;)
October 5th, 2015
Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love my Dad and how very proud I am of all that he has accomplished in his life. Most people know my Dad, Wilson W. “Bud” Wood, as a former history/social studies teacher at John Marshall High School, where he taught for 25 years. However, many people may not know that prior to moving to West Virginia, he worked for Bendix Corporation at Cape Kennedy in Florida. While pretty much everyone from my generation is familiar with Cape Kennedy, younger folks may not know that Cape Kennedy, now known as Cape Canaveral, is the launch site for all of the manned space missions in the U.S., from Saturn to Gemini to Apollo and the space shuttles. Dad began working for Bendix, a multi-national manufacturing and engineering company, in 1965.
At Cape Kennedy, Bendix employees worked in one of three divisions: life support; assembling, disassembling and reassembling the astronauts’ breathing and air conditioning equipment in a sterile environment; or the division responsible for maintaining the “crawler”, which transported the rocket and space capsule to its launching pad. I can still vividly recall the images of those huge rockets being moved, seemingly inches at a time, into launch position at the Cape. During his years at Bendix, Dad worked in the Life Support Division as a technician. He was responsible for the astronaut breathing units and also supported the fuel handlers with their safety suits and breathing units. As a child, I don’t think I fully appreciated the importance of the work that my Dad did, but it has really hit home to me as I have grown older. Our nation sent men into the void of space, and ultimately to the moon, and it was my Dad who was responsible to make sure they had air to breathe along the way. As he did his job, Dad quite literally held the lives of our astronauts in his hands.
During his career, Dad worked on Apollo Space Missions 7 through 14 and finally on Apollo 17. As a technician he was always situated close to the launch pad, with extra breathing and air conditioning units available in the event of an unforeseen problem. Dad has told me countless stories about the sleepless nights he endured as engineers worked through the near-tragedy of Apollo 13, and the immense pride he felt upon being chosen for the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, when the U.S. put the first man on the moon. If it wasn’t for my Dad, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would have been in big trouble up there.
Dad tells me that several other people from our local community, including folks from Moundsville and Glen Dale, worked at Cape Kennedy as firefighters, engineers, technicians and safety inspectors to name just a few. Needless to say, I never get tired of listening to the stories my Dad tells me of his time at Cape Kennedy and I could not be more proud of his contribution to our historic space program.
