Interviewer(s): Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, Sandra Johnson
Interviewee(s): Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Today is November 12th, 2019. This interview with Jane Conrad Dreyfus is being conducted in San Antonio, Texas. The interviewer is Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, assisted by Sandra Johnson. Thanks again for inviting us into your lovely home. We appreciate it.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: You’re welcome.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I thought we’d start out by talking about your childhood and your education before you attended college. Would you give us a little history?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I lived on a ranch about 15 miles outside Uvalde, which is fairly close to the border. I went to the public schools in Uvalde until tenth grade, and then I went to a boarding school here in San Antonio called Saint Mary’s Hall. It was an all girls’ school. From there I went to Bryn Mawr College [Pennsylvania], and that’s where I met Pete. I guess it was in the second year that I was there. I met him at a dance at Princeton [University, New Jersey], I think that was in Lily’s book [The Astronaut Wives Club: A True Story].\n\n No, I met him before that. I met him at a debutante dance, as we were all leaving. This is in her book too. People were standing around and saying good night. I saw Pete was in the middle of a circle of people. He was telling some story, and everybody was just in awe and rapt attention. I thought, “Gee, he sure is cute, and boy, he must be interesting too, because those people are really listening to him.”\n\n When I went to a dance at Princeton with somebody, and I don’t remember who it was, I saw him there. I asked this boy that I was with to introduce me to him. It turned out that he was a roommate of my roommate’s [boyfriend], so that made it a lot easier to see him next. She and I used to go to Princeton on weekends from Bryn Mawr College, and we were in each other’s weddings.\n\n Pete was in the NROTC [Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps] at Princeton, so he got a commission when he graduated, and we went to Pensacola for flight training. We went to Maine on our honeymoon and stayed in some friends’ cabin where I got mumps and stayed in bed the whole time.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, that’s awful.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Then we drove from Maine down to Pensacola, Florida, where Pete was in flight training. He had flown a lot before that in light planes, and he used to take me flying on weekends at Princeton too. He’d rent a plane. I don’t know where he got the money, because I don’t think he had very much money. He probably did some work at the airport for his time in the planes. I think that’s the way most kids get their flight time. He knew from the time he was a little kid that he was going to be a pilot.\n\n From Pensacola we went to Corpus [Christi, Texas] for more flight training, and we stayed at my godmother’s house. She was away for the summer, and she let us have her house, which was wonderful. She wanted someone in the house so that it would be safe while she was away. That worked out perfectly for us, although Pete had to drive all the way to Kingsville. It was about 30 miles every day, 60 miles round trip, because that’s where that second phase of the training was.\n\n We went from there to Pensacola. He was in a fighter squadron, and that’s where our first two children were born. Then from there we went to test pilot school in [Patuxent River], Maryland, where our next two children were born. We had four boys. I was really a nervous wreck because of this test pilot training, because so many of the people we knew got killed. They had a crash every week or so, and every time somebody from the squadron would come to my door I would be like this. [Ducks]\n\n But we survived all that, went to another squadron in California after test pilot school. Let’s see. I’m going back 60 years or so, yes, close to 60 years. My oldest son is going to be 65 on Christmas Day.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh my gosh.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: He’s already on Social Security. I told him, “Don’t take it so soon because then you won’t get as much money,” but he said, “I need it now.” Anyway, Christmas, he will be on Medicare, yay. Now I’m talking too much, ask me another.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: No, you’re not talking too much at all. It’s good information. Tell us about being a Navy wife. You mentioned how scared that you were when people would come from the squadron, [thinking Pete had crashed.]

