“It’s a thrill, really, just to have been a part of it,” says Ormond Beach’s Marvin Wonder, one of hundreds who represented Daytona Beach’s Local 295 of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union at the Space Center and the Cape.

Trial and error

In retrospect, the term “space race” seems quaint, perhaps even exciting. But post-World War II relations between the United States and Soviet Union carried a more ominous descriptive: Cold War. The space race was a byproduct, and despite its jaunty name, was thought by some to be a matter of life and death.

The ability to control the heavens was considered the way to control your national fate in the new age of atomic weaponry and spy satellites. And early on, the Soviets were flexing their muscles, most notably by sending the first human (Yuri Gagarin) into space, just three weeks before Alan Shephard took America there.

The U.S. was always playing catch-up in the early years. In the days of trial-and-error, the sun often set on error. The biggest disaster of the Apollo era was the launch-pad test for Apollo 1 in January 1967, when an electrical fire in the cabin claimed the lives of its three astronauts.

But the decade prior to that was awash in aborts and accidents with unmanned rockets like Polaris, Redstone and others. Two early-1959 Polaris rockets were destroyed just after launch when they began to behave erratically.

“They had a list on a board where you came in to work, so you’d know if any launches were going up that day,” says Dow Graham, a retired electrician who began work in 1957, at age 18, at Cape Canaveral.

Graham says he and co-workers would always find a good vantage point to watch a launch, but not for the reason we do today.

“You did it back then so you knew which way to run,” he says with just a slight laugh.

After each misstep, messes were cleaned up, literally and figuratively. Corrections were made. The mission continued, and as the 1960s arrived, a firm goal was put in place.

GE comes to town

It’s hard to fathom in today’s political and bureaucratic climates, but things moved rapidly after President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 directive to put a man on the moon, and return him safely to Earth, by decade’s end.

The United States, Kennedy insisted, must catch up with the Soviets and pull ahead in the space race, and the moon would become the next finish line.

Many of the country’s major industrial giants were tasked with the all facets of the job — Grumman, North American Aviation, Bendix, General Motors and on and on. Among them was General Electric, a New York State-based conglomerate with roots tracing back to the 1890s and Thomas Edison.

GE would provide design engineering, manufacturing and the installation of ground support and test equipment. A big piece of this was called ACE — Acceptance Checkout Equipment, which, broadly, made sure everything was operating as designed.

When you look at the old photos of mission specialists sitting behind banks of monitors, they might be sitting behind equipment built by GE.

For its role in the Apollo program, GE had a presence at Cape Canaveral and the space center on Merritt Island, which was originally called the Launch Operations Center (renamed for President Kennedy following his 1963 assassination). GE also had workers at NASA facilities in Texas (Houston), Alabama (Huntsville), California (Downey) and New York (Bethpage).

The headquarters for GE’s Apollo Systems Department needed to be close to NASA, and in 1962 Daytona Beach became GE’s Apollo-era home, with 500 workers originally sent here and, by 1966, the number was nearly 3,000.

It started in a building that’s now a shopping center anchored by Carrabba’s Italian Grill on International Speedway Boulevard, and soon grew to a seven-building “campus” where One Daytona now sits.

Among the first wave of GE workers to arrive in 1962 was a future mayor of Daytona Beach, Larry Kelly, who was 27 with a young family and more than happy to leave Binghamton, N.Y. But before long, he realized just how seriously everyone was taking the space race.

“I worked my ass off,” says Kelly, who was among the local GE engineers building testing equipment for the ACE system. “They wanted it done quickly, and it had to be perfect. NASA not only put quality in what they were sending up to space, but quality in what we had on the ground. It was long, long hours ... 12-hour days.”

More than 50 years later, Kelly’s focus has changed from the work involved to the accomplishment achieved.

“President Kennedy, he said we’re going to put a man on the moon. And boy, people were going to make it happen,” says Kelly, who was Daytona Beach’s mayor from 1974-93. “It motivated America. It was something similar to World War II; it was a motivation. You were devoted to making it happen.”

As the Apollo program leapt closer and closer to its 1969 crowning achievement, Jim Kotas joined GE and was assigned to its Kennedy Space Center operations. Now 73, in 1968 he was a fresh graduate of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, where he majored in electrical engineering.

“GE called me and talked about a job in Utica (N.Y.). I wasn’t thrilled,” Kotas recalls. “Then they offered me a job at the Cape and I came down.”

He arrived in ’68, in time for Apollo 8 and the first manned launch of Apollo’s “chauffeur” — Saturn V, the mammoth Earth-rattling rocket that stood 36 stories high and weighed 6.5 million pounds.

