It was standing-room only at Orlando’s Municipal Auditorium on June 10, 1948, as Orlando High School prepared to graduate its then largest-ever class of 375. When Principal William R. Boone presented the top student award — the Guernsey Good Citizenship Cup — he noted that the winner, John Watts Young, “had made nothing but A’s from the ninth grade onwards.”
No doubt his teachers and classmates expected much of Young, also a star athlete. But on that June night, who could have guessed that one day he would leave his footprints on the moon?
Riding rockets into space
Earlier this month, on Jan. 5, John Young died at age 87 in Houston, Texas. Just put his name and “Orlando Sentinel” into your favorite search engine, and you’ll find articles including a tribute by former Orange County Mayor Rich Crotty and pictures of Young during his remarkable life.
Once, high-school students, like Young was in 1948, knew the names of astronauts — real-life superheroes who rode rockets into space. Now it’s likely that many Orlandoans have only heard of Young because a busy Central Florida road bears his name.
But in a career in space exploration that began during Kennedy’s Camelot in 1962 and extended more than four decades, Young became our most experienced astronaut.
“It would be hard to overstate the impact that John Young had on human space flight,” Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa said after Young’s death. “Beyond his well-known and groundbreaking six missions through three programs, he worked tirelessly for decades to understand and mitigate the risks that NASA astronauts face,” said Ochoa, a former astronaut herself. “He had our backs.”
Roots in College Park
Young was born on Sept. 24, 1930, in San Francisco. His father was a civil engineer. During Young’s childhood, his family moved to Georgia and then to Orlando, where he attended Princeton Elementary School. A state historical marker denotes the College Park house at 815 W. Princeton St., where he lived during his OHS years, from 1945 until graduation in 1948.
Young earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from Georgia Tech, where he graduated with highest honors in 1952 and then became a Navy pilot. In May 1961, while watching a small black-and-white TV, he heard President John Kennedy’s bold proposal to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth.
Young knew that was for him. He began his NASA career in 1962, when he was tapped from among hundreds of other pilots to join the second astronaut class, known as the “New Nine.”
Through the years, his hometown honored Young with at least three hero’s receptions: in 1965, when he co-piloted the first manned Gemini flight with Gus Grissom; in 1969, after he circled the moon on Apollo 10; and in 1981, after he commanded Space Shuttle Columbia on its maiden flight, STS-1, with pilot Bob Crippen. It was the first time a piloted spacecraft was tested in space without previous unpiloted orbital flights.
In the spring of 2005, just a few months after Young retired from NASA, Orlando honored him again when the Historical Society of Central Florida presented him with its inaugural John Young History Maker award at the Orange County Regional History Center.
Since then, the society’s John Young awards have been given to an array of distinguished Central Floridians, ranging from another space pioneer, Col. Joe Kittinger, to Orlando Magic legend Pat Williams. On May 22, the 12th such celebration is slated to honor E. Ann McGee, president of Seminole State College since 1996.
Such awards give us opportunities to tell the stories of people who have inspired us. In the case of the John Young awards, we’re able not only to honor the current award recipients but to keep the legacy of Young himself alive — to tell the story of a College Park boy whose dreams took him to the moon and the stars.
Joy Wallace Dickinson can be reached at jwdickinson@earthlink.net, FindingJoyinFlorida.com, or by good old-fashioned letter at the Sentinel, 633 N. Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801.