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. I remember one time the rector of our church came to the door, and I just didn’t even want to let him in. I just knew he was going to tell me that Pete had been in a crash, because there’d been so many of them. I guess that’s what test pilot is, because they put them in planes that have not been tested. I guess I’ve always been kind of nervous about the flying ever since. I think my mother taught me to worry; she was a great worrier.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think that’s what most women do. We actually think ahead about some of those things.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, we have to do all the worrying for the family.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s right, all the repercussions. Am I correct you met the Lovells at Pax River?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: At test pilot school, yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: And Jo Schirra as well?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, Wally [Walter M. Schirra] and Jim [James A. Lovell] were in the same class with Pete.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You developed close relationships with a lot of these other families?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Pretty much, yes. We did, because it was a small class.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: How many people were in the class, do you recall?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Maybe 20. I think so. I can’t remember so long ago, wow.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you have a wives’ club meeting [at test pilot school]?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No we didn’t, not until we were with NASA. I think Marge [Marjorie] Slayton was the one that got the idea that we should have a wives’ club. Actually it wasn’t a club. I think Lily put that club on the end of it for some reason. It was not a club. We just got together maybe once a month or every six weeks or something like that.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think Jan [Janet Evans] had mentioned that to us, that it wasn’t a club, and that you didn’t support anything other than I think she mentioned POWs [prisoners of war] at one point. That it was just an opportunity to get together and have some fellowship.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Tell us about Pete’s decision to apply to become an astronaut. What did you think when he told you?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I heard it first because it was on the television, the news, they said, “A class has been picked,” this is while we were in Pax River—“a group have been picked to be astronauts.” I don’t know why I thought I knew that Pete was going to be one of them. He was in the shower. I raced in the shower, and I said, “Guess what, you’re going to the Moon.” How was I so prescient? I don’t know. But anyway that was very exciting.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What did he think of the idea?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: He was not picked in the first group. Then we went out to California, and he was in a squadron out there. When the second group was picked, I’m trying to think what was my reaction. I don’t even remember. I guess I thought, “Well, it’s about time!”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: He should have been picked the first time, right?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, we had people coming out to interview me. Pete went of course to Houston right away. It took me a while before I sold our house and joined him down at Clear Lake. I remember the kids were all pretty small then. Christopher was just a little baby. Trying to think if I can remember how old were they when we went to Houston. I think they were like one, three, five, and seven, something like that.\n\n We bought a house in Timber Cove, which is where the Schirras and the Grissoms and the Carpenters and the Glenns all bought houses. Then a bunch of them did in El Lago. Then when the third group came along they went into another different neighborhood. What was the name of that? You probably know better than I do.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Nassau Bay I think.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes. When you get to be 87, you don’t remember things very well, particularly names.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think you’re doing a great job. Tell us about the idea of moving to Houston. What did you know of Houston? You were from Texas, but had you spent much time in the Houston area?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I had never spent any time in Houston at all, no.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What did you think of coming back to Texas?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It was exciting. The first thing they did was put us up in—what was that hotel? It was a very fancy hotel, a brand-new one. The first thing we saw was that they’d put [gifts] in our room. They had matchboxes or folders with our names, and they put the wrong husband and wife. They put Jane and Jim Lovell and Marilyn and Jim [James A.] McDivitt or something like that.\n\n That was the day when everybody had to have big bouffant hairdos, so we went to the hairdressers there in the hotel, and we came out with our hair looking like this. [Demonstrates] Our husbands went, “Ah, what happened to you?” Then the Glenns invited us down to their place soon after we’d got there. They were very nice. Everybody was just wonderfully welcoming to us.\n\n Then all the society people in Houston started inviting us to their parties. We went to one big ball. I don’t know whether it was a mental health ball or something like that. We all had to go into town and try to find some evening gowns, because we didn’t own any. Nobody that were in the service had any reason to. We went in, and we went to these secondhand stores, and we found all these wonderful barely worn evening gowns with designer labels. So when we got to the ball, we were taken aside by reporters who said, “Now tell us about your dresses. What designer is yours? Which is yours?” We did get to a lot of pretty neat things and met lots of movie stars when they came to town.\n\n One time I made a list of all the celebrities I’d met. I don’t know where I put it, and naturally I can’t remember it. One of them we really liked a lot was Jimmy Stewart. He was just the neatest guy. We invited him to the launches, and he and Pete got to be sort of friendly because they both went to Princeton.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Sandra Johnson: He was a pilot also.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: That’s right. Indeed. More questions.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Tell us about moving into Timber Cove. What was that neighborhood like? You mentioned that there were some astronaut families.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: There were a lot of people there that were connected to NASA, people that worked there. Our next-door neighbor was Jack [A.] Kinzler, and he was the one that actually really saved Skylab I guess it was. I wish I could remember things better. He was kind of like an inventor.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You’re correct.