VT Stories Oral History with Charles Tynan, May 17, 2017 (Ms2016-015)

Ren Harman: This is Ren Harman, the project manager for VT Stories. Today is

May 17, 2017 at about 4:10 PM. We are in the Holtzman Alumni Center on the

campus of Virginia Tech. So the first question I have, we have a very special

guest with us today, and I guess the first question I'll ask, if you can just

state in a full sentence my name is, and when you were born and where you were born.

Charles Tynan: My name is Charles I. Tynan, Jr, born in Newport News on October

10, 1930.

Ren: Thank you. What years did you attend Virginia Tech?

Charles: I started in '47 and graduated in '52.

Ren: What was your major?

Charles: 00:01:00Aeronautical engineering.[1]

Ren: Can you just tell me a little bit about growing up and a little bit about

your family?

Charles: Well, I was a single child born in Newport News, Virginia, and my

father worked in a shipyard, Newport News Shipyard, and my mother was a nurse. I

had a normal childhood.[2] I used to play golf as much as I could, and I never

won any tournaments, but I played in them. I had a normal childhood as a

teenager, went to grammar school. Well I started in kindergarten around the

corner, and I did so well she put me in second grade, which put me behind. I was

younger than everybody else in the class.

Ren: At an early age.

Charles: Yeah, it turned bad sometimes.

Ren: Right. 00:02:00Were you smaller than everyone else?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: You were?

Charles: I wanted to go out for ball and the coach told me, "They would make a

punting dummy out of you," so I didn't go out for football.

Ren: You said your mother was a nurse and your father worked in a shipyard. Was

that kind of the main economies of Newport News at that time, what a lot of

people did?

Charles: Yeah. It was during the depression. I was born in 1930 and things were

not very good then.

Ren: I'm sure you have plenty of stories about what it was like growing up in

the depression.

Charles: Well, I was lucky, my father had a good job in the shipyard and he

provided for me very well.

Ren: As a child did you notice that things were tough at all?

Charles: Yeah, especially when it got to World War II because of rationing and

stuff like that, and that was hard. But we had a gun emplacement within 100

yards of 00:03:00our home.

Ren: Wow.

Charles: An aircraft gun.

Ren: Right. So you felt pretty protected?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: Right. What were you like as a child in school?

Charles: I did normal things, but I was too small to do much contact sports, but

I played a lot of golf. I made the golf team in high school, but we didn't have

many people to play.

Ren: Right. Where did you attend high school?

Charles: Newport News High School.

Ren: When did you first thinking about college and how did Virginia Tech come

into the picture?

Charles: I knew some people, I've forgotten his name now, he was a battalion

commander up here and we came to a 00:04:00VPI football game in Roanoke, and he met me

here, [00:04:07] and everything. And then when I went to high school, a

teammate, Chris Kraft, his division chief was Mel Goff and my mother and I used

to play golf with Mel Goff and his wife. After we played golf, this was when I

was in high school, after we played golf, before we had dinner, before we had

lunch we go to the hangar and Mel Goff would get Chris Kraft to show me all the

things he was working on. And I will never forget the first thing he showed was

he working on gust alleviation for airplanes, and I guess he was my mentor from

then on. In fact, he hired me. I had an interview with him at Virginia Tech and

he hired me.

Ren: So because 00:05:00of Chris Kraft attending Virginia Tech [3]is that kind of what

got you interested in the University?

Charles: Yeah, kind of.

Ren: Do you remember that first memory of stepping on campus, what it looked

like, smelled like?

Charles: Well, Rad Tech was terrible. For one year I had to stay there. I guess

it's still there, but if you wanted to go to the campus you had to ride a school

bus get on a school bus and they had horrible roads. They had a lot of accidents

with school buses. But on Sunday you could go to Radford, but the first year was

bad, but after that we moved to the campus and I became a corporal my sophomore

year. I started my junior year and then captain my senior year.

Ren: Where did you live freshman year? We were talking a 00:06:00little bit about that.

You lived at Radford Arsenal,[4] right?

Charles: Yes.

Ren: The story you were telling before we started recording do you care to tell

that again?

