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50th Anniversary of the John C. Stennis Space Center

An Oral History

with

Jackson “Jack” Balch Jr.

With photo of his father, Jackson Balch Sr.

John C. Stennis Space Center

History Project

Interviewer: Daphne Alford

August 17, 2011
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An Oral History

with

Jackson “Jack” Balch Jr.

This is an oral history interview with Jackson Balch Jr., the son of the second site manager of the

Mississippi Test Facility, Jackson Balch Sr. This interview is being conducted on August 17, 

2011, in conjunction with the 50th anniversary celebration of the John C Stennis Space Center. 

The interviewer is Daphne Alford.

Daphne Alford: Mr. Balch, please give a little background information about yourself –

education, employment and family.

Jack Balch: Jackson Balch Jr., I'm the fifth child of six of Jackson Balch and Janet Diehl Balch, 

the third of four sons and two sisters. I was born in Huntsville, Alabama, lived there for 10 years 

and moved in 1965 to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where we lived in Pass Christian. Dad was 

transferred as a NASA director to Mississippi from Huntsville to be the director at what was then 

the Mississippi Test Facility. I went to elementary school in Pass Christian, and I went to high 

school in Bay St. Louis at St. Stanislaus graduated in 1974; went to the University of

Mississippi, graduated in 1978, the Bachelor of Arts; and went back to school at USM in

Hattiesburg and got into computer science, which is what I've done most of my life since then it's 

the computer industry information systems. [I] worked out here for a bit with Computer Sciences 

Corporation. One summer I worked with General Electric, the last year they were here I was the 

primary technical contractor for NASA 1975, when I was in school and then with Computer 

Sciences Corporation from 1979 to ’83 and then again with Computer Sciences Corporation at

Keesler, where I managed a simulation project for the Air Force. Subject to that, I was back out 

here with Mississippi Army Ammunition Plant, served with Mason Chamberlain for a couple of 

years and then, actually I got that backwards. I was there before I was at Keesler, so I had that 

backwards. I was at Keesler after that. There were two stints with CSC in between with Mason 

Chamberlain and then following that, I worked with a systems consultant. We had a consultant 

company that did some work with Shell Oil in New Orleans and Houston and some local 

businesses in Mississippi and did that for several years and then I got into the healthcare 

industry, but all in information technology and information services. That's where I presently am.

I work with Hospital Corporation of America out of Nashville, HCA, and we administer 162 

hospitals around the United States, and I'm part of the Delta Division, which is Louisiana 

hospitals and one hospital in Mississippi, which is Garden Park.

Daphne Alford: And what's your position?

Jack Balch: I'm an Information Services Director with HCA, working primarily out of Garden 

Park Medical Center.
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Daphne Alford:. Now let's go back to 1965 when your dad was assigned to the Mississippi Test 

Facility, transferring from Marshall, moving his family to Pass Christian. Tell me about the 

Balch family – your parents, siblings.

Jack Balch: In 1965, there were six children – four boys, two girls. The two girls were the oldest 

and my oldest sister, Jane, had graduated from Auburn by that time. So she never migrated down 

with us. She had gone to work teaching in Georgia, and so she didn't make the move in ‘65 to 

Mississippi Gulf Coast when we did. We were in a small little three-bedroom, one bath, if I

remember house, the three boys were in one room, the two girls in another and my mother, father 

and the baby, he would have been 5. I don't think he ever did leave their bedroom. Go figure that 

one. But anyway, we moved to Pass Christian. Dad had come down here, appointed as one of the

directors as I said earlier. He was here before us in the summer of ’65, and we actually moved 

around Labor Day. I think the first day in the house we had purchased in Pass Christian on the 

beach, was the day that Hurricane Betsy hit in 1965, so it was an interesting welcome because

there was no furniture and we were laying on old dirty mattresses and hearing this thunderous

storm outside, not knowing what was going on. It was a rather verboten sort of introduction to 

life in a hurricane zone.

Daphne Alford: So do you remember that address?