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: You probably heard this anyway. His kids and our kids became great friends. Then Marilyn See lived across the street. Of course Jo and Wally lived close by and the Grissoms did and the Glenns. We didn’t get to know the first group as well as our own group, naturally, but we were always friendly with them. One of the wives who will remain nameless was not terribly friendly with us, but I don’t know why. She must have had some chip on her shoulder about something. I don’t know. One day Pete asked me to go give her a message to give to her husband. I went over, and she almost shut the door in my face. I don’t know why at all.\n\n All the others were extremely fun people. I think Marilyn Lovell and I have remained probably the closest. Our last wives’ reunion which was on the Cernans’ ranch up near Kerrville. Clare Schweickart, Dotty Duke, and I roomed together in one of the cabins. They had several cabins on this place. It was really a perfect place to have a reunion, because they have the big main house and then all these guest cabins. It was really beautiful, river running through it and hills up there. It was just a wonderful fun time.\n\n There are really not that many of us left, so everybody was [allowed] to invite their daughters. That was fun, because I hadn’t seen a lot of them since they were little kids. Here they are, some of them even grandmothers. They were excited to see each other too, because some of them hadn’t seen each other [in years]. They all dispersed all over the country after the fathers got out of NASA and everybody retired in different places. The children, some of them of course knew each other, but others hadn’t seen each other since they were children. That was probably our most fun reunion.\n\n The first reunion we had, Jan Evans sort of got it together, and it was up in Salt Lake City [Utah]. I think it was. That was really fun.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I bet. Nice to catch up with old friends.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: We had so many things to talk about, yes. We just stayed up all night every night talking. It was really fun.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You had done an interview, I think, for the Timber Cove anniversary.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I believe so.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You talked about how people living in that community were like a family. I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. When people went out of town, we babysat. We just took their kids to our house whenever they wanted, to try to save on babysitting, although we only paid 50 cents an hour in those days. Can you believe it?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I would love that. It’s now like $10 or $15 an hour. It’s crazy.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I know it. I remember in Patuxent River I paid my maid $5 and now I pay my maid $80 for three hours, and the other maid stayed eight hours. Isn’t that something? Times change. [Like Bob Dylan sang], “Times, they are a-changing.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Would you do other things besides babysit?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh gosh, we shopped together. We took food over to everybody’s house when they were sick. We just did everything together. Went to parties, had parties. [We] had progressive parties, have drinks in one place and hors d’oeuvres and then a main meal and then a dessert in somebody else’s house. It was just like one big family.\n\n That included all the people that were not with NASA too, everybody. A lot of them were contractors from other companies that were building parts of the spacecraft. Let’s see what [other] kind of people were there. I guess it was mostly people that had something [to do with NASA]. A lot of them were engineers with NASA. Some of them were public relations people.\n\n When we went on those world tours we always had a doctor with us, a NASA doctor. Oh, and we had the most wonderful nurse, Dee [Delores B.] O’Hara, I guess you heard her name. She was just great. Everybody loved her. We didn’t have to go to doctors in those days, because Dee would make an appointment for us. We’d come in, and we’d see a NASA doctor. The only time people didn’t go to a NASA doctor was when the wives thought they were too nervous. They had to see a shrink, or they had to get some Valium or something to calm their nerves. Maybe they’d go to another doctor and say, “I don’t know whether I can face this flight without some kind of thing to [calm] my nerves.” But we all survived.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Was that common for the wives to feel that nervous?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t know because they wouldn’t tell each other really. A couple people that you were really close to would admit that they had to take a pill or two, but I don’t think they wanted NASA to know it. They certainly didn’t.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: In Lily’s book she talks about how your group came in and you had a meeting with a protocol officer who laid out the expectations for the wives. Do you remember that meeting?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, that’s right.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I was curious about that.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: We were supposed to be very circumspect, I think, and be very loyal and not talk. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but I think we knew our roles, which would probably be what a role would even still be today. We don’t rock the boat. We’re very loyal and backing them up in every endeavor.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did anyone question that, do you think?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I’m not sure that they would say so, but maybe they would today. They probably would say that today. I know Beth Williams would. What a person she is, a personality. She has done so many things. Her husband was killed just, I think, when her [second] child was born. She picked herself up. She got busy, and she started a whole [business] with the Russians. I think they were getting ready to have that [Apollo]-Soyuz [flight], that one with Deke [Donald K. Slayton] going on a Russian mission. She got together all these translators so that they could talk back and forth with the Russians, and that was very interesting. She made a lot of money. I think she never remarried. She had a lot of people wanting to marry her, but she had a lot of people working for her too. We all admire her.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I bet. Going back to Timber Cove, one of the things that I’ve learned interviewing some of the folks is that some of the homes that would face each other had gates in the back so that you could go to another house. Was that common in Timber Cove?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh [not in Timber Cove], I think that was over in Nassau Bay.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, okay.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Because we didn’t have any gates.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You didn’t have any of those. I was curious about that, with the kids, having them go back and forth.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, we had a bicycle brigade. A bunch of us would ride bicycles around Timber Cove every day. I guess we had car pools to school, except for the school bus. Then when the reporters were there, I forget which flight, but my kids used to try to entertain them. They would get up on the roof and do all sort of frightening things so they’d get their pictures taken. Jump off the roof into the pool. [Cringes] Ooh.