Charles: Well, and it's kind of dreary. Every building was the same. It was

built for World War II housing, and the cafeteria was the same. I get very hot,

and so we go to mess hall all the freshman had to stand in line and have heavy

coats on. All the heat, the steam heat was around the edge of the building. We

had to stand there waiting for dinner and it was horrible. A lot of time we

would fall out and go into a little shop and get some apple pies for dinner. But

the 00:07:00school, it wasn't too bad, but we had to study a lot for engineering.

Ren: What were some notable professors that you had here? Can you remember any

names or professors that were influential in your life?

Charles: Well, Professor Stewart was head of Aeronautical Engineering. In fact,

before he became head of it A. A. Rowland was the head, and A. A. Rowland was a

structures man. He liked structures. He taught structures, but he went

elsewhere. They got a teacher from the Civil Engineering Department to teach

structures. Everything he said he related it to concrete. There's no airplanes

that are concrete, but everything he said 00:08:00was related to concrete. But Professor

Stewart was different, because he had been at NC State before and he was upset

because Virginia didn't have any professional engineering for aeronautical

engineers. So he kept pounding on the table about it, so they said, "Okay, you

make up the exam," so Professor Stewart made up the exam and all of us went to

UVA and took two days' worth of tests. It was hard, those tests.

Ren: Wow.

Charles: He was our teacher but he was hard. And so I got #10, [00:08:51 PE] for

the State of Virginia for Aeronautical Engineering.

Ren: Wow. Any other professors or mentors that you can remember?

Charles: Well, I 00:09:00can see it.

Ren: See a face, right.

Charles: But I can't remember.

Ren: You talked a little bit about your first year being kind of rough with kind

of what they call the rat year. I'm sure you have lots of stories about maybe a

little rough times around kind of that being a freshman and being a rat.

Charles: Well, I found a picture. Don Huffman, have you heard of Don Huffman?

Ren: I don't think so.

Charles: He was a rising sophomore and I have a picture of him in the snow. We

had a first snow fall over at Rad Tech, I sent him pictures of himself in the

snow. Anyway, I remember he and some other sophomores got us in the shower and

turned on hot water and it was team and we had to push a rifle over our head for

a long long time.

Ren: 00:10:00 Wow.

Charles: It wasn't supposed to be, but they were doing it anyway, hazing.

Ren: That's what I was going to say, a little bit of hazing.[5] What were some

other things that they kind of put you through?

Charles: The main thing was you had to walk around in a brace you know. I guess

they still do that.

Ren: I'm not for sure. Yeah.

Charles: That's with your shoulder blades touching and stuff like that. Your

chin down on your chest. Yeah, that was kind of awkward carrying a bunch of

books too.

Ren: Do you have to square every turn?

Charles: Oh yeah, yeah.

Ren: They still do that. My office is on the edge of campus. My office is in

Shanks Hall and I see the cadets today walking and they are squaring the

corners. And then someone was talking a 'square meal', that's where 00:11:00that term,

and I didn't know that and it was during one of these interviews.

Charles: The thing was, they were pretty strict about how we ate and everything.

After a while they stopped serving liver. They used to serve liver and you had

to eat it, so they started serving liver with alternate baloney my freshman year.

Ren: [Laughs] Sounds good. Where did you move to after freshman year? You moved

to central campus, right?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: Do you remember the residence hall?

Charles: I've forgotten the names. It was the upper quadrangle, two 00:12:00 years.

Ren: Maybe [Raish], possibly?

Charles: Yeah. Thomas?

Ren: Thomas, yeah.

Charles: Is Thomas...?

Ren: Yeah, it's still there.

Charles: I remember when they did some pranks on the lower quadrangle. They fed

a cow a lot of Epson salt and led him up to the top of the stairs where the

higher-class people, the squadron commander, they lived in the tower. They took

this cow up the stairs.

Ren: Were there a lot of pranks[6] going on?

Charles: Yes. They threw them into the duck pond and they had to swim 00:13:00to get

out, and some of them almost drowned. You never knew what was going to happen next.

Ren: It sounds like it. Your time here, you were here at a really changing time

in our nation's history.

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: Do you remember any national events and how those were being played out

here in Blacksburg with the war and things?

