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    Julie Shepard Jenkins has a replica of the club her father used to hit a couple golf balls on the moon. PHOTO BY TOM GORDON
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    At 47, Alan Shepard was the oldest man to walk on the surface of the moon and the only one of the original seven astronauts to do it. PROVIDED BY JULIE SHEPARD JENKINS
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    Astronaut Alan Shepard was honored all over the country for his first space flight and his trip to the moon. PROVIDED BY JULIE SHEPARD JENKINS

The life of an astronaut’s daughter

This is the second of a two-part series that recounts the memories and experiences of Juliana Shepard Jenkins, the daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard.

Juliana Shepard Jenkins remembers the original seven Mercury astronauts fondly. They were a close-knit team. They stuck together.

The long-time Wimberley resident, remembers her father, astronaut Alan Shepard, being in constant competition with John Glenn. “They were a lot alike,” Julie says.

Her favorite astronauts were Glenn, Deke Slayton and Wally Schirra. “If you wanted a laugh, what a sense of humor Wally Schirra had,” says Julie.

In 1983, “The Right Stuff,” a hit movie about the space program, was released. It was based on the bestseller of the same name by author Tom Wolfe. Movie reviewers loved the film; Shepard and some of the other astronauts panned it because of the way it treated astronaut Gus Grissom, among other things. “Well, they got the title right,” Shepard told Julie at the time.

During a television interview Shepard said: “Neither Tom Wolfe nor (movie director Philip Kaufman) had talked to any of the original seven guys...The movie assumed that Grissom had panicked, which wasn’t true at all. The movie made him look like a bad guy…They were very hard on John Glenn’s wife, who had a mild speech problem….It was just totally fiction.”

The Mercury program gave way to Gemini. Shepard was named commander of one of the first two-man crews. Then he developed dizziness and nausea which, at first, he tried to hide to protect his flight status. Eventually, he told Slayton, who was director of Flight Operations, about the problem. It turned out he had Meniere’s disease, an inner ear problem.

Shepard was replaced on the Gemini program and made chief of the Astronaut Office, responsible for training.

Problem solved

Shepard checked into a hospital in Los Angeles under an assumed name. The innovative operation on his ear was a success and he was restored to flight status in 1969.

It was time to shoot for the moon. The Apollo program was launched.

“Daddy really wanted the Apollo 13 mission (to the moon),” recalls Julie. “He wanted the first available mission.” He wasn’t assigned Apollo 13, a flight that experienced severe mechanical problems and had to abort its mooning landing. When Shepard and James Lovell, who commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 flight, would meet in ensuing years, Lovell would always offer to trade Apollo 13 for 14. It became a running joke.

Once safety modifications were made to the craft, Shepard took command of Apollo 14 and piloted the lunar module on the moon’s surface. At age 47, he became the oldest man to walk on the moon and the only one of the original astronauts to make it there. “I looked at the moon differently from that moment on,” says Julie.

Shepard was famous for hitting a couple golf balls on the moon. He had a special six iron made that attached to the handle of a space shovel. Shepard’s first attempt at lunar golf angled into a crater. The second was a solid shot that went “miles and miles and miles,” according to the astronaut. Shepard smuggled the six iron aboard Apollo 14 in a sock. Normally, NASA discouraged such hijinks, but the stunt proved a popular and easily understandable lesson in the moon’s gravity — which is about 1/6th of the Earth’s.

Among the many mementos Julie has of her father’s career is a replica of that collapsible club. The original club is on display at the United States Golf Association Museum in New Jersey.

More parades

After the successful landing of Apollo 14, it was time for another round of parades and celebrations.

The Shepard family was invited to a state dinner hosted by then-President Richard Nixon. Julie sat by Nixon’s daughter Tricia. The Nixons turned over the Camp David retreat to the Shepards who spent the week there, watching movies (Julie remembers seeing the World War II epic “Tora Tora Tora”) and playing in the snow on a sled provided by the White House staff.

With his career as an astronaut approaching the end, Julie remembers her father asking her and her two sisters: “Well, girls, what do you think I should do now?”

He retired as a rear admiral in the Navy with two stars in 1974.

Alan Shepard went on to have a successful business career, including owning a Coors distributorship in Houston. “He sat on the boards of a lot of businesses. Houston was a happening town at that time,” says Julie.

Over the years, Shepard traveled a lot but every night he would call home at 5 p.m. Julie recalls her father once telling her: “I just want to let you know that I’m sorry I wasn’t around more.”

The girls had their own careers and Louise and Alan moved to Pebble Beach, Calif., where he played a lot of golf. Shepard died of leukemia in 1998. About a month later Louise died of a heart attack at 5 p.m. — the time her husband always called. Their ashes were scattered off the coast of Pebble Beach and all activity on the famed golf course was halted in their honor.

“Daddy just scooped down and got her,” says Julie.

Alan Shepard wasn’t the only family member to take to the sky.

Crash landing

Julie became a flight attendant for Continental Airlines.

During a turbulent takeoff from Denver’s airport in 1975, the Boeing 727 she was on encountered a wind shear and was forced to make a crash landing. “I felt something happen to the plane and it just didn’t feel right,” recalls Julie.

The plane came down hard, forcing the landing gear up into the cabin.

Julie was sitting on a flimsy jumpseat toward the front of the airliner when everything went dark. Her seat crumbled and a closet containing body parts for transplants — hearts, eyeballs, kidneys — collapsed on top of her. Most of the passengers had to evacuate through windows at the rear of the plane. No one died in the crash, but there were numerous injuries. Julie was recognized by the airline for her courage and conduct during the crash.

She was hospitalized in Denver after the crash and, while in traction, her father walked in. “I said, ‘Daddy what did you do, take a rocket here?’” says Julie. As luck would have it he was attending a meeting for Coors in Colorado and quickly detoured to the hospital.

She later successfully lobbied the airline industry for sturdier seats for the cabin crew and a repositioning of that storage area.

Julie was living in Houston when she met her future husband Greg Jenkins, a contractor. Greg lived in Wimberley and Julie had fond memories of visiting here over the years. They settled in Wimberley. That was almost three decades ago.

These days Julie is in charge of fundraising for the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, a group that was created in 1984 by the six surviving Mercury astronauts and the widow of astronaut Gus Grissom (Grissom died along with astronauts Eugene White and Roger Chaffee during a pre-launch test fire in 1967).

The foundation awards more than 50 scholarships annually to students studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Over the years, the students have secured many patents and, as Julie likes to point out, developed new and improved gloves for space travelers.

To find out more about the foundation, go to www.astronautscholarship.org.

Julie also speaks to groups about her father’s accomplishments and the importance of space exploration. “I think Daddy was an outstanding man, a great man,” she says.

Wimberley View

P.O. Box 49
Wimberley, TX 78676
Phone: 512-847-2202
Fax: 512-847-9054