Sandra Johnson: I heard that story. I was wondering if it was true.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think Jack had told us that.

Sandra Johnson: Yes, Jack Kinzler told us that.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, really.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: You talked to Jack?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes. Many years ago.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Really? Gosh, what a neat guy he was.

Sandra Johnson: We had a couple interviews. He was.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: He was.

Sandra Johnson: He helped us. We had a couple interviews with him when we were writing some articles and he helped us with that and with the flag, because he had done the flag.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, yes, he just was a fine person, and so was Sylvia his wife. I think my kids still keep up with their kids, which has been a nice thing for them too. In fact my oldest son is going with Amy Bean to some function this weekend [for] Alan [L.] Bean, maybe in his hometown. Something’s going to happen. Anyway, he’s going with Amy. Peter Conrad is going with Amy Bean, which is kind of a fun thing.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, that’s nice to have those connections, it really is.

Sandra Johnson: Jennifer has talked to her, so hopefully we’re going to talk to her and do an interview.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: She’s an awful cute girl. She’s having a bit of trouble with her stepmother. She won’t mention that, maybe she will. Peter and Amy commiserate about how they can’t stand their stepmothers. They call them the “stepmonsters.” That better not be in the history. Oh, no, it wouldn’t hurt them to know that. Would not hurt them to know that. Because apparently Leslie Bean didn’t want Amy to say anything at Alan’s funeral. She told her not to, but she did anyway.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, I’m glad to hear that.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: She’ll tell you that.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I wanted to ask some about the community, because obviously we’re very interested in how NASA shaped the community while you were there. I noticed that you went to an Episcopalian church. I wanted to know how NASA influenced that church. Do you think it had any impact on it?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They never mentioned that where we would go to church at all.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: No sermons?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: We just had to behave ourselves and not get drunk and disorderly, I think.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I was hoping maybe it reflected some of the excitement over the space program, and maybe there were some sermons or anything like that.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, I don’t think so, not really. The Lovells went to the same church we did.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I had found some material on the Methodist church. The Methodist minister was very interested in Al Bean. Al Bean went to that church.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I think the Kinzlers did too. No, they went to the Presbyterian church.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, there are quite a few churches around.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. Oh, and there was a little theater that we started down there too which was very popular. Joan Aldrin was a wonderful actress, and she helped get it started and another neighbor of mine that was quite an actress too. We all participated in these plays. It was an old movie theater. I did everything from cleaning the toilets to being the president of the board. I just did everything. Acted in a couple plays. My neighbors all acted in the plays. It was so much fun.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Where was that theater?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It was in Dickinson.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Dickinson.