Jack Balch: 624 West Beach, Pass Christian. I remember it well. I sure do.

Daphne Alford: Before you started to work, I'm sorry I think we forgot to talk about your 

family, wife and children. Would you like to mention?

Jack Balch: Yeah. I'm married to formerly Kimberly Truett. We've been married 12 years, and 

we have one 5-year-old daughter, Amelia, who just started kindergarten this year.

Daphne Alford: Alright, I know that you mentioned your employers you work for out here, but 

before you started to work, did you ever come out and visit your dad?

Jack Balch: We did. I can remember a time or two, particularly on the weekend, I would ride 

out with dad, ride the car and listen to him talk about what he did, smell his pipe smoke or cigar 

smoke whatever it was at the time, and we would come out and we would go sit in his office in

Building 1100. I think at the time, it was the second floor, where his office was and I remember 

he had a little device that connected to the phone, you know it's nothing nowadays, but it was a

speaker phone, and it was the first time I'd ever seen one. So I remember him calling his father, 

who was alive at the time in the ‘60s, and I was astonished about that. I was also astonished more 

with what was out here, what was going on with the whole space program and the testing of the

Saturn engines here. We drove what seemed to be for an eternity to get out here and, yet, when 

we were out here it was pretty phenomenal what was so high-tech at the time, came out of 

nowhere, being an area in this buffer zone, what used to be swampland and all of a sudden 

there's this hi-tech stuff at the time – rockets and space and the space race we were going 

through. It was a really interesting time to be a part of that so it was fun to come out.
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Daphne Alford: Your dad was very concerned about this facility at the end of the Apollo 

Program, and he worked very hard along with Senator Stennis to transform it into a multi-agency

facility. Can you recall what life was like during that time period?

Jack Balch: That's a good question. I do. It was a pressure-packed time. I think about years, I 

think about ’69, which was an eventful year for the country. We’d gone to the moon. It was an 

eventful time. We had gone to the moon July 21 when Apollo went off, and I knew that there 

were some rumblings about the space program. What's the long term? Where we going to go 

now that we've done this? What's going to be the next thing although we knew we had more 

moon shots planned, and we were still testing out here? But I remember that year, losing my last 

two grandparents. I remember Camille hit, 42 years ago this day. That same year, it hit in

August. We went up to the moon in July ‘69 and August 17, ’69. We had Hurricane Camille and 

the effects of that and actually what the role of the MTF at the time, and dad's role in helping the 

local communities recover. Because NASA, at the time, had a lot of resources such as 

communications, probable water things like that. They were able to reach out to some 

communities and provide some support, where that support didn't exist, whether it be Pass

Christian, particular Bay St. Louis, Hancock County. It was extraordinary. It wasn't particularly

following any governmental protocol, but it probably helped save some lives. So it was a critical 

time of year, and the year subsequent to that is when we get into the site looking to be 

downgraded or worse yet mothballed or some similar kind of process and that's what I remember 

my dad struggling with greatly is to what could he do? What could they do to establish some 

continuance of operations that would envision something for the future and still be a real benefit 

to the community? It was a real struggle for him to do that. There were dreams there, and I 

particularly remember he would come home and he would sit in a lounge chair and he would 

doze off from exhaustion. He would mumble words in his sleep, and I knew it was stress for 

what he could do. I could see it on his face, and I could hear it in those rumblings. This went on 

for a couple of years, and I know in the middle of the night he would call people – people he 

worked with and, they would strategize. They would argue. They would whatever, about ‘what 

we can do to continue the operations,’ and I know he made some real enemies along the way 

with the NASA hierarchy up in Huntsville and really bypassing them and going to working 

through Senator Stennis's office and Allen Ellender, senator of Louisiana, and probably Jim 

Easterling, another senator from Mississippi, primarily Stennis. [He] did a lot to go around the 

governmental normal channels and probably upset folks at NASA headquarters with the idea of 

‘what can we do to perpetuate this facility and what can we do,’ and that's where the dream of a 

multi- agency, multi-entity, facility, began to emerge.