Charles: When I was here in '51, 50, there were about 100 girls and 5,000 men. A

lot of the men were veterans from World War II and had this huge...of trailers.

Have you ever seen the pictures of the trailers?

Ren: Hmm.

Charles: I got invited to dinner one time and I never could find it. They all

looked alike. But 00:14:00there were a lot of veterans, so I got invited, where they had

to go to Norfolk, they were in the Navy Reserve and they have to go every so

many weeks. That's the way I got rides home.

Ren: How were the vets on campus, how were they treated? Would they talk a lot

about the war?

Charles: No. There were a couple of vets in my company. They wanted to get a

commission in the service, so they were pilots in the Navy or Army and they came

into the Cadet Corps, and they called them skippers because they didn't want

rank. Skippers were people that didn't want any attention except to get a 00:15:00 degree.

Ren: So they just kind of wanted to be left alone sort of?

Charles: Yeah, yeah. They didn't talk much about their experience with the service.

Ren: Were a lot of people asking them about it?

Charles: I don't think so. There was a kind that graduated, he was in World War

II and he came to Tech after that and he got a degree in aero engineering, and

when I was in the Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base he was second

lieutenant, Captain McConnell. He had a desk job, but he was ready to pilot so

they must fly some test flights. One test flight was a B50 with two F84s off the

wings and 184... 00:16:00They had one pilot control with all three, and it fouled up and

[one 84] went up in the air and came down and cut the wing off and all of them

died. So of them people, McConnell and there were two people in there who

graduated from Tech named Epps and Hans. Both of them transferred to Edwards Air

Force Base and they got killed out there. In fact, Epps had the world record in

a [V2] for 15 seconds before it crashed.

Ren: Wow.

Charles: But they were VPI graduates that I met in the Air Force.

Ren: So even then you were meeting people that had went to Virginia Tech.

Charles: Yeah.[7]

Ren: Wow. That's awesome. What were kind of 00:17:00some of your favorite experiences or

memories from your time here?

Charles: I didn't have much fun except going out of town, stand and look at the

traffic light change a couple of times and go back to the room. I had a crush on

a little girl that worked in the drugstore on the corner, but we never went out

or anything. I talked to her sometimes, but I had to devote my time to studying,

because I wasn't very smart.

Ren: Surely not. So you just kind of kept your head down, concentrated on your studies.[8]

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: Didn't get into any trouble of any kind?

Charles: I had to walk demerits off once in a while. My bed was completely as

flat as it should have been, made up. 00:18:00Female: Didn't you tell me some stories about dates you went on and you spilled something?

Charles: Oh, dance weekend I had my uniform and I had a hamburger steak and I

was trying to cut it. I had ketchup and all of a sudden the whole thing fell in

my lap and I had ketchup all over my uniform. But my senior year I wore a

palette, a white uniform. I guess they still wear them, don't they?

Ren: Yeah. Were there ring dances?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: How were those?

Charles: Well, mine was a fail. The girl I was going with we broke up and she

wouldn't come, so I got a blind date with my 00:19:00friend, a cadet. He had a sister

that came and she was terrible.

Ren: [Laughs]

Charles: She was anti-social, so it wasn't much. In fact, my ring, I broke my

ring. The box we had, those steel boxes, I wore it to bed the first night I got

it and I hit it and they broke the ring, so I had to get a new stone in it.

Ren: Is this the same ring from your time here?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: Okay. Wow.

Charles: I bought one for my mother too, but I don't know what happened to it. I

really don't know. It just disappeared.

Ren: So that's the same ring?

Charles: A small one for my mother.

Ren: But this is the same one. Wow. That's awesome.

Female: It's an awesome ring.

Ren: It is. I 00:20:00can get mine to about right here. I didn't have my resized. What

about some difficult experiences? We talked a little bit about kind of the rough

first year and studies being hard. Were there any other things kind of going on

that made your time here particularly difficult?

Charles: The course wasn't easy at all, but I didn't do too well at first and

the last years I did okay.

Ren: What was your hardest classes?

Charles: Some aero dynamics courses and fluid mechanics.

