecting with a legacy, Claudette McDonald

 of Des Moines, Ia. touches Thomas Merton's 

gravestone during a 1989 pilgrimage to the

Trappist monastery in Kentucky.

by Brian Arbenz
During a visit in the mid-1990s to the Abbey of Our Lady of

Gethsemani in Nelson County, Ky., one of the two monks who conducted the meet-and-greet for our small group of spiritually-based peace activists told us early on in his talk: “It seems like all we hear from people who visit here is Merton this, Merton that.”
He was referring to ­­Thomas Merton, the 20th century monk at Gethsemani who ranks as one of history’s great figures on religion, writing and social criticism.
Merton, a convert to Catholicism who lived at Gethsemani from 1941 until his untimely death in 1968, sometimes retreated to a backwoods hermitage at the abbey to turn out books, essays and poems that powerfully influenced spiritual, religious and pacifist thinking worldwide.
Our host’s downbeat assessment of the Merton name as an annoyance that narrows the understanding of the monastery left the half-dozen of us a little slack jawed.
Though I knew a few Louisville activists who had visited Thomas Merton and had talked of the real-world limits which shaped his and other monks’ lives at Gethsemani, Merton still had been guru-like to radical activists of the secular and religious realms.

Thomas Merton, 1915-1968

To Louisville idealists, his charism had made the Gethsemani Abbey something of the Shangri-la next door – a place where contemplative and communally living Trappist monks surely must revel 24-7 in a Merton aesthetic.
Or perhaps not. Our host told us straightforwardly that day in the ‘90s that the Gethsemani monks’ lives were about communion with God through both group ceremony and workaday toils, not exuding the sheen of any one former brother’s legendary insights.
As a secular, non-Catholic person, my conception of Thomas Merton was shaped by reading some of his works and by hearing talks and doing interviews with a few of his closest friends, including Sister Mary Luke Tobin, a feminist, ecumenist and member of the Loretto nuns; and Ron Seitz, a Louisville poet, essayist and creative writing professor whose haiku written upon Merton’s death is the most moving piece of writing I have ever seen.
While I worked as a writer and photographer for Louisville’s archdiocesan newspaper The Record, it was my good fortune in 1989 to cover the first meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society.

This two-day coverage of sessions at Bellarmine University in Louisville and a group trip to Gethesemani was among a handful of stories I did involving Merton and the contemplative radical lives of monks at the monastery and nearby orders of nuns while reporting for The Record, then editing FORsooth, a peace and justice newspaper.
In 2008, I covered the 50th anniversary of the life changing epiphany which had come to Thomas Merton on an ordinary busy day in downtown Louisville.

In the spring of 1958, the already worldwide acclaimed monk was surrounded by average Louisvillians waiting for the crosswalk signal to change as a moment ensued which for all but one person present was just another non-descript and forgettable instant in lives of expedience.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district,” Merton wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

The dedication of a plaque at 4th and Walnut (the latter street was renamed Muhammad Ali Boulevard in the ‘70s) in March 2008 drew about 75 people from the Louisville area and as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand.

Also present were Louisville political hopefuls whose speeches and photo ops made the event run long.
The blend of Merton friendly constituencies – traditional Catholics, intellectuals, political activists and tourism minded business people – was golden for candidates.

City leaders were chortling with delight over the worldwide visitor promotion potential from the identifying of this street corner as the place where such a profound shift in religious and political thinking was born. That night they unveiled 4th and Muhammad Ali’s honorary name of Thomas Merton Square.

Spiritual Travels website writer Lori Erickson recently gave the intersection a green light: “I don’t know of anything else quite like it. Where else in America can you find a tourist plaque marking a mystical experience?

"Its existence points to Merton’s influence and importance, but also to a central teaching of his: there is no division between the sacred and the secular. All places are holy, including a busy street corner in the middle of a city.”
The sacred and the secular crisscross where two busy thoroughfares do as well. So do the left and the right often, wherever Thomas Merton’s legacy dwells.
Two polar opposites in Catholic activism I interviewed were Father Jim Flynn, a bold anti-oligarchy and pro-sanctuary activist who had repeatedly risked his mortal life resisting U.S. Central America policy and marching with Martin Luther King against segregation in Louisville; and Ron Ray, a lawyer, former Pentagon official and Vietnam combat veteran during his years as a colonel in the Marines.

Ray had overseen fundraising for a Vietnam memorial in Kentucky’s capital city of Frankfort, and he had seemed like the most pleasant and soothing personality until he later wrote several articles in which he maliciously attacked gay people.
Both Father Flynn and Colonel Ray, in unrelated interviews a few years apart, told me they sometimes sought inspiration by reading and praying by the grave of Thomas Merton on the abbey grounds. (Whether they ever met there or elsewhere I don’t know.)
The Merton gravesite is a powerful spot. At the 1989 pilgrimage of Merton Society members, I saw a nun draping a rosary over the grave then praying, and another visitor picking pieces of grass from the gravesite and placing them into a sealed plastic bottle.

