Cate Neilson

In 1963 there were three of us kids–me, my brother Brian, and little sister Cindy. I would have been 7, Brian 4, and Cindy a baby. I’m not sure we knew what our dad was really up to. I mean, when you’re 7, do you really know anything about engineering or space ships that might, maybe, someday go to the moon. Probably the only thing we knew was that we had moved away to a place that was completely alien  to us, and not much more. Obviously I had some inkling of who President Kennedy was.

There are things I remember–we all go chicken pocks. One kid does and the siblings do I guess. I think I may still have one of two scars from it. We stayed home, and weren’t really sick but just itchy. I guess the vaccine hadn’t been invented yet, because I do know we had our other vaccines. I don’t think it was very much fun for our mother!

Meanwhile, our dad went to work at NASA, doing whatever engineers did back then. We didn’t know! I’m going to try to find out more about that…stay tuned.

…a day you don’t forget, if you were alive to remember it. Even children don’t forget. I was seven. My mother was watching TV and ironing, and then suddenly she was crying. I remember her telling me our President, John F. Kennedy, had been killed. In Dallas. Where I was from. You just don’t forget that.

So this was the beginning of our journey. I’m not even sure I really understood what my father was going to be doing. (Probably didn’t understand the specifics of that until MANY years later!) All I knew at first was loss, loss, loss. And it took a long time to get over those losses.

Maybe I didn’t completely understand how serious it was that the President had been assassinated, but I knew how much I missed my dog and my grandparents. I knew I wanted to start second grade at the school where I’d gone to first, Lenore Kirk Hall. (Funny, if I’d stayed there I might have grown up knowing Stevie Ray Vaughan!) But he was a kid then, just like me, and we both had miles to go… (Although I’ve read he was obsessed with the guitar at 7, so who knows?!)

But on that day, to all those other losses, I added one more…

When I was a girl, the Space Program was at the height of its popularity. It was magic. It was the dream. We were shooting for the moon.

I was especially close to that dream because my father was part of it. He not only was an aerospace engineer at NASA, he was one of its early pioneers. When I was in second grade, we moved to Houston, Texas just as the Johnson Space Center was in its final stages of completion.

I was seven years old, about to enter 2nd grade, when we settled in a rent house in Pasadena, Texas. The NASA offices were located on the in Houston on the Gulf Freeway at that time, while the Space Center in Clear Lake was being finished. My parents planned to either buy or build a house in the area, once they decided where they wanted to live.

It was not an easy move. We left the house where I’d lived for most of my life. We left my grandparents. We had to give away our German Shepherd since we had no yard to keep him in. We had to leave the city I’ll always think of as my first ‘home’ – Dallas – at a time when the nation turned its eyes in that direction. It was 1963.