Ren: I wanted to ask you a little bit, and you mentioned this earlier, but your

relationship with a Virginia Tech alumni and a VT Stories alumni and Chris

Kraft, but what your relationship with Chris and how influential was he 00:21:00in your

life and your career?[9]

Charles: Well, like I say, when I played golf with his boss he took me to the

hangar and got him to show me. That was before he had gotten into space, and he

showed me some things he was working on. Like he had a [00:21:22] tube in front

of the airplane and it would take the gusts and it changed the configuration of

the plane to take care of it.

Ren: Right.

Charles: I never forgot that. Then after that when I interviewed him for a job

he said, "What the hell are you doing here? You know you've got a job."

Ren: [Laughs]

Charles: So we had a little talk and it was okay. And then we worked together.

He was in the same 00:22:00division, Research, but I had just come back from the Air

Force. I spent six years in the Air Force and they wanted me to listen to these

lectures on space, and Chris was one of the people sponsoring the stuff.

Ren: Right.

Charles: We had lectures maybe once every few weeks, but knowledge of people,

but how to put things in space and that was interesting.

Ren: So were there a lot of Virginia Tech grads at NACA and then what became 00:23:00NASA? Were there a lot of engineers there?

Charles: Yeah, there were quite a few.

Ren: Was Chris kind of the leader of them in a way?

Charles: He was, but he formed, it was Bob Gilbreath was head of it, they formed

a space test group to work on the Mercury program. In the Air Force I had been

doing a top secret [00:23:28]. President Eisenhower said we were not doing it.

They were floating balloons over Russia and we were supposed to catch them with

a C1-19. They would float over Russia. Russia shot most of them down, but a

600-pound package of cameras and then they were supposed to catch them, get them

off the water if they landed in the ocean.

But then 00:24:00apparently in the space test group when they started, they were

considering that for recovering astronauts, and they got me to talk to them

about it. I said I didn't recommend it because we had to cut a lot of them

loose, so it wasn't a safe way to recover that. But that's my entrance to the

space test group. I was the 40th one to join the space test group. I think

number 40-something.

Ren: Wow.

Charles: But that's how I got into it, but Chris was my boss.[10]

Ren: Was he a pretty tough boss?

Charles: Oh, no, he was good. In fact, I went to Houston for one year and she

was born in Houston.

Ren: Okay.

Charles: I had gotten a job lined up here with Langley [00:25:00] Center and was

about 00:25:00to move, and Chris came into my office and sat on my table for maybe close

to an hour to try to talk me into staying. He said, "One-third of your life is

sleeping, one-third having fun, and one-third working." I will never forget

that, but I told him I was going.

Ren: Can you talk a little bit about your role as part of the recovery team for

Project Mercury?[11]

Charles: Well, I was on the recovery team. I was on the aircraft carrier, Lake

Champlain recovering Alan Shepard, and I've forgotten the name of the carrier

now, they recovered Chris and... Lake Champlain never had recovered an astronaut 00:26:00before, but they forgot a lot of stuff. They didn't bring any uniform for him to

wear after he got recovered and we didn't have anything to put the... So the

ship got together and built a big platform and put the name on it and put

mattresses all over it to they could set the capsule down. And it turned out

that it came within the side of the carrier, so they got pictures of the capsule

coming down, got the helicopter recovering the capsule, and then hoisting him

out of the capsule into the helicopter. And they brought him back to the carrier

and that's the only pictures that they got of any astronaut from first coming down.

I saw a movie not too long ago about 00:27:00Walter Cronkite, and the same thing, and I

was standing with my hand on my--with a clipboard on my arm.

Ren: You were a witness to history.[12]

Charles: Yeah. When he got ready to leave the ship, we weren't supposed to talk

to Shepard because they didn't want him to be influenced with other [words], so

I wasn't supposed to talk to him. So I was [00:27:27 taking...] out of the

capsule and he came out and jumped off of the platform and started talking to

me. And my family said that the TV commentator said, "Oh they are having a big

technical discussion." We were having an argument." He wanted me to take the

clock, the [00:27:48] clock out of the capsule and take it back to the Cape in

my briefcase.

Ren: Why did he want to take it out? I read that, yeah.

