Saturday, January 1, 2022
From Earl Thompson-Grumman retiree
The very first time I ever saw Charlie Harris was in the spring of 1965 at plant 25 in Bethpage, Long Island, New York. He was wearing a big ball and chain attached to his leg. I asked the guys “Why he was wearing this ball and chain”. They indicated that was Charlie Harris and he had just gotten married. I had never seen this type of wedding celebrating before. Charlie was an engineer working in the LM instrumentation section of Grumman. Later on I was asked to see what was required to check out the C-Band Beacon system on the LM which was used to help in tracking of the LM. I was told to go to instrumentation engineering and find out about the C-Band beacon operation. I knew that Charlie worked in this instrumentation department; thus, I introduced myself and told him what I needed and that I had come up from Florida. He then told me that he was thinking about going to Cape Canaveral, Florida with the LM checkout team of engineers; whereby, I told him I was only staying in Bethpage for ten months and then returning to Florida to work with Grumman at Kennedy Space Center. Well from that time on, Charlie would talk to me about Florida and asked me lots of things about Florida especially what was around Cape Canaveral. I told the main thing for the area which I enjoyed was you could drive your car on the Atlantic beach all the way from Cape Canaveral to Cocoa Beach; thus, you could always find a place on the beach that was not crowded.
Finally Charlie and his wife came to Florida in 1966 to support LM testing at Kennedy Space Center. The very first night that they stayed in a motel, his wife saw a huge cockroach in their room (In Florida we called that cockroach a Palmetto Bug). Charlie told me his wife went wild and told him that she wasn’t going to live in Florida and she was ready to go directly back to New York. Well they continue to live in Florida until the LM Apollo was over 1972; whereby, then Charlie and his family move to Camarillo, California and he worked at Point Mugu Naval base until he retired. Charlie was a great man and he will be missed for sure. He and I still communicated via e-mail by our computers until he moved out of his house into an assisted living facility.
