DaytonDailyNews.com

Against the backdrop the Cold War provided for the Space Race, no one dared to point out the irony.

But the man who traveled from 239 Green Valley Drive in Enon to Washington to be introduced to the press 50 years ago this Thursday, April 9, as one of the nation's first seven astronauts had a Russian sounding middle name — Ivan.

Moreover, his first two initials, V.I., matched those of Soviet founding father V.I. Lenin.

No matter. His fellow astronauts called him Gus, anyway. And he was part of the American team that would challenge the Russians for predominance in space and sweep the Soviet launch of its basketball-size Sputnik satellite from memory.

An ambitious Hoosier

The Associated Press characterized Grissom, 33 at the time, as an All-American boy who had "toed the mark" during a childhood spent in Mitchell, Ind.

A Boy Scout who made basswood models of Charles Lindbergh's "Spirit of St. Louis," (the plane that made history when Lucky Lindy soloed across the Atlantic Ocean), Grissom read pulp magazine stories of aerial dogfights and dreamed of holding the stick of a combat aircraft.

Although accepted for training in 1944, World War II ended before Grissom had a chance to take to the air.

So he returned home with his high school sweetheart, Betty, to take a job in a bus-making factory.

Becoming restless, he went to Purdue University on the G.I. Bill and finished a degree in mechanical engineering, flipping burgers while his wife made his schooling possible working as a long-distance operator for Indiana Bell.

Grissom returned to the military in 1951 and got his wish. He flew more than 100 combat missions, won the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal and was gung-ho enough that he sought permission to fly 25 more missions.

His request denied, he returned to Bryan Air Force Base, Texas, to take on a job he eventually concluded was more dangerous than flying combat: training young pilots.

He always knew what he was going to do, he explained, but the students were not always as predictable.

His development as a pilot continued in test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base in California and test pilot work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where he also attended the Air Force Institute of Technology.

At 5-foot-7 and a trim 155 pounds, the compact pilot had logged more than 3,000 flight hours — more than 2,000 of them in jets — when he stood before the nation in April of 1959.

Like the others, he said that, if called on, he was confident he could return safely from what the AP called "the most terrifyingly dangerous voyage yet conceived for a human being."

Back in Enon

The day after Grissom was in the high-pressure atmosphere of Washington, his family provided some comic relief at home.

Although clearly proud of her husband, Grissom's wife, Betty, was focused on more down-to-earth problems that can consume a military spouse.

"Oh, I hate to think of all the work I get into when we have to move," she told reporters, adding she couldn't count the number of times they'd done so in his military career.

One reporter's take was that "the incomprehensible news seemed to overwhelm" Betty, who described the space assignment as "just another tour" and "felt the decision was up to him.

"We have other decisions to make, too, like what we're having for dinner tonight," she said.

While the Grissoms' 5-year-old son, Mark, was playing with a model plane at home, their older son, Scott, was holding a globe and holding forth for the press in his third-grade class at Enon Elementary School.

To a classmate's question, Scott said no one would be shooting at his father because "the only way they could see him would be on radar."

"I don't know if he'll be the first one up," Scott is reported to have said "with authority."

"All I know is that he's going to be in the capsule and fly around for 24 hours and land somewhere."

A capsule lost

Gus Grissom turned out to be the second American in space and the third human being. The Soviet Union followed up on its Sputnik coup when it shocked the world April 12, 1961, and put Yuri Gagarin into space.

On July 21 of that year, Grissom rode a Redstone rocket that lifted his Liberty Bell 7 capsule above Cape Canaveral, and during a 15 minute, 37 second flight reached a record 5,280 mph, an altitude of 118 miles and traveled 303 miles down range.

But his Mercury mission is most remembered for the loss of the $2 million space capsule, which sank in the Atlantic, forcing Grissom to swim for safety.

"Give me something to blow my nose," he said after being picked up by a helicopter from the aircraft carrier USS Randolph two minutes after splashdown. "My head is full of sea water."

Later, it was revealed that Grissom came close to drowning, in part because he'd forgotten to close a port on his buoyant space suit.

In the book "The Right Stuff," author Tom Wolfe makes a case that the capsule sank because Grissom inadvertently triggered an explosive hatch on the craft. Others denied the claim and backed Grissom.

Although an investigation cleared him of wrongdoing, he became known as the hard-luck astronaut.

Grissom's Mercury flight also cost him two steak dinners. Before the first American space flight, he and John Glenn bet on whether an astronaut would be able to see stars in the early Mercury mission.

Grissom bet against it and collected a steak dinner from Glenn after Alan Shepard had seen no stars on his flight.

When Grissom himself saw stars, he felt compelled to replace the first steak dinner and buy Glenn a second.

Grissom's remark that he had been scared during his Mercury flight raised some eyebrows. But papers also reported him saying, "I'd recommend the trip to anyone."

Glenn took it next.

Unsinkable

In a wry reference to his Mercury flight, Grissom named the Gemini capsule in which he and Navy Cmdr. John Young orbited the earth on March 23, 1965, the Molly Brown for the Broadway musical "The Unsinkable Molly Brown."

When NASA officials balked at bringing up a bad memory, he is reported to have countered with another name, The Titanic. He then was assured Molly Brown would be fine.

The flight with Young produced three orbits and one memorable story, the astronauts being dressed down because crumbs from a corned beef sandwich Young had smuggled on board as a practical joke started floating around the pristine capsule.

There were later reports that Grissom was in early consideration to pilot the Apollo mission that would complete the American quest to land on the moon.

But in late 1966 and early 1967, as he and his crew prepared for the first three-man Apollo flight, Grissom had concerns about the spacecraft.

NASA's official history said he had picked a lemon off a tree at home a week before the fire that ended his life and told his wife he was taking it to work because the spacecraft appeared to be a lemon.

He never got the chance to experience how it handled after liftoff.

With the capsule pressurized with oxygen for a July 27, 1967, training day at Cape Kennedy, a single spark was enough to seal the crew's fate.

Emergency crews had the Apollo I doors opened in five minutes, spokesman Maj. Gen. Samuel Phillips told the press, but were confronted with intense heat and dense smoke.

"Twenty-seven rescue workers were felled by smoke inhalation, dropping like dominoes as each rushed to help," wrote an unnamed AP reporter.

The crew hadn't had time to get to the hand cranks that might have freed them. All three died of smoke inhalation.

We mourn

With the families in isolation, the AP reported "Mrs. Grissom was said to have spoken by telephone with Vice President Hubert H. Humprhey, but the Space Center could not confirm the report."

Instead of going on a 14-day space mission on Feb. 21 and earning the distinction as the first person to make three trips into space, the hard-luck astronaut whose hero had been Lucky Lindy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

He was 40 years old.

"Everyone knew it could happen," said an editorial in the Springfield Daily News, "but it didn't happen the way everyone expected it would. If it could happen, it would happen in space — but not on the pad."

By the time of Grissoms' death, most of the couple's military friends who had lived in Enon had relocated. But nothing changed the reaction in the village and elsewhere.

As the editorial's simple headline put it: "We mourn."

And as Neil Armstrong's Lunar Excursion Module was headed for the moon and his historic footfall of July 20, 1969, Americans paused to remember the hard-luck astronaut and ill-fated crew whose lives were gone in a flash.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.