Wait, NOW I'm Finding Out My Parents Knew an Astronaut?

On a personal note, I just only found out this Thanksgiving - and then verified during this Christmas - that my dad knew Ken Mattingly back in the 1960s when Mattingly was getting trained to be an Apollo astronaut.

It was just talking about how one of my cousin's daughters was about to graduate from Auburn University - where my mother and half her side of the family went to college - during the turkey dinner that my mom started talking about how Auburn was such a great aerospace school because guys like Mattingly went there. And then she started bringing up how Mattingly showed up at dad's place in Sanford Florida - where dad was stationed at the naval air field - just after he and my mom had gotten married in May 1966. According to the tale, Mattingly was there to invite my dad out for a night drinking, but dad pointed out the new wife and mentioned he married a girl from "a cow college." Mattingly asked which one, found out it was Auburn, and then he stayed the night chatting up my mom about all the people they knew back at school.

War Eagle.

So I'm sitting there at the Thanksgiving dinner table with my jaw hitting the floor yammering "you knew an APOLLO Astronaut?" and my mom was all "oh yeah this was all way before the Apollo 13 incident" - they saw the movie - and then she goes into talking about how that summer Mattingly left his car with my dad while Mattingly left for space training, and that my Aunt Dot - who was 16 at the time - spent all summer driving his car everywhere.

So while I emailed Aunt Dot thanking her for the crazy cat shirts she always sends me for Christmas gifts, I took a moment to ask her "hey did you really drive an astronaut's car everywhere during that summer?"

And Aunt Dot emailed back that yeah it was Mattingly's car - she said it was a Facel Vega - but that she only drove it one time to a picnic event. Also that Mattingly had a pet chihuahua named Fang.

And now here I am scouring the Worldcat catalog for ANY biography book on Mattingly for fact-checking the chihuahua part, and dammit you people never wrote a detailed biography on him.

And it's like, parents, dammit WHY did this never come up before that you guys knew a space astronaut? Astronauts are rare breeds, up there with rock stars and A-list actors, especially the guys from the 1960s space programs that did things like fly to the moon and back again.

All those years of driving to school in Tarpon Springs alongside mom (who taught there), watching the early morning shuttle launches at that intersection of Klosterman and Alt-19, and mom never said a word about knowing one of the shuttle commanders (Mattingly was one of the earliest, flying the Columbia to test its systems).

Also kind of sad to mention Mattingly passed away this last October, so I can't email him and confirm the whole Facel Vega and chihuahua stuff.

This is just still blowing my mind.