edgar-mitchell

26
The Way of the Explorer
pulled wooden clogs over my shoes, then climbed inside the cooling cavern
for but a few seconds to huck out hot chunks of slag from its black stomach.
After our midnight shift we headed back to the fraternity house to
get some rest, and then moved on to class. So that I wouldn’t have to do
this for very long, I accelerated my undergraduate studies and finished in
three and a half years. As soon as I did so, I married Louise and moved
back to the ranch in New Mexico, which had by then grown by two farms
and two farm machinery dealerships.
These were challenging times for a young man. The conflict on the
Korean Peninsula was heating up, and it was made clear that you could
either enlist or be drafted. Although military life was not in my career
plans, it was unavoidable at the time. I wanted to fly, and as a married man
the only way to do so was with the Navy, so I enlisted. Consequently, Louise
joined me in San Diego during my final days of boot camp, and then we
found ourselves again heading east; our destination was the Officer Candidate
School in Newport, Rhode Island. We stopped and visited both sets of
parents along the way, and when we arrived in Newport on Christmas
Eve, 1952, with wonderful gifts from our families still unopened, we had
but 25 cents in nickels and dimes in our pockets. With it, we bought and
shared a hot dog and a cup of coffee, and then drove directly to the OCS
headquarters where I could collect my first paycheck. That’s how it was
for us in the beginning: austere and simple, but infinitely hopeful. In spite
of present hardship, the future spread itself out before us in a succession
of pleasant vistas.
Not long after our arrival, Louise took a job as an instructor seamstress
for Singer, and soon discovered she was pregnant. She did her best
not to show, as in those days it wasn’t uncommon for a woman to lose her
job when expecting. But together we survived the 16 weeks of my training
and her work, and were off yet again to another part of the country where
neither of us had ever been—this time Pensacola, Florida. But now I was an
officer and a gentleman with a bit more green in my pocket to support our
family.
We drove through the May heat of the South with Louise pregnant
and all our belongings piled in the back seat. The day of our arrival we
learned to show up at the pressroom of the local newspaper at dawn,
where we could rifle through the classifieds for an apartment to rent. This
was a training base in wartime, with hundreds of young couples not unlike
ourselves searching for some sort of home. But within a few days we did
find a modest place. A few months later, in the deepest heat of that unrelenting
southern August, a daughter was born to us. We named her Karlyn
Louise. Suddenly we were no longer just a couple, but a family. This was
about the time that Louise found her life gradually growing emotionally