Another standing nearby asked me to photograph her broken camera lens, which she explained had fallen on the floor of the Gethsemani chapel during that morning’s service, and had cracked more or less in the shape of the letter A, or the Greek letter Alpha, which she said while exuberantly smiling was a symbol for happiness.

If the mishap had happened anywhere else, it would have been just a crack, and in something so expensive as a lens, hardly denotive of happiness.

But in the place where Thomas Merton walked, positive feelings come naturally.

^Click ABOVE to hear Thomas Merton's final talk, in Thailand, hours before his death on Dec. 10, 1968.

Back at the campus which served as the gathering place for that initial Merton Society meeting in 1989, a new president, Joseph J. McGowan, would shortly lead Bellarmine after leaving a position at Fordham University in New York City. McGowan and his wife Rita McGowan won friends instantly with their likability and emphasis on student life at Bellarmine, which opened in 1950 as locally focused Bellarmine College.

As the McGowans arrived in 1990, the campus would shortly be basking in very high rankings in Money, Forbes, and U.S. News magazine stories on the nation’s best values in higher education.
Under Joseph McGowan, dorms were built to accommodate the influx of students drawn by these magazine rankings, but also per his policies, adjuncts were replacing retiring professors, and STEM was overshadowing liberal arts.

In other words, the personable and intellectual McGowan nonetheless was emulating college trends of the 1990s and 2000s making growth, financial assets and public image paramount.

And that meant a decision by Merton in the mid-1960s to donate his papers to inaugurate the Thomas Merton Center at what was then a rather quiet and provincial Bellarmine College now spelled “recruiting gold” to a BU not content in the 21st Century with anything but exponential growth (McGowan said he hoped Bellarmine would become the Vanderbilt of the region).
“Besides being one of the most significant interdisciplinary Catholic thinkers of the 20th Century, Merton was both a neighbor and a close friend to Bellarmine, entrusting the bulk of his literary estate to our stewardship,” McGowan wrote in promotion material in 2015 for a Bellarmine-organized centennial celebration of Thomas Merton’s birth.
 

Though who am I to question a monk and writer’s choice, I believe Spalding University, then called Spalding College, would have been more fitting as a Merton repository.

Spalding, near the historic Old Louisville section of the inner city, was founded in 1814 by Mother Catherine Spalding, the beatified founder of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.

Their headquarters is about 10 miles from Gethsemani, and the pro-feminist peace and justice activist Merton blends with the woman-founded, social work oriented Spalding.
Bellarmine was proposed as all-male, and its student body was for the school’s first year. It was named for Roberto Bellarmino (whose name was later anglicized), the Catholic Church’s overseer of the censoring and home incarceration of Galileo for his correct findings about the planets and the sun.
It certainly seems a contradiction that a science-oriented college would be named for him in the mid-20th century -- the persecution by Bellarmino was a setback to Galileo, and science.
In 2019, however, Spalding University is getting a slice of the Thomas Merton legacy.

A Contemplative Garden dedicated to Merton’s life and work is opening on the Spalding campus this year, complete with a 27-foot-tall stupa – a monument modeled in the Eastern tradition – which will contain Thomas Merton artifacts, including visual images from a meeting in India between Merton and Tibetan spiritual leader in exile His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama shortly before Merton’s death in Thailand from an accidental electrocution during a break at a multi-faith conference.
“The garden is designed to express the unity experienced by the Dalai Lama and Merton through their historic meeting as well as how both men oriented their life’s activities around the contemplative tradition,” a Spalding website said.
As upbeat as this garden’s construction is, its venue is a reminder that a now closed Merton-Dalai Lama peace garden in downtown a block west of the Thomas Merton Square failed to achieve the hoped-for aesthetics.
That open-air facility drew more litter than visitors.
An imposing picture of Merton and the Dalai Lama was impressive, but just as telling was a sign pleading with skateboarders not to defile this place of sacredness, a needed request during a time when Tony Hawk had more followers under 40 than a great monk.
It seems that in the United States scheme of things, the crass can’t be excluded from the ideal.
It’s a combination as inevitable as travel agencies cashing in on trips to the Holy Land, or the Kroger supermarket chain making the yearly garland of roses for the Kentucky Derby winner, or the computers on which you read rallying cries for freedom for Tibetans being made in the nation that is their brutal oppressor.
Nonetheless, anyone who cares about ideals will find strength in Merton’s writings. He was pro-racial equality, pro-feminist and a pathfinder for multiculturalism, as demonstrated by that meeting with the Dalai Lama.

 

          "Keep Your heart awake." From some Merton talks in the 1960s.

  

Merton also was passionately against the nuclear arms race. He wrote the poem “Original Child Bomb” against the use of the A-bomb at Hiroshima while he lived amid the highly pro-war and culturally normative populace of Nelson County, where World War II is The Good War, no questions asked.

