Men on the moon, women on the sewing machines

Fifty years ago tomorrow, the first men landed on the moon.

I was watching

I was 19, working as a waitress at Big Boy’s for the summer, but my shift had ended by 8 p.m., and I was home.

So I watched. Who didn’t? I read somewhere that 95% of Americans were watching.

Even someone like me, who wasn’t all that interested in the space program to begin with.

Sure, I’d been excited in May 1961 when they shot Alan Shephard into space, mostly because they wheeled a b&w, rabbit-eared TV into my 6th grade classroom and we got to watch it in real time. This was quite a novelty, A/V at Our Lady of the Angels grammar school being fairly limited.

Occasionally we “enjoyed” a St. John’s Catechetical Film Strip. This was a glorified (hah!) slide show that illustrated some point from the Baltimore 2 Catechism, accompanied by a voice track playing on an LP. When the slide needed to be advanced, there was a very distinctive plink sound, that I can still recall 60 years after I last heard it.

A typical episode might cover a sacrament.

You’d see a picture of a boy walking in a cross walk, a car barreling down on him, and hear the screech of brakes, followed by someone hollering “Johnny’s been hit. Better call a priest.” Plink. The next slide would show Father Holymoly giving poor Johnny the last rites.

On rainy days, when we couldn’t go outside at recess, they played records over the PA to keep us occupied. Not normal music, mind you, but aide memoire ditties to help us memorize the commandments, the sacraments, and important items like the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. All these decades on, I can still sing you the works of mercy, if you’d like.

The chief corporal works of mercy,
They number seven,
Practice the corporal works of mercy,
And go to heaven….

And once in a blue moon, we had movie afternoon to raise money for the missions. The movies were pretty awful. I recall watching the reels spin around rather than watching the boring, dreadful movie.

Watching Alan Shepard get shot into space was a treat and an excellent diversion from the norm.

I’m not sure if they did it again the next year when John Glenn went into orbit.

But I only kept a partial eye on space.

Not that I didn’t follow the news. By the time I was 10, I was watching Huntley and Brinkley and reading every word of Newsweek. It’s just that space never captured my imagination in the same way that, say, Ngo Dihn Diem did.

But on the night of that first moon walk, I was watching on the b&w TV in the family room, surrounded by my family.

July 20, 1969.

Fifty years. A lifetime ago, just yesterday.

As the anniversary has been approaching, there’s been quite a bit of news about it, which has been a welcome break from the regular old news. 

One of the more interesting stories I saw was about some of the folks behind the scenes, who, unlike the glamorous astronauts and “the chain-smoking guys in Mission Control”, were out of sight and out of mind.

I give you the women who sewed the spacesuits that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore for the big occasion.

And those spacesuits were important:

In the vacuum of space, without the right spacesuit, an astronaut could blow up like a balloon, or burn up, or maybe get drilled by a micro-meteorite. (Source: CBS News)

Oh, that.

For the moon suits, NASA needed something that was more flexible than earlier spacesuits, so they turned to – of all things – the makers of Playtex girdles and bras, rubber gloves, baby bottle nipples.

So a company that specialized in things for the distaff side of the house, for the domestic realm, was going to make the suit that would take that “one small step for man.”

The women tasked with making the suits were the “bra-making seamstresses.”

Women, it turns out, had the perfect touch, according to ILC [the Playtex folks] project manager Homer Riehm. "The people that sewed the suits were all women, that's correct," he said.

And the reason? "Agility."

And it took plenty of agility: Each suit was comprised of 21 layers of gossamer-thin fabric, sewn to a precise tolerance of 1/64th of an inch on a sewing machine your grandmother might've used.

Reihm said, "We were interested in accuracy."

In other words, there was no room for any mistakes.

Women’s work, alright!

Anna Lee Minner was one of the bra stitchers turned moon suit maker. The work was a lot weightier than making bras, as bra wearers are not apt “to blow up like a balloon, or burn up, or maybe get drilled by a micro-meteorite” if, say, a bra strap breaks.

Minner said, "I went home on many a night and cried because I knew I couldn't do it. I was scared. this was a person's life this depended on."

That would be Armstrong and Aldrin.

The women at ILC took their job very seriously. "They may have had the most important job of all, frankly," said Basil Hero, author of the Apollo account, "The Mission of a Lifetime." "As Neil Armstrong said, 'Those space suits were mini spacecraft.' You were one pin prick away from death. If those suits failed, that was it. You were done."

I may not have been watching the moon landing, but the women who made those suits sure were:

…on July 20, 1969, when the big moment finally arrived, the women of International Latex held their breath. Lillie Elliott recalled, "Once they started down the ladder, and he put his foot on the moon, that was a pinnacle of watching something that you've helped do."

Smith asked, "Where was your heart in that moment?"

"In my throat!" Elliott replied.

"Was there an inner dialog going on, a voice in your head?"

Elliott said, "Oh my, 'I wonder if that's gonna hold? Oh my, I wonder if this gonna be all right. I hope that stitch didn't pop!'"

Hats off – space helmets off? but not until you get back on earth – to those meticulous seamstresses, the unsung heroes of the first men on the moon.

At some point, I took a break from watching the moon walk and went out and sat on the front steps. I think my sister Kath and her fiance were there, too. We looked up at the moon. Was it full? I remember it as so. It was a nice, clear, warm July night.

We looked up, and despite being fine young cynics all, I believe we were all looking up with a bit of wonder. For all my lack of interest in the space program, it was pretty awesome just sitting there on the front steps on a summer night and knowing that, all those hundreds of thousands of miles away, there were a couple of guys in moon suits, walking around, having just taken one giant leap for mankind.