John Wolfram, 1969
This week I put together two stories I found fascinating. My photographer, A.J. Willen, interviewed the man who was the first to welcome home the astronauts of Apollo 11 when their space capsule splashed into the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969. At the time, John Wolfram was a 20 year old Navy Seal, who, by sheer luck and timing, was the seaman who was sent first into the water that afternoon to make sure the astronauts were alright and to secure the capsule. He told a great story about how many people had trained for the sea rescue, there were 9000 men on nine ships and over 50 different aircraft circling the Pacific a few hundred miles off the coast of Hawaii. The team that was closest would get the call and John happened to be the one. If you’ve seen pictures from that day, you noticed the giant flower decals on John’s wetsuit. He said he was a prankster back then and after NASA reprimanded him and some other seaman for using the decals on the Apollo 10 mission, he knew they had to make a comeback. And they did. All over his wetsuit. Another interesting thing he told us was that after the astronauts had been safely moved from the capsule to a helicopter, that was on its way to the U.S.S. Hornet, he and the two other Navy frogmen with him played ‘king of the mountain’ on the capsule while it was bobbing in the ocean. Like I said, it was a fascinating interview. He also shared with us some of his memoribilia from that day, including some gold foil John took from the hull of the capsule and shoved down his wetsuit. He has a new book coming out that details all these great stories called ‘Splashdown.’ You can see his interview with us Sunday and Monday nights, July 19th and 20th, and 11:00.