Nelson had the highest percentage of Vietnam veterans of Kentucky’s 120 counties, and unreconstructed pro-war attitudes abound there, yet the anti-war Merton is revered among locals. Farmers and other neighbors often chat with “the monks” over the fence during the day’s labors, just as rural people do everywhere.

In Louisville, everyone seems to have a Merton encounter story, frequently true, if embellished, and often second-hand.

One acquaintance of mine in the 1980s related their father’s memory of chatting with Merton at a chance meeting in Louisville in the 1960s during which he told the monk – just as so many immediately would – that he was uplifted by Merton’s 1948 book “The Seven Storey Mountain."

That seminal book awoke social justice and individuality as causes within Catholicism and wider Christianity. It was described by Adrian Hastings, in his History of English Christianity, 1920-1985, as “the most exciting and influential religious autobiography of its generation, perhaps of this century.”

But the Seven Storey Mountain author disagreed, according to my acquaintance, who related that Merton responded to their father’s praise for the book by saying that it was “verbose” and urging him to read his more recent works on social justice.

That anecdote is unverified, but another account of Merton’s behavior while spending time in Louisville which was passed on to me secondhand has turned out to be proven correct: that the sworn celibate monk Thomas Merton had a girlfriend.
A co-worker of mine said they understood that the significant other was a nurse seen, or rumored to be seen enjoying a picnic with Merton in the city’s lovely and winding Cherokee Park in the mid-1960s.

Even if this citing were confirmed, two people picnicking would seem flimsy evidence of an affair, but from reports in Catholic and secular sources across the political spectrum – including numerous biographies of Merton written since 2010 -- here is what is known:
Thomas Merton in fact became romantically involved with a student nurse who cared for him after the monk had back surgery in 1966 at St. Joseph Infirmary hospital in Louisville.

Published reports have identified her as Margie Smith, and said she was a Catholic from Ohio who was 19 in 1966 and was engaged at the time to a future doctor living in Chicago.

Louisville's St. Joseph Infirmary, the place
where romance was planted.

It was Merton’s only straying from his vows of celibacy during his 27 years as a monk, and the involvement was deeply meaningful to him, if impetuous.
Former Irish Times correspondent John Cooney, using as a source Gethsemani monk and Merton colleague Fr John Eudes Bamberger, wrote in 2015 that the 51-year-old Thomas Merton “fell in love with 19-year-old Margie Smith,” adding: “It was a situation which was obviously provoking an acute inner crisis in Merton who was perceived to be in a mid-life fling with a young woman.

"On Saturday, June 11th, 1966 Merton, by now back at Gethsemani, arranged to ‘borrow’ the Louisville office of his psychologist, Dr James Wygal, to meet Margie, where they drank a bottle of champagne and became intimate.”
Wygal had more or less a contract with Gethsemani to provide counseling to its monks and he knew Merton personally.
The great progressive peace activist and Washington columnist Colman McCarthy, so close to Merton that he still calls him “my friend, Tom,” wrote in 2018 that his friend and the nurse “fell in love, hard.”

Citing Merton’s journals, McCarthy describes Margie Smith as having “flowing black hair and gray eyes,” and said Thomas Merton wrote soon after his release from St. Joseph hospital that it was "clearer than ever that we are terribly in love, the kind of love that can virtually tear you apart."
McCarthy added that despite Merton confessing the affair to a sympathetic but firm Abbot James Fox and agreeing to break it off and end all contact with Smith, "For months into the spring and summer, after repeated secret phone calls, furtive lunches and dinners, sipping champagne in Louisville, Merton's journal entries and letters would lyrically run deep with his happiness:

"‘We are moving slowly toward a complete physical ripening of love, a leisurely preparation of our whole being, like the maturing of apples in the sun.’

...."‘There is something deep, deep down in us, darling, that tells us to let go completely. Not just the letting go when the dress drops to the floor and bodies press together with nothing in between, but the far more thrilling surrender when our very being surrenders itself to the nakedness of love and to a union where there is no veil of illusion between us. Darling, I long for it madly. Do you see? Do you need me as well?’ ”

Not permanently. McCarthy and other sources said Margie Smith shortly married her Chicago fiancée, returned to Ohio, continued her career in nursing, raised three children, and still keeps in touch with some Merton friends in Louisville. She has never publicly identified herself or spoken on the record (though one Merton biographer said he has talked by phone with her).
The Irish Times' John Cooney said Merton's last telephone call to Margie was to wish her bon voyage as she departed for her honeymoon with her Chicago fiancée in 1967. This would indicate the monk was letting go of that mad longing, figuring he and Margie would be resuming normal lives, both with many years to go. 
               ___________________________________________

 
Brian Arbenz, a Louisville writer, researcher and activist, recommends these videos for more insights into the Trappist monk:

                            "Merton just keeps on teaching."

  

                      A peacemaker who stood up for justice