Charles: Well, he wanted it because they had a 00:28:00lawyer doing work for him, a pro

bono with no charge, and they took the clock, mounted it in walnut and gave it

to him at as a desk ornament. That's what he used the clock for. But Grissom was

a different story, because he said he didn't do it, but he must have hit the

emergency thing and blew the hatch off and the capsule flooded with water. It's

a wonder he didn't die because first his capsule flooded with water, and then

when he got in the water he put the horse collar on backwards. He could have

slipped out.

Ren: Wow.

Charles: And he forgot close the...had a plug on his uniform where the oxygen

went 00:29:00in and he forgot to plug it up, so water was going into his suit. And then

we got him out on the ship and he had rolls of [00:29:10 dimes in his pants to

give his kids in school], so he was lucky he lived.

Ren: Yeah.

Charles: They wanted me to talk to him because they wanted me to find out what

happened to him. So I went in and he was in a white terrycloth bathrobe eating

breakfast. All of a sudden he spit his food. He said, "The [00:29:37...'s] food

aren't any good either." He says, "[00:29:42 Not today].

Ren: When we interviewed Chris Kraft we talked a little bit about the

astronauts. What were their attitudes kind of during that time and how was your

relationship in working with him?

Charles: Well, very good because [00:30:00] 00:30:00next to him. Fortunately the doctor

was across the hall, Dr. Douglas. If we got sick we had to go to the doctor and

he would give us all the medicine we needed. We had a large coffee pot and they

had a small one and we always had coffee, so they would come over and drink our

coffee. We would talk to each other.[13] But you know, one example, the way

worked, in those days without having to write a lot of stuff, one morning my

neighbor, Melton Wendler, he is a graduate of VPI, he got a radar [00:30:48

shaft] in the mail, the morning mail. That detects in space a radar will detect

it. They 00:31:00put that into the parachute so when it came out we would know the

parachute deployed. We walked next door and found out that Alan Shepard was

flying at 1 o'clock, so we went down there at 1 o'clock and stuffed the shaft in

his [00:31:19 outbreaks]. He flew up to [00:31:20] in the afternoon and popped

his [00:31:22 outbreaks] and we got the data. From the morning mail within a day

we had the data. And he could do that later. He had to write a mental statement...

Ren: Wow. How long were you at NASA for?

Charles: I retired in '88.

Ren: So you were there from basically the mid-1950s to 1988.[14]

Charles: Yes.

Ren: Wow.

Charles: Then later I worked with some of the astronauts because of the long

duration 00:32:00exposure facility. It's a big dumb... I mean it's the size of a

greyhound bus. It had [00:32:09 experience] on it and it was supposed to have

one year. After it deployed, exposure, so it was up to four years. So some

people some of the data was no good and others got more than they wanted.

Ren: Can you talk a little bit about this, that you brought here today, some of

the pictures?

Charles: Well, that was the phone book. That's a one-page phone book.

Female: For where?

Charles: For the space task group, two pages. That's the whole Mercury Program 00:33:00when it started.

Ren: Wow.

Charles: This is the picture they took after one of the test flights. That's a

picture of Alan Shepard being brought back to the ship. That's me standing with

a clipboard. [Laughs]

Ren: Wow.

Charles: Yeah. This was recovery after a certain flight. This is an article in

the paper of me talking to Shepard.

Ren: I have a couple of pictures. I'm thinking this is...

Charles: That's me.

Female: That's a good one. I like that one.

Ren: Is 00:34:00this you?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: There you go.

Charles: Well, this was a [press pool. A press pool] had 40 people. In fact,

there was one man they had to put a suicide watch on. He worked for Movie Tone

News. He got the pictures coming down. He sent his film into the Cape and he got

the message back there's nothing on it. You goofed up something. He forgot to

take the lens cover off, so they had to put a suicide watch on him because he

was so despondent. He was talking about winning all kinds of awards.

Ren: And he didn't take the lens cap off.

Charles: They got nothing.

Ren: Wow

Charles: That was Grissom coming out. 00:35:00The helicopter pilot said he recovered

Alan Shepard. They went out without him and came back with him. That was Grissom

and me. This is some other worker. This is [00:35:25 Vaughn] had a contract with

a lunar shelter to house people on the moon for eight days, but it was supposed

to be comfortable to fit under the lunar [00:35:41 experiment...] model, but it

was so heavy they didn't try it.

