The Astronaut Wives Club

Clubs by Definition

The definition of club according to the dictionary  is an organization that offers its subscribers certain benefits such as  discounts, bonuses or interest in return for regular payments or purchases.  There are many types of clubs in today's world,  many requiring no monetary payment just participation. For example many of you have seen the movie The First Wives Club.  This was a group of women who had been friends in college and years later found themselves in the position of the "other" woman.  They formed the club to support each other in this very emotionally distressing period of their life and to as Ivana Trump pointed out with her brilliant statement "Don't get mad get everything" , get revenge.

 

Astronaut Wives Club 

There are other clubs of course; book clubs, wine clubs and in the case of this book The Astronaut Wives Club.  This club was comprised of the wives of the astronauts from the Mercury 7 project. The Mercury 7 were the 7 men chosen for the then fledgling NASA manned  space program.  They were all test pilots for the military and were introduced to the world in the Spring of 1959. The men who comprised this group were Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordon Cooper and Deke Slayton. Later on the wives of the Apollo project joined them.

 

This book gives amazing insight into the world of 1) military wives especially during that time period and 2) the amazing character and strength these women had.  They were married to men that for the most part were absentee husbands and fathers.  They lived with the knowledge that any day a member of the military could show up at their door and tell them their husband had been killed.  While they might have been an unlikely group in the beginning, they all shared these traits.

 

Added to this stress was the additional stress of being propelled into the public's eye when their husbands' became "celebrities".  They were followed around by reporters and journalist and basically had very little privacy and yet they made it.

 

One last note. I was always interested in the origin of the word astronaut and here it is according to the NASA website. The term was a cross between "aeronauts," as ballooning pioneers were called, and "Argonauts," the legendary Greeks in search of the Golden Fleece. These new explorers were being prepared to sail into the new, uncharted vastness of space.

This is a non fiction book.  I would put it on my beach read list because it is a really easy read with a great story.