Sandra Johnson: In the movie theater, yes.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: In the old movie theater.

Sandra Johnson: The theater is still going.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Is it really?

Sandra Johnson: Yes, it is. It’s still a community theater.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, I’m glad to hear that. How fun.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What were some of the productions that you starred in?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, let’s see. I was in The Women that Clare Boothe Luce wrote. Let’s see what else was I in.

Sandra Johnson: What part did you play?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I can’t remember. I have pictures of it somewhere, but I can’t remember what my [character] was. I remember one [line], “Tell it to the marines.” Now that’s such an old, old, old saying. I don’t know whether anybody ever heard it. Clare Boothe Luce did. I heard that when she was ambassadress to Italy she got very ill. They finally figured out that there was lead in the paint in her ceiling, and it was drifting down on her at night.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: How horrible.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, that’s an aside. I’m trying to think. My son Thomas was in a lot of plays, because he thought he was going to be an actor. He did turn out to be in one movie that Frank Capra, Jr. made, a remake of Tom Sawyer. He wanted Thomas to play the [lead] part. But then it turned out that his voice started to change and they wanted him to be a younger boy, so they got Johnny Whitaker, who was one of the Disney boys. Thomas, I think he had one line in it.\n\n He had a very exciting thing happen to him while he was on location at the movie. This was in Missouri. They had the scene where the boys had been whitewashing the fence, and they were all covered with whitewash. The next scene was going to be where they were going to jump off a cliff into a rock quarry that is filled with water, and they were going to jump in there and wash all the whitewash off themselves.\n\n They had a break, and Thomas started walking down the edge of the [quarry]. He slipped down in the water. It was very clear because it [had] a rock bottom. He saw a car submerged, so he ran back. He found the policeman that was on the set and said, “I found a car submerged in here.” The policeman said, “Take me back there. I want to see it.”\n\n They went back and the policeman asked him if he would dive down and get the license number off it, and when he came up they radioed it back to the police station. They said, “Oh, that car was in a robbery last night.” I got that story, and I made one of my books that I wrote about it. I embroidered it a lot, but that was my starting point.

Sandra Johnson: How nice.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: How wonderful. What’s the name of the book?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It’s called A Shooting in Missouri, and it was a double entendre with shooting a movie and then of course there’s a real shooting in it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: We’ll have to look for it.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t know whether it’s still on Amazon or not.

Sandra Johnson: You can find things everywhere.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, hey, I can even give it to you, because Thomas or somebody ordered me a whole bunch of them, and I’ve never tried to put them online or tried to advertise them.\n\n [Break in interview]

[The book] is young adult. If either of you have any young adult children, they would like it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes she has a granddaughter, and I have a son that are about the same age.

Sandra Johnson: They’re just a couple weeks apart.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, really. They would like that book.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I was actually out there looking when I saw that you had been an author. I was looking for your book.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It was on Amazon, but they didn’t ever sell anything, I think it’s because I didn’t ever try to promote it in any way. You have to do that if you’re going to sell a book.

Sandra Johnson: Especially nowadays. There’s so much competition.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: There really is.