“That blew me away,” Kotas says of the handiwork of famed German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. “It was so big. It cleared the tower so slowly and smoothly, it was beautiful.”

By 1969, Kotas would be reassigned to GE’s Daytona Beach complex, but during his year at NASA’s ground zero, he was fully aware that something very big was going on all around him.

“I think, down at the Cape especially, you had a sense you were part of something much bigger than normal,” he says. “There’s so much going on. There are astronauts flying in, astronauts flying out. Walter Cronkite would set up his remote newscast out of the Hilton. You had this sense you’re into something bigger.”

Wally's words

Bill Rutherford, now 79 and living in Deltona, was an electrical instrumentation technician for the Bendix Corporation, commuting 52 miles daily from his Winter Park home to the Space Center from 1968-75.

He worked at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Operations Building (MSOB), in the altitude chamber. He worked specifically on the water deluge system and, like the others, he worked a lot.

“I was hired on Feb. 12 or something like that,” he says. “We didn’t have a day off until Thanksgiving. Once you got one spacecraft out of the chamber, they’d put another one right behind it.”

Rutherford’s job briefly put him in the company of NASA’s rock stars — the astronauts, including Apollo 11’s Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. Early in his tenure, he was sent to fix a mechanical issue in the “suit room,” where astronauts put on their space suits for simulations. In walked three astronauts, in their space suits, and he says he was overwhelmed with awe.

Among them was Wally Schirra, one of NASA’s original seven astronauts and soon-to-be commander of Apollo 7. Rutherford says Schirra quickly noted his awestruck and nervous manner.

“I was shaking like a leaf,” says Rutherford, who’s lived in Deltona since 1985. “Schirra motioned for me to come over. He had me help him loosen a strap on his suit. I started to walk away.

“He stopped me. He looked down at my name badge and said, ‘Rutherford, let me give you a little advice. It doesn’t matter what your title is — President of the United States, bank president, or astronaut. We all put our trousers on one leg at a time.’ He patted me on the back and said, ‘Don’t you ever forget that.’ ”

Work to do

Before there was Broadway, someone had to build the theaters. Before there was Apollo, someone had to build the space center.

“Our local had 200 members, but I’d say we had 2,000 travelers coming through the local working down there,” says Graham, who’s now 81 and lives in Port Orange.

Local 296 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) practically had a conveyor belt of electricians commuting to Merritt Island and Cape Canaveral before and during the Apollo years. They weren’t alone. Carpenters, masons, lathers, painters — practically all of the trades — made the daily commute.

Just south of Mason Avenue on North Beach Street, where it's still in operation, Daytona Beach’s Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 295 was a bustling place.

“At the peak during the Apollo program,” Marvin Wonder says, “we probably had — just pipefitters — maybe 700 working out of this local. A contractor would call the local and say, ‘I need 20 men.’ And it had to be done right now.

“For a couple of years when I was down there, they kept two crews of men just on stand-by. Everything had to be done right away. You could be sitting there twiddling your thumbs for two weeks, then all of a sudden you’re busting your butt 12 hours a day.”

For many, that eventually grew tiresome, and not just physically.

“A lot of jobs worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” Wonder says. “Some of them had two 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. I kinda drew the line a little bit, because it dawned on me, my children were getting ready to start school, and we were like strangers.

“I’m up at 4:30, 5 o’clock in the morning. Then don’t get home until late. They’re in bed when I leave, in bed when I get home.”

The commute

The daily commuters made their way south on U.S. 1 before veering left, south of Oak Hill, on Highway 3 to Merritt Island.

Today, that two-lane road is smooth, comfortably wide enough for two-way traffic, and offers a scenic drive through native flora and fauna. But long-ago car-poolers, to a man, laugh and shudder at memories of that 15-mile stretch of narrow roadway that somehow got their assorted vehicles across Haulover Canal and to the NASA gates, and back again.

“Not a good road,” says Graham. “Narrow. And potholes. And everybody drove about 90 miles an hour on that road. Then you get to Haulover and there’s a skinny drawbridge.”

Wonder, who did the same routine with fellow plumbers and pipefitters, points out the one good aspect of the old road.

“Yeah, it was like a one-lane road, but thankfully all of the traffic was usually going in the same direction.”

Many of the tradesmen in those days lived a modern cowboy’s lifestyle — some of them were far from home, here just for the work. And like the ranch hands of yore, many liked to blow off steam at quitting time.

“Coming home, the first stop after we got through the gate was a little package store,” says Graham. “That was the first beer stop. Then at Haulover, they had a package store.

