Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 by Robert Zimmerman Read Free Book Online

to know Marilyn Gerlach, he was also discovering that his fascination with rocketry might actually lead to his life's work. World War II had just ended, and a local museum had exhibited the V1 and V2 rockets of the just-defeated Germans. Staring at those formidable weapons built by engineers and scientists, Lovell suddenly realized that he would gladly spend his life building rockets.
He wrote a letter to the American Rocket Society, asking how he could become a rocket engineer. The society's president responded, explaining that "the whole field of rockets and jet propulsion is still so new that we do not know clearly what preparation is best for it." He suggested that Lovell get as thorough an education as he could, especially in fields such as thermodynamics or aerodynamics.
Now Lovell faced the same problem as Frank Borman. His mother didn't have the money to send him to college. He had applied to Annapolis but had been chosen as a third alternate, leaving him little chance of getting in.
Undeterred, Lovell took advantage of a Navy program called the Holloway Plan. The Navy would pay for him to get a two year engineering
     

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Jim Lovell and Marilyn Gerlach on board the U.S. Navy 
sailboat  Freedom,  1950.
Credit: Lovell
degree, after which he would take fourteen months of flight training followed by six months at sea as an aviation midshipman. He would then begin a military career as a regular naval officer. Though this wasn't quite the same as a rocket engineering, the idea off flying advanced military airplanes appealed to Lovell almost as much.
For the next two years Lovell studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, renting a room in a nearby family's house. And each weekend, Marilyn came by bus from Milwaukee to visit, staying in Jim's room while he moved to a YMCA near the campus.
At his mother's insistence, however, Jim applied a second time to the Naval Academy. She was afraid that when he went overseas as a midshipmen after his second year of college he would get caught in an overseas military action, and be unable to return to school for years afterward. He took her advice, and to his surprise this time he was accepted.
Blanch's foresight was almost clairvoyant. All of Jim's Holloway classmates ended up in Korea. Years would pass before they could complete their educations.
Lovell moved east, starting college all over again at Annapolis. By this time Marilyn was also going to college on a scholarship at Milwaukee State
     

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Teachers College. When Jim headed to Maryland, he asked her to come east as well.
Marilyn had no doubt what she wanted to do. She gave up her scholarship, transferred to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and got a part time job in an up-scale department store in Washington, selling woman's clothing.
She also typed Jim's school papers, including an astonishing twenty four-page term paper on "The Development of the Liquid-Fuel Rocket." In this essay Jim described the early history of rocketry in the United States and Germany. He concluded enthusiastically that "The big day for rockets is still coming the day when science will have advanced to the stage when flight into space is a reality and not a dream." 13 As she typed, Marilyn couldn't help feeling amused. "It seemed so farfetched,'' she later said.
They spent as much of their free time as possible together. Every Friday she traveled down to Annapolis, stayed with a local family, and joined Jim for the weekend socials.
And yet, while they had talked about marriage, Jim hadn't yet proposed, nor had they made any detailed plans about their future.
At the end of junior year the Academy held what was called the Ring Dance. At this formal ritual, the midshipmen received their class ring with the crests of both the Navel Academy and their graduating class embossed upon it. Should a midshipman be engaged at the time, his fiancee would be given a miniature of the ring at the same dance.