Daphne Alford: Well, I think it was good that he saw what it revolved into after all that hard 

work and, at least, he saw it, and it's still functioning for 45 years later.

Jack Balch: That's a real testament, and he was in there with a lot of the people who were along, 

who contributed to the dream and then the reality.

Daphne Alford: So this was like a double dose of pressure, dealing with the transformation,

along with the recovery of Hurricane Camille. That was like a double dose, and I want to say that 

I read somewhere ... can you go back, 42 years today, the next day, August 18? Because I 

remember reading, I read a lot, and I want to say that he was at home when that happened.
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Jack Balch: When Camille hit?

Daphne Alford: Yeah

Jack Balch: He was at home, and he was at home with my two older brothers – Arthur and 

Michael. It hit on that Sunday night, which was August 17, 1969, which happened to also be my 

brother Arthur's birthday. I can't remember how old he was. He might have been 19. It was his

birthday and at that time we, my mother and younger brother, Victor, stayed out at Building 

1100, the administration building, in his office, along with several other families of the 

Mississippi Test Facility workers. And, obviously, there was some staff that was here, I do recall

Roy Estess being here, and he was a much younger fellow at the time. One point we had a 

picture of him, that was one we lost, but had a memory of a two- or three-day-old beard, and he 

was just so young. We stayed here, and it was a violent night because here it was pretty safe. 

They were pretty fortified buildings; I do recall the parking lot. A lot of people had rolled their

windows up for the storm and what happened, the pressure from the hurricane, the low pressure, 

just blew a lot of the windows out of the cars. It just cracked them. And you know there was 

some wind damage, along the pine trees here, and they were messed up. We had no idea, there 

was very little communications at that time with local entities, like civil defense and emergency 

services people. It was early on in the development of those things. So really we did not know

the condition of not only those communities, but of my father and my two brothers. And we 

began to hear little by little that night and into early morning on the 18 that it was devastating. It 

was bad. In the little town we were in I can't recall how many, but there was quite a few people

killed, over a hundred. And we lost some neighbors, but yeah, it was a traumatic time and very 

concerning until somehow later on that day. I think my oldest brother Arthur and dad got out to 

the site so we were relieved, and we understood that my brother Michael was staying back to 

help with some recovery. My sister, Peggy, had stayed with another family and they were OK. 

They were safe. That's when we heard those stories of what happened. They got through the 

night.

Daphne Alford: So you lost your home, the family home?

Jack Balch: Yeah, the family home had to be demolished. In the next month or two, it was 

demolished. It had been an old home. It had been probably 75 years old, 60 odd years old. So it 

had endured other storms over the years, but it didn't this one.

Daphne Alford: So did y’all rebuild in the same location?

Jack Balch: We didn't. We actually sold that property, and we moved to a location in Pass

Christian on the beach, but at a lower elevation, which I've always wanted to ask my father. I 

think he got a good deal on the property. That's why he did, and we built there and we were back 

in 1971 we moved into the house.

Daphne Alford: So was it more than three bedrooms?

Jack Balch: It was more than three bedrooms. It was bigger this time, it sure was.
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Daphne Alford: Your dad retired from NASA in 1975. What was life like for him after 

retirement, and was he still active in the community?

Jack Balch: Yeah, he was. He did some consulting work. At that time ... he ended up working 

with the governor of Mississippi, Cliff Finch, who he told he didn't vote for him, but he said, ‘I'll 

be glad to work for you since you came to me.’ At that time it was the Clean Water Act that had

been enacted and communities were having to scramble in short time to get sewage treatment 

capabilities built. So he worked with the governor on that so they could get some federal 

matching funds, which would help to do that. And so he worked with that, he worked with some 

of the municipalities in the counties and south Mississippi – Harrison, Jackson and Hancock 

counties to try to get a multi-county approach towards environmental protection, you know, 

mostly dealing with water and sewage treatment. So he continued to be very active. I will say he 

was a little less stressed. I think a better husband and a better family man. It was becoming to 

emerge. I think some of the weight of the pressure he had been under began to lift.