Sandra Johnson: Thank you.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: We look forward to reading it. One of the questions that we’re always intrigued by is the difference between being a naval aviator wife and an astronaut wife. Were there major differences in your opinion?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: As far as being worried about them, it’s about the same. But as far as social life, we went up a lot when we became astronaut wives. We were much sought-after.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I definitely got that feeling. Like you mentioned, you got to meet a lot of celebrities. The media was definitely around quite a bit.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What did you think of all that media interest and exposure at the time?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: A lot of people hated it, but I really enjoyed it because they were interesting people. I didn’t mind having them in the house and entertaining them and feeding them, because they were just neat people. I didn’t have anybody that asked any embarrassing questions, and nobody was rude. They were all very polite, so why would I be mad? A lot of people griped and griped about it.\n\n I think Jan Evans was a very private person, and she did not like to have any kind of publicity. She would never talk about her husband being an astronaut. In fact, none of us did very much because we thought it was sort of like bragging. Unless it came up in the conversation you never went up and said, “Well, I am the wife of.” Nobody ever ever ever said that.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you just tell people, “My husband works for NASA,” leave it at that?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Who were some of the journalists that you talked with? Obviously you had the contract with Life. But were there other journalists that came over to the house?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I wish my brain was better. There was one that went to the ranch with us during Skylab, because they were up there for a month. We wanted to go to the ranch, which we often did, so one of them went to the ranch with us. He kind of enjoyed that. What was his name? There was one really funny thing, and I think it was in Lily’s book.\n\n The pool guy came and asked if Mr. Conrad was home. The security guy that was in our house said, “He’s,” like this. [Points up to the sky] The guy said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”

Sandra Johnson: Oh, that’s funny.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s hilarious.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Not that Pete was ever going to get up there. No, that’s as far as he got, to the Moon.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Tell us about that Life magazine contract. Were you briefed on it or was that something that Pete handled for your family?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Actually my uncle got us the lawyer from his firm to write our contract. Yes, we did. We knew about it, and we were happy to get it, because we were going to use it for our kids’ education, which we did.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That must have been a nice extra.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Absolutely, we deserved it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You did have to deal with a lot of media, a lot of attention. There were a lot of tour buses as I understand it that came through your neighborhood.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. Pete loved to put them off track when he was out there mowing the lawn. They would stop and say, “Do you know where the Conrad house is?” He’d say, “Oh, it’s about five houses down there.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: But nobody recognized him?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I guess not.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s funny. You would think that they would recognize an astronaut.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: If he had a cap on and sunglasses they might not.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, yes, maybe.

Sandra Johnson: They were the days before the Internet too where everybody knew what everybody looked like.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Right, and I think the neighborhood kids, I think Jack mentioned, liked to throw people off about who lived where.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Right.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That brings up another question. You talked about going down to downtown Houston and going to those places to find the dresses. I was curious about military pay. Were you still getting the military pay that Pete had received?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Were you concerned when you found out that you were going to be an astronaut wife based on the articles you had read about the Mercury Seven wives going to the White House and some of these black-tie events, about how you might handle those sort of things?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, I don’t think so. Maybe they had gone, but nobody had gone to the White House [yet] except maybe John [H.] Glenn at that time, because that was so early. That’s of course when JFK [John F. Kennedy] was there.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you feel like you got to spend much time with Pete, when he was an astronaut?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Not a lot, no. Being on four flights, he was training most of the time. Even when he was not, he was over in Australia at Carnarvon, at the CapComs [Capsule Communicator console] over there. He was gone an awful lot, yes. I don’t necessarily think that had to do with people getting so many divorces. I think more it was the fact that maybe the women chased them. I don’t think it was the fact that we were apart a lot. They just had lots of people, women, after them all the time.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Were you aware of that at the time, that that was happening?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: When they started getting divorces, I did, yes, I realized. I’m trying to think. We didn’t get a divorce right away. We were married for 37 years. I began to get a little suspicious when Pete had so many meetings out of town. Then one time I found—what was it? Oh, I know, I found another garage door opener in his car, and I thought, “Hmm.” I went, and I said, “Why do you have two garage door openers?” He said, “I asked if I could keep my car in my friend’s garage sometime.” I thought, “Oh yes, sure.” I said, “Well, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take it out and throw it in the driveway and drive over it,” and I did.