“I remember riding with a bunch of ol’ linemen. We stopped and they got a bottle of whiskey, opened it and threw the cap out of the car window. I said, ‘what are you doing?’ The guy says, ‘We don’t put the cap back on our bottles of whiskey.’ The bottle made the rounds around the car. We get to Edgewater, another package store, same thing. Tossed the cap again.”

It was a different time.

“The linemen, they were a great breed,” Graham says. “To me, I got to be a good union person by working with linemen. Linemen had to work together. Their lives depended on each other.”

Given such stories, naturally, there were some downsides.

“Jimmy Ivanhoe had a bar just south of Edgewater (it’s now Riptides),” Wonder says. “That was a popular stop. There was a lot of that going on. When you’re working that many hours, you don’t have time to blow off much steam. Quite a few of them became alcoholics.”

And not just that.

“Gamblers, too,” laughs Brett Mirsky, current business manager of the Local 795. “I’ve seen some old telegrams in our files upstairs, saying you need to tell them to stop gambling out there. There’s no gambling allowed. The contractor would send our local a telegram.”

The launch

As the launch date for Apollo 11 approached, Jim Kotas insists, he had little anxiety. His engineer’s philosophy won out.

“By Apollo 11, you think it’s all going to happen as planned,” he says. “Apollo 8 had gone around the moon, Apollo 9 had tested the lunar module. Apollo 10, they went to the moon, got into the LM, got close to the surface but didn’t land, just tested all the sequences.

“So by the time you get to Apollo 11, you’re convinced everything is going to work because it’s been working fine.”

Larry Kelly, at GE’s Daytona Beach plant, was a bit more nervous.

“You’re thinking, ‘you’ve done a lot of space shots, but this is it, baby. This is it,’ ” he says. “You have a child due to be born. You’re waiting on him to be born. And then he’s born. It’s part of you … part of you. You feel good about it.”

Marvin Wonder, the pipefitter, takes the bigger view.

“You just knew that this is history,” he says. “About like Columbus sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.”

He also marveled, and still does, at the logistical miracle of it all.

“There were people working on this all over the United States, putting pieces together and assembling the stuff, and it all came down here and got put in,” Wonder says. “To coordinate all that … just a monstrous task.”

Thanks from high above

Four days after the launch, on July 20, Apollo 11’s lunar module touched down in the Sea of Tranquility. By then, Wonder had left Florida and was working on a project with a much different historical legacy — the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania, site of a partial meltdown a decade later. 

In a bit of irony for a man who was working at that future powder keg, Wonder watched on TV and marveled at the astronauts’ courage. Neil Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin, farther from home than man had ever been, on a dusty moon, with no guarantees that their module would lift off properly, much less find and rejoin Michael Collins and the command module circling above the moon.

“To be on that moon, with that capsule up there going around …” Wonder says with a shake of the head. “To be on the moon and wonder if you’re ever gonna get back on that capsule. It has to be in the back of your mind, you know?”

Jim Kotas had fully relocated to Daytona Beach’s GE headquarters, but his girlfriend and future wife (Kathy) lived near Cape Canaveral, as did a former co-worker, who owned the large, black-and-white TV he and Kotas had bought the previous year — “We pooled our money and bought it used,” Kotas recalls.

The three of them, along with the world, watched on that Sunday evening as Neil Armstrong prepared to leave the lunar lander and go down the ladder.

“Yeah, I remember the excitement of just listening to them talk as he’s about to step down,” Kotas says.

Kotas’ years at GE, particularly his time on the Apollo project, attached a perfectionist’s attitude to his psyche. That might explain why he still points out that Armstrong’s first words upon touching the moon’s surface didn’t come across as intended due to spotty audio.

Armstrong’s intended “one small step for a man” came out as “one small step for man.” Not a huge deal, some would suggest. Maybe even better, you could say. To Kotas, it seems, it’s at least one small shame.

“He comes down,” Kotas says, “and he makes that famous misstatement, ‘one small step for man.’ ”

On the three-day return trip to Earth, Armstrong spoke again to a worldwide audience, using network audio capabilities that were revolutionary for the time. He thanked everyone — Everyone — who “put their hearts and abilities” into the success of that mission, and this time his words were clear and precise.

So were the words of command module pilot Michael Collins, who might have summed up the effort just as well, if not better, than his historic cohort.

“We have always had confidence that this equipment will work properly,” Collins said. “All this is possible only through the blood, sweat, and tears of a number of people ... All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all of those, I would like to say thank you very much.”

With 50 years' distance between all the hard work and the historical significance, it seems now as if it was all a pleasure. No thanks necessary.

“When you’re doing it,” says Larry Kelly, “I think you’re so busy, you don’t realize how it changed the world.”