Daphne Alford: When he was assigned here by von Braun to come down from Huntsville, he 

hit the ground running. He was ready for this challenge. Did he expect this or was it totally 

different would you say?

Jack Balch: I think my father was pretty ambitious, and he relished it. He actually was one of 

those people, probably some “Type A” personality. He was more at home in a stressful situation. 

So he was his own worst enemy in that regard, but he also became bored with the day-to-day 

routine. So I don't think he necessarily manufactured his own misery, but when there was 

challenges, he was ready for them, and he was excited about them.

Daphne Alford: Well he accomplished a lot, and it takes people like that.

Jack Balch: He would grab something, and he would learn everything he could about it. 

Everything he could, he would just go with it, and he would apply a lot of thinking to how to go 

about accomplishing something?

Daphne Alford: That's good. Now, you said he was born in Canada and went to school in 

Ireland, so did you ever visit those places?

Jack Balch: No, I haven't been to all of them, but I have been to a few places. I still want to go 

to Ireland. He went to Trinity College there, which houses the Book of Kells, which is the 

original English manuscript of the Bible, the first manuscript of the Bible in English, they house 

that there. So I want to go there, and obviously, he went to college there as his younger brother

did, too. He was a chief of surgery at Georgetown. They went there. He went to high school in

Monterey in Mexico. I haven't been to Monterey. I think it's a very industrial town and, of 

course, Mexico is a little violent now. But I would like to go there, too. I did go to Madrid. In 

1936, he said he was in Madrid. He had learned Spanish and was actually immersing himself in 

that culture before the war to try to really learn not only the culture, but the language, to just be 

speaking Spanish. He was there when the Spanish Civil War was going on, and he remembers

the German tanks that came there to support the Fascist regime at the time. So I had been there. I 
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haven't been to Australia. He lived there as a kid, and my brother Michael is named after one of 

his best friends in Australia as a kid, who was unfortunately killed in World War II, Michael

Bergman. Michael was named after him and he has been to Australia, and he has met that family 

and they were just wonderful. They did the sheep thing, where they took the wool off the sheep 

and all of that.

Daphne Alford: He lived an interesting life.

Jack Balch: He really did. All those places in the world, and it gave him a really broad view of 

things, even though he had been an engineer. He wasn't just a numbers person. I think he had that 

classical education. So it wasn't just, he understood literature and history as well as a technical

engineering, there was a real blend.

Daphne Alford: Did any of your siblings follow in your dad's footsteps at NASA in 

engineering?

Jack Balch: Sort of but not directly. None of us are engineers, interesting to say. My brother 

Michael has been with Global Associates, later with Martin Marietta and now Lockheed Martin 

and to this day he's been with them 30 years. So he's just turned 60 years, and he's worried about

[inaudible] His middle son is at Mississippi State in engineering, sophomore, and then his 

younger son is graduating from high school. His older son is an engineer, and then my brother 

Victor is a contractor. He's a vice president or contractor or something with.

Daphne Alford: Radiant something, I got it on an email.

Jack Balch: Yeah. They have some air space work, and he's done a lot of that.

Daphne Alford: But not directly with NASA.

Jack Balch: Nobody, no NASA directs. Dad's sister, Sylvia, who is still alive, was a NASA 

employee. She's retired – her and her husband.

Daphne Alford: What did she do?

Jack Balch: I don't know what she did. She's retired now, and she knew von Braun, too. She 

would know ... of those surviving. She would remember those days way back. She was younger 

than my dad, two boys and one girl, and she was the girl.

Daphne Alford: And Victor told me that your mom is 88 now.

Jack Balch: She's 88.

Daphne Alford: That's good. And she would love to come back?

Jack Balch: She'd love to come back. I don't know if that will happen. We're hoping to get her 

down here in a couple of weeks to visit, I really do.
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Daphne Alford: What about von Braun? What do you remember?