Sandra Johnson: Wow.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Probably didn’t go over very well.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: He could get another one if he wants to, but that gave him the clue that I was onto him. Now that’s the kind of thing that Jackie Kennedy wanted, but it wasn’t going on then when I wrote that.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Right, right. Maybe you didn’t necessarily want to talk about it, even if it had been going on.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, no. I don’t mind talking about it now, because I can laugh about it.

Sandra Johnson: Did the wives talk about it amongst yourselves?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I remember Barbara Gordon calling me up and crying and crying on the phone, because Dick [Richard F. Gordon] had—this was much earlier—asked her for a divorce. She had six children all at home. Can you imagine? Oh. It was hard enough on me when my kids were all grown and out of the nest, but for her to have all those children.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: There was that big brouhaha about Donn [F.] Eisele and that first divorce.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. That was really sad, because with her child dying. Oh, that was really awful.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Was that something that you discussed behind closed doors?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, we thought that was the most egregious thing that ever happened. We just couldn’t believe it could happen, and then boom boom boom. [The divorces started like dominos falling.]

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think in Lily’s book she talks about how you closed ranks in opening your meetings to the second wives. Do you remember much about that?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I think we finally did have—[L.] Gordon Cooper’s second wife came to some of our meetings. I don’t remember why. I wasn’t even there. Where was I? It must have been that third group was still there maybe, and they had her. The first two wives’ groups didn’t ever welcome the second wives.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you ever get together just as the second wives and do things together as a group?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I think that there were times. Going for launches, they would be there and we would be there. We would be at the parties together, but we never got to know them. I don’t think. I think I kind of got to know Gordon Cooper’s wife a little bit when we were in California, but that was many years later.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: One of the things I noticed that was missing from Lily’s book was the selection of the scientist astronauts. It included the pilots that were selected but kind of overlooked those two groups of scientist-astronaut wives.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, that’s true.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I was curious. Were they ever a part of your group?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Because they were so different, were they—

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, they did come, of course.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What about the MOL [Manned Orbiting Laboratory] wives, when they came? They were selected in what, 1969? They were kind of latecomers.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: When were they selected?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: In ’69.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I should have met them. I guess I did. But I don’t remember much about it. Because we left there right after Skylab, after we got back from trips that we made. Those trips were really fabulous that we made, round the world trips. They were great.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I bet.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Meeting all the heads of state everywhere we went and gave them a little piece of the Moon, a little crumb in a Lucite case.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: How many world tours did you go on?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Actually I went on two world tours and then after that just more little jaunts here and there, not round the world.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You went after Gemini V, is that correct?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: [President] Lyndon [B.] Johnson sent Pete and Cooper on that tour and you went with them?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Where did you go? I think Lily talked about you going to Africa in one of the stories, but I was curious where else you visited.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I get those two long trips kind of mixed up. I know we went to some of the same places. We went twice to the Canary Islands but maybe that was because it was where they needed to refuel. I don’t know. Let me see if I can find that book. One of the books got lost when we moved here, which I’m so sorry about, because it was a party before the Apollo 12 launch. Jimmy Stewart and his wife were there and a lot of other celebrity people were there. I don’t know how it got lost. Let’s see. I think this was my memoir that I wrote, but I’ve never done anything with it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Have your sons read your memoir?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. No, I guess they haven’t read it. I’m thinking about the first book that was published. My son self-published it for me for a Christmas present. I was so surprised, because here comes this big box with my book in it. He found a picture of my dad to put on the cover. It was really neat.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Wonderful.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: A wonderful present.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Let’s see. Jerry, the Moon [Men, and Me]. What was he? NASA man. I don’t know what all this is. This was another Timber Cove neighbor that had a quite important [career]. I don’t know what he did there, but he was somebody at NASA.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think we interviewed [him].

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I’m trying to find some of those pictures but I don’t know where I’ve put all my [stuff]. I had to give away 400 books when we moved, because there were no bookcases.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, I understand that. Is it Jerry