Lee Visits His Old Haunts

I am going to do this out of order, with Houston coming before San Antonio, although we visited San Antonio first.  Why?  I enjoyed Houston - I liked it better than I thought I would.  It's a nice city, although spread out more than cities of the northeast, certainly.  In both Texas and the desert areas, that is, Arizona and New Mexico, cities do tend to sprawl.  There are no "brown-stone fronts" as there are in Philadelphia, where narrow, three-story homes, joined to one another for blocks on end, are the norm.  In the desert and Texas, suburbs have become the cities.  The American dream of the single-family home lives.

I also enjoyed the Houston area because Lee and his family lived there during his junior-high and high school years, and he shared his old haunts with me.  He retold stories I had heard before, but this time in context.  I didn't have to imagine the location, I could see it.  It brought the stories to life.  (My imagination was way off, by the way.)

[Skip to the second half of this post for photos of the Johnson Space Center.]

His family's first home in the area was a rental, on the south side of Houston.  It is close to an elementary school, and today the neighborhood is full of kids.  I imagine it was back then as well.  There used to be a large tree in the front yard, which Lee climbed to watch construction of the Astrodome.  The tree he climbed is no longer there, all that remains is the outline of a stump in the grass.

Next, the family moved to a home on the west side of Houston, a home designed by Lee's mother.  They lived in the rental while their new house was being built.  He always told me there were lots of trees around it.  I imagined it to be a more modern style, but it is traditional. 

Lee says there are more roads, trees, and homes in the neighborhood now than when he lived there.  He had a newspaper route, and attended the local middle school.  Seeing these places allowed me to see Houston in a different way than most tourists would, through its neighborhoods.

Here's the middle school Lee attended.  It is larger now - wings have been added.

The third home is in Clear Lake, directly east of Houston on Galveston Bay.  Lee's family didn't like the heat and humidity of Houston, so moved towards the gulf for more comfortable weather.  The trees in the back yard are pecans.  Lee says he felt disoriented driving through his old neighborhood on this trip because the trees and shrubs have grown so much.  As with all the places we have visited, there are more people everywhere.  The population of the US has almost doubled since 1960, and it is clearly visible.  Except in Newtown Square, PA, which has hardly grown at all in the 20 years we have lived there.  Which makes me appreciate Newtown Square all the more!

Lee sailed on this lake:

Lee spent two and a half years at this high school before his family moved to San Diego.

Doesn't this remind you of your high school?  We all have walked down that long corridor to our next class!

The school has a new facade, a facelift, so looks different now, fancier.

This area is very close to the Houston Space Center, and many of the astronauts and their families lived in Lee's neighborhood.  Astronaut Edward White's son was in Lee's high school class.  Three astronauts, including White, died during a pre-launch test of Apollo 1 in 1967.   Lee was there when this happened, so remembers it better than most of us.  White is the one in the center, below.  Our astronauts sacrifice so much. 

Lee loved being close to the space center, so it was only natural that we visited Houston's Johnson Space Center.

The Johnson Space Center doesn't get nearly as many visitors as the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which we saw a year ago.  But there were interesting things to see, nonetheless.  I had two favorites: a reproduction of Skylab, to scale, which visitors could walk through; and one of the buildings where the astronauts train.  I will start with the latter.

The training facility is a large building with precise reproductions of the space station, the space shuttle, and the Russian space capsule.  The astronauts learn how to operate everything here, before launching into space.

 

The green round thing?  The Soviet space capsule, Soyuz.

There were three models of the space shuttle, but now that the program has been scrapped the parts are being shipped to museums around the country. 

Packaging parts for shipment:

This is looking down on a work space with desks, computers, and some robotic contraption in the center.  I believe the training center was messier than usual during our visit because NASA is currently in transition, from the space shuttle program to Orion.  There are changes afoot!

Vehicle and arachnid robot, below.  Astronauts get to play with fun toys!

The other exhibit I really enjoyed was a replica of the Skylab. It was set up for visitors to walk through.  I was surprised at how large the interior space of Skylab was.  I couldn't fit the section below in the camera viewfinder.  The man curled up is a life-size manikin. The three partial "tiles" in the top left corner are pads that form a ring around the space.  Astronauts would run around this ring for exercise, sort of like hamsters on a wheel.  Although in this case the wheel doesn't turn, the astronauts do.

Another section of the Skylab was divided into six sections, all open to the center.  The center space served as a passage (like a hallway of sorts).  Each of the six sections served a different purpose.  One was for eating, another for sleeping, another as a bathroom, and so on.  Remember that in a weightless environment there is no up or down.

In the photo below I am looking up at a manikin who is eating something from the kitchen.

The man below is taking a shower.  The current space station doesn't have showers like this one, because the astronauts didn't like them.  They now wipe with wet cloths.  Water in space clings to things, or forms large water globules that float around, not very conducive to showering. 

Best of all, the Johnson Space Center had on display a space toilet!  Haven't you always wondered about toilets in space?  Isn't that the first question anyone asks?  I didn't take a photo, unfortunately.  I should have.  Essentially, a vacuum captures whatever is eliminated.  There is a seat to sit on, bars that fit over the person's feet, and a third bar that fits over the person's thighs so he/she doesn't float away while sitting on the toilet!  Fascinating stuff.