Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B Construction Photos

Page 54

Hajdaj at Sheffield Field Trailer, Mom & Dad, MacLaren at Sheffield Field Trailer (Original Scan)

Top: Eugene Hajdaj (last name pronounced Hay Jay), one of the best human beings I've ever encountered in my life. Hanging out at the Sheffield Steel field trailer.

Middle: Mom & Dad.

Bottom: Me at the Sheffield Steel field trailer.





Top: (Reduced)

And if you were standing next to your car where you'd parked it, and you looked at where you worked, this is what you'd see.

Except that this one has Eugene Hajdaj standing at the top of the stair that led to the sliding glass door you walked through to get inside to your desk, which was against the wall, directly opposite that sliding glass door.

Hajdaj was one of the engineers who worked for Reynolds Smith & Hills, and as a gleaming counter-example to all of the nasty words I've had to say about engineers in this thing, I cannot think of a better person than Eugene Hajdaj.

Hajdaj was a sterling human being, and exhibited none of the unfortunate personality traits which make up what I've grown to call "Engineer's Disease" and instead was a broad-minded deeply-understanding and empathetic sort (personality traits that are notable for their absence in your typical Engineer's Disease specimen), possessed of a boundless curiosity about the world and all the people who inhabit it, and had more than just a small bit of a poet's soul. And, now that I think about it, I shall hereby correct myself as regards all my previous words about the cultural dislike and hostility toward my camera out on the pad, too, and use Hajdaj as a counterexample to those words... and really... now that I think about it... Jack Petty should be included in that ever-so-small set of counterexamples regarding the camera, too. Maybe I'll think of more, later.

Hajdaj is the one who tipped my ignorant ass off to an annual publication called Writer's Market (it's still being published to this day), which lists publishers with information about them that is very useful for those who fancy themselves as capable of writing well enough to actually sell their words, and in so doing precipitated the astounding decades-long process (which shows no signs of letting up), which allowed me to discover yet another unsuspected aspect to myself, which was that I could write.

So for the books I've sold, I have Hajdaj to thank.

No small debt of gratitude there.

Gene was a writer as well, and years after this photograph was taken, I distinctly remember him showing me a fairly short piece he'd written, called, I think, Fast Concrete, and it was a gripping tale of having to deal with getting something very large and complex built in a hurry, a desperate hurry in fact, and the pitfalls, problems, and grave decisions that those who designed and constructed such a thing at a dead run had to deal with, and only at the end was it revealed that it was all real-world-based, and it involved the construction of the original sarcophagus at the site of the Chernobyl disaster.

Chernobyl, being in the Ukraine, struck a resonant note in Gene, who's very recent ancestry was Ukrainian, and who knows just how harshly life could hand out punishments for nothing at all.

So yeah. So RS&H had themselves a good man in the form of Gene Hajdaj.

And since it was RS&H who designed the RSS (and a lot of other large and complex things out at the Cape, too), and since it was Sheffield Steel who fabricated and delivered the heavy structural elements for the RSS, we did a lot of work together.

Gene had the heart and soul of a teacher, and employing the extraordinarily-efficient technique of his kindly and gentle way, he managed to teach me a lot.

The exact same can be said for my boss, Dick Walls, who occupied the far end of this trailer.

I was extraordinarily lucky to have fallen in with such people, at such a place, and I harbor no illusions about any of it.

And I will never be able to pay the least of it back to any of the originals, so instead, I shall everlastingly try to pay it forward, to the Good People I know, and the Good People I have yet to meet.

Look closely at the walkway leading to the bottom of the stair, and you'll see that part of it is a panel of steel-bar grating. Same stuff that makes up the flooring all over the towers. Hot-dip galvanized. The kind of stuff you find just sort of "laying around" when dealing with steel fabrication and erection.

Walk across the grating, step inside the trailer, sit down at your desk, and if it's still early on in your altered circumstances, which you have yet to comprehend in any meaningful way, just how radically altered those circumstances really are, and you're still quite a bit more of an answering machine than you are a properly-productive member of the Space Shuttle Team, then time can pass very slowly, with very little going on, and you'll do a lot of reading, and sometimes you'll doodle on a piece of paper, and if by some miracle a thing like that survives for 40 years, then this is what it looks like.

Look close at the sheet of doodling, and you get a look at what's visible through the glass door from the chair you sit in, as the guys working for Wilhoit (who's trailer it is, in the doodle) continue to climb into the sky with the stuff that Sheffield Steel was furnishing and delivering to the pad.

A day once lived, in a life never to return, and yet...


Center: (Reduced)

My parents, at their home in DeLand, Florida.

I had just given this jacket to my Dad.

I love you, Mom.

I love you, Dad.


Bottom Left: (Reduced)

The world is filled with unspeakable horrors.

People rich and powerful beyond comprehension, people who already have far more than they can ever make sensible use of for themselves, are right this minute working diligently via means devious and indirect, to steal food out of impoverished babies' dinner bowls.

War and disaster rain down on the heads of innocents, laying waste to whole populations.

Disease comes creeping on stealthy feet and takes family members away from one another in the slowest and most terrible ways imaginable.

Insensate unreasoning hate fills the land like rising floodwaters, and keeps on rising despite the best efforts of decent people to stem its flow.

Willful ignorance and malicious agenda-peddling fill innumerable minds with no end of misinformation designed to manipulate the fools who believe it into doing dark work in the service of dark forces.

There is no end to it...

And yet...

Fortune smiles down upon utterly unworthy recipients...

Who can only smile uncomprehendingly at their own good luck...

James MacLaren never deserved such a thing, and cannot believe his impossible good fortune to find himself standing in such a place, and strikes an appropriate pose in front of the Sheffield Steel field trailer at Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center, Florida.