Jack Balch: I remember he had a neat sports car. And he would zip all around town. I remember 

my aunt Sylvia talking about [him]. I guess it was one of his children and her daughter, 

Elizabeth, taking dance somewhere and von Braun was there, and they were dancing, and he was 

kind of a colorful figure.

Daphne Alford: But no direct contact

Jack Balch: No, I met him a couple of times, but I don't remember him a lot. I would have been 

less than 10. Neat guy.

Daphne Alford: And we talked about Patricia Baker, you dad's...was she the only secretary?

Jack Balch: Ann and Patricia seemed to have worked together a lot. And they both were the 

sweetest people and bright and sharp. And the fact that they could deal with my dad, I think that 

they saw, my father really, as tough as he was, there was really clearly a really good heart in 

there. People really were always concerned, and I think they knew him enough to get passed that 

rougher edge or sometimes his volatile behavior. They knew him, and they respected him and he 

respected them.

Daphne Alford: That's the way to go. Now, that it's 50 years later. Stennis is still here, due to 

your dad's vision 45 years ago. What do you think he would say about Stennis today?

Jack Balch: What would he say? I think he would be pretty amazed that it is still here. He would 

be very happy that there is this technology transfer and the sharing of laboratories and rocket 

testing and the sciences and the engineering that our country, that our world has benefited as a 

result of having that kind of technology transfer. I think he would feel that's a real 

accomplishment and a real gold star for the area, for the community that it is here. And it's not 

necessarily replicated that way elsewhere ...

[Informal Conversation]

Yeah, I think he would have found it pretty extraordinary that it has endured. He would be very 

curious as to how it really evolved since then. Did it in fact, and I believe the answer is yes in a 

lot of ways. Was there really that sharing of information, sharing of science and engineering that 

was envisioned? Did it really produce? I would have to

say the answer is yes because it's here, and there are the multiple agencies and universities and 

entities that are here. I'm not sure how many people are here, but it's quite a few thousand.

Daphne Alford: Yeah, I think it's four or five thousand, about five thousand.

Jack Balch: So that's substantial. That's a real testament.

Daphne Alford: Very good in economic development.
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Jack Balch: Huge impact on economic developer -- St. Tammany Parish, Hancock County, 

Pearl River County, Harrison County and beyond – Forrest County and Lamar County.

Daphne Alford: And beyond that because I think someone told me somebody commuted from

Mobile. So it's all over. Is there anything you would like to mention that I didn't ask?

Jack Balch: You know, it was an extraordinary time back then, and there was a phenomenal 

sense of pride that I saw in pride. And I remember it from being out here when I worked with 

General Electric that last year, and it was a tough time for General Electric. They had lost the 

contract. A lot of their guys had been longtime GE people, and they were not sure what they 

were going to do, were they going to transfer to Schenectady, New York, Pennsylvania, 

California or Minnesota. Wherever it was and stay here in some capacity with CSC who took 

over the contract. But the people that I remember then – when I did work that summer when I 

was in college – they just had this confidence. They had this air about them that they were on the 

forefront of something very, to be very proud of, that we had achieved something that seemed to 

be almost impossible.

Daphne Alford: And you were a part of that by working here?

Jack Balch: I had no real part being a co-op student, but those guys did, and they put in a lot 

effort and a lot of hours and sacrifice and sacrifice in terms of, they could have gotten paid better 

maybe elsewhere. They could have lived elsewhere if they preferred to, but I think there was just 

this phenomenal pride that was there. I remember I said, that's what we should all, in our careers

and in our work, we should all aim towards finding that. You can participate in something that's 

for the greater good, and it is and has been for the greater good. Sometimes we lose touch of that 

when all the politics gets around and that seems to mess it up but there has been so much that's

benefited mankind as a result of this and when you feel you're part of that, I don't know, I could 

sense that it was there and heard it in their tone and their temperament and in direct words that 

they've said. The different people that were around at that time.

[Informal Conversation]

Daphne Alford: I really appreciate you taking out time for this interview. It was fun.

Jack Balch: Yeah, it was for me too, Daphne, and thank you for allowing me to.

Daphne Alford: And you’ll have to come back.