GRAA NEWSLETTER
P.O. Box 1184, Greenbelt, MD 20768-1184

IMPORTANT DATES

COMMENTS FROM TONY COMBERIATE AND ARLIN KRUEGER:

After 17 months of shut down due to the pandemic, we are happy to announce that we plan to resume our monthly GRAA luncheon meetings on August 10, 2021. Our Goddard Center Director, Dennis Andrucyk, had planned to highlight our opening meeting but a conflict has developed. He will speak to us at a later date. Alternatively, we have invited the NASA Deputy Administrator to speak but have not received confirmation. In any case, we will meet that day and hope you can join us. Our hall at the American Legion Post at 6900 Greenbelt Rd will open at 11:15 am and lunch will be served at 11:45 am, followed by a short meeting and the presentation. We invite our members to come prepared with pandemic survival stories, slides, and brief presentations if we do not have a formal speaker. All Goddard retirees and guests attending the luncheon should have had their Covid19 vaccinations. The American Legion will be following the state of Maryland’s pandemic protocol regarding the wearing of masks.

NASA centers are gradually returning to what will become a new normal. Goddard is currently in Stage 2 of the NASA Framework for Returning to on-site work, but encourages telework for those employees who are able to do so.

We hope to resume mailing hard copy newsletters to members later this year. Please inform your snail mail colleagues that we are restarting monthly meetings on August 10th. Also, please tell anyone who is not receiving our email Newsletters to send their email address to goddardretirees@gmail.com. Our long-time Newsletter editor, Dave Moulton, who has done an amazing job researching Goddard obituary notices for former colleagues is no longer able to contribute to our newsletter, so please let us know (at goddardretirees@gmail.com) if you know of any of our members’ passing or have other important information to share.

After management of Goddard retirement was moved off Center, it became more difficult to tell our civil servant retirees about GRAA’s roll in preserving Goddard’s history and culture. Younger members are urgently needed to maintain a connection to this evolving organization. If you know of any recent retirees, please ask them to participate actively in GRAA by contacting goddardretirees@gmail.com.

To keep in touch with Goddard missions please see https://fpd.gsfc.nasa.gov. Also, visit https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/twan_index.html to see NASA weekly updates. The Goddard Engineering Colloquium and Scientific Colloquia series continue to meet virtually. Videos of past talks are available at https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/ and https://scicolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/. The Scientific Visualization Studio (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov) translates science findings into readily understood videos. Our September luncheon speaker, Lori Perkins, will tell us how SVS produces these videos. Many are available on YouTube and on the NASA Visualization Explorer App. For current chatter about Goddard look at: https://twitter.com/NASAGoddard . Goddard Press releases are available at: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/all-stories and https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news.

REMEMBERING OUR FORMER COLLEAGUES:

• James Livingston Faris, age 84, of Warfordsburg, PA, passed away Saturday, June 19, 2021, at Doey’s House in Hagerstown, MD, surrounded by his family and under the care of Hospice. Jim was born in North Adams, Massachusetts, was raised in Readsboro, Vermont and entered the U.S. Marine Corps in 1954 until his honorable discharge in 1957. His professional scientific career spanned over three decades, retiring in 1993 from NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center, Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics. He and his lab were known as the go-to-guy whenever an apparatus needed to be designed and subsequently built for a myriad of research endeavors. It was Jim’s unique ingenuity which made a difference as his many former colleagues attest. His creative, artful, technical skills and abilities, along with his many collaborative theory proving experiments, contributed to several scientific publications during his tenure.
• Lorenzo Ross Covington, 90, Born in San Angelo, Texas on January 6, 1931, Lorenzo Ross Covington lived to serve God and love his family. Ross never met a stranger. They moved to Clovis, New Mexico where Ross graduated from Clovis High School and joined his father working on the railroad. Drafted during the Korean War, he joined three of his brothers in the United States Navy and served as an electrician on the U.S.S. Sphinx. During this time, Ross met and married Jimmie Lucille Fults. After his discharge, the young couple moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico so that he could attend New Mexico State University to become an electronic engineer. During a wide-ranging NASA career, he held positions from Alaska to Madagascar. Ross retired as a Supervisory Electronic Engineer with NASA, having worked first at Goddard Space Flight Center as the Head of the Compatibility Test Section until 1977, and then at Marshall Space Flight Center, where he retired.
• Robert Wigand: P.E., passed away on July 4th, after celebrating his 97th birthday with his family, a few weeks before. After retiring from the Marine Corp Reserve, Bob worked at Goddard from 1963 to 1995, where he worked on building the 26 ground tracking stations throughout the world. He was also involved with building 14 ground tracking stations for Project Mercury. Twelve years ago, Bob married Dr. Mary Alice Smith, who he met at the Goddard Health Unit, and both were regular attendees at GRAA monthly meetings. Bob was quite a gentleman and an active GRAA member, serving as Treasurer for many years until he was well over 90. He was a big help when GRAA had to become a 501(c)(3) organization to get USPS bulk mail rates after Goddard was unable to mail our newsletter. Bob and Mary Alice were our oldest active members.
• John David Laws, 92, of Laurel, Maryland passed away July 12, 2021. He was born in 1928 in Penn Yan, New York. John was a veteran of the United States Air Force and Alumni of Michigan State University. He retired from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where he was a Flight Project Director, working on projects such as the Hubble Space Telescope and Project Gemini. He enjoyed fencing in college, crabbing and fishing, football, swimming, and horse races.
• John Patrick Callan, Sr., 91: John attended Springhill College in Mobile, Alabama and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. He enlisted in the United States Army and was stationed in Japan during the Korean War. He attended the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and then Georgetown University Law. John met his wife of 60 years, Mary Eileen FitzMorris Callan and made a home in Bowie Maryland from 1961 until 1999. During that time John worked as an attorney for the fledgling government agency NASA and thus helped launch the space age. Upon retirement, John and Eileen lived between Ocean View, Delaware and Cocoa Beach, Florida. They traveled the world, visited with their children and grandchildren, and generally enjoyed life. John was an avid golfer and loved to swim. John was proud of his Irish heritage as anyone who knew him could tell you.

FROM THE GODDARD ARCHIVES — IT HAPPENED IN JUNE/JULY:

55 years ago. June 23, 1966, Thor-Agena launched Pageos-1, (Passive Geodetic Earth Orbiting Satellite) polar orbiting follow up to Echo, it reflected microwave energy.

25 years ago. July 2, 1996, Pegasus-XL launched TOMS-EP, to conduct long term measurements of global distribution of earth’s ozone layer and to measure volcanic eruptions of sulfur-dioxide.

TREASURER’S REPORT: Treasurer Jackie Gasch received tax-deductible donations from Karl G. Peters and one from Ellen Herring.