Ren: Is this you here?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: I was looking at the class ring. You can see your ring.

Charles: Yeah. That was a zero G pot, a toilet.

Ren: These are wonderful memories.

Female: Oh, you were sitting on a 00:36:00toilet, a zero-gravity toilet.

Charles: A messy toilet. That was the LDEF, the Long Duration Exposure Facility

that ran aground, and that's when I got the award for the first space [00:36:18].

Ren: This is fascinating. This is really nice.

Charles: Yeah. That was it [00:36:30 deployed]. That's what it looked like when

it was deployed. [00:36:39]

Ren: Wow.

Female: I remember them talking about how are we going to get it down?

Charles: Yeah. He was on the ship and his flight to [00:36:58 Florida], but he

was killed on the next 00:37:00flight when it exploded.

Ren: What flight was that?

Charles: I can't remember.

Female: It was the Challenger wasn't it? Wasn't it called the Challenger?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: The Challenger, okay. That's fascinating, and to have an entire career at

NASA, and the witness that you were to so much history and that you have a good

memory of it is really fascinating. I'm glad we got to talk about that a little

bit. I want to ask you some broad questions about Virginia Tech. If someone

simply says the words 'Virginia Tech' what's the first thing that you think of?

Charles: I think of the academics[15]. I'm not too big on football 00:38:00now. I've got

a bad taste when Preston and she was in the class of '84. I came up here one

time during her undergraduate days and had breakfast at the Red Lion Inn, and

Bill Avery was the President and Dooley was the coach, the football coach, and

they were making fools of themselves trying to talk to [me into playing

football]. So after that I never gave to football again.

Ren: Wow.

Charles: They were talking so loud and it rubbed me the wrong way. I give to

academics but not to football, I mean to athletics.

Ren: What changes have you seen at Virginia Tech over time?

Charles: Oh, these buildings are so big now, 00:39:00so many. It's amazing because in

1950 there were very few buildings compared to what it is now.

Ren: Right.

Charles: In fact, 100 girls then and now they've got all kinds of girls.[16]

Ren: What do you think about some of these changes? This University continues to

grow and to expand.

Charles: I think it looks like the academics are kind of catching up some, but

still the sports get the biggest. But the number of people that give to sports

they want more sports, but I like the academics. [17]

Ren: Are there any changes or would you have any advice for the University? What

would you say as someone who was here many y ears ago and a daughter that

attended here, 00:40:00what would you like to say? Is there anything they should change

or stick to?

Charles: I really don't know much about what goes on now, but I think if I tried

to get in now I don't think I could get in. I don't think I would have good

enough grades to get in. I think it's a different... And they've got so many new

departments. When I was here the engineering was specific, but now mining

engineering, aeronautical and civil, but now they've got all kinds of... In

fact, I don't understand some of what they do.

Ren: Right. [Chuckles] How important was the Corps to you when you were here?

Charles: Very important I thought.

Ren: What did you learn from the Corps and 00:41:00some lessons?

Charles: Just discipline and learned to keep a neat room. Yeah.[18]

Ren: I want to ask you about your skiing.

Charles: My skiing?

Ren: Yes.

Charles: I ski quite a bit[19]. I retired in 1988 when I was 58 years old, so I

had 12 good years of skiing before I had a stroke in 2000. But I continued

riding a bike after that for many years until just about five years ago. But my

skiing, well we skied mostly in the eastern part of the country, but when you go

west, because they've got such 00:42:00big areas you can go up one mountain and stay up

there all day, have lunch there and everything and not have to go out.

So I would ski in California. I went to Switzerland to ski once, but there

wasn't much snow, so I did shopping, after two days I did shopping.

Ren: And you were a member of a ski club for a pretty good while?

Charles: Yeah, Vanessa Ski Club.

Female: And a bike club.

Charles: Yeah, two bike clubs.

Female: He biked like...

Ren: Right, long distances, huh?

Female: Denmark and--

Ren: Oh wow, great. Cars, you were a car collector for a while?

Charles: Yeah.

Ren: What were some cars that you've had?

Charles: Well, I had a 1950, my first sports car, well the first car was a Ford

and I souped it up. I 00:43:00was in the Air Force. I got together with a guy that made

souped-up cars. He used to make Fordillacs. He would buy a Cadillac engine and

put it into a Ford to make it feel fast, so he helped me soup my car up to a

three-quarter race Ford. Then I bought a Jaguar, a 1950 Jaguar and I had the

luck to run it to...I can't think of his name... A went to a station in Ardmore,

Oklahoma to get it checked and the nearest Jaguar dealer was in Dallas, Texas.

The man, I can't think of his name...

Female: It will come to you.

Charles: Anyway, he was a racecar 00:44:00driver and he invited me out. I was sitting in

the hot waiting room waiting for my car in August in Texas, and he come and

says, "I've got a cool place for you to wait." He told [00:44:20] I think it was

like a Playboy club and he was getting ready for the evening dinner, evening

[00:44:30]. So he told me to have anything I wanted and put it on his bill. He

was very nice, but I just cannot think of his name.

Ren: Right.

Charles: He died not too long ago. He had a heart transplant.

Female: You have stories about driving without a clutch and somebody borrowing a

part of your engine. You have all kinds of car stories. 00:45:00 [Laughs]

Charles: Then I had Porsches, and the first Porsche was 1958 and that was

wonderful. I won a lot of trophies with that, and then I got a '62 and a '67,

but I didn't win so much after I got them. The '58 was good.

Ren: Right.

Charles: One time I was at the race in Marlboro, Maryland. I had the '58 and

they [00:45:44] on the audio. I gave my license number and they wanted to see

me. I had to report to the booth. I didn't know what... So I went, now I can't

think of another name, 00:46:00Penske, Roger Penske, a racecar driver, he was looking

for a new fuel pump but he couldn't find one. If he couldn't find one he wanted

to borrow my fuel pump for the race, and I said, "Okay," but they found a fuel

pump, so he didn't need mine. That was in I guess 1959, Marlboro Run.

Female: We used to do [00:46:31 Jim Connasse]. You did [00:46:36 Jim Connasse]

and what's the thing we did where you go...?

Charles: Rallies.

Female: Sportscar rallies.

Ren: Very cool. What would you like people to know about you that maybe they don't?

Charles: I don't know. I guess I'm kind of an easy-going person. Another thing

is 00:47:00 spectacular.

Ren: What would you like people to know about Virginia Tech?

Charles: I think it's a good school. It's huge now compared to what I was used

to, but yeah.

Ren: Thank you for being so generous with your time. I know you guys are running

around and doing... They have you scheduled to do things for the rest of the

next couple of days. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you would like

to talk about or anything you want to add? It's an open floor question if you

have anything you would like to say.

Charles: No, I don't. It's nice to come up here for these old guard reunions

because you get to see the growth of the campus. It's huge.

If I was a student now I 00:48:00wouldn't be able to walk that far to go to all of the

things. The parking is kind of tight here.

Ren: It is. It's a struggle. There's a lot of buildings and not a lot of

parking, and this campus I think was designed for a certain amount and as we

continue to go and buildings are replacing parking lots and things it's tough to

try to find some parking. Mr. Tynan, Class of 1951, thank you so much for taking

the time to speak with us. I really appreciate it, and thank you for your

service with NASA and everything you've done to represent this University. Thank

you very much. Nice to meet you.

bio father had nice job to help during Depression, and he was advanced for his

age Kraft interviewed and hired Tynan after college, he was his mentor lived at

Radford Arsenal freshman year - was designed for WWII housing so all the

buildings looked the same, was really hot his freshman year "rat year" was tough

- awkward braces, squaring turns, strict eating leading a cow upstairs in the

dorm, throwing people into the duck pond sound clip related to vets/military he

encountered devoted most time to studying, had a few memorable romantic fails he

and Chris worked together, did research togrthers . . sound clip about Project

Mercury relaionship wih astronauts NASA career . one major change favors

academics over sports Corps was important to him to be neat loved skiing,

biking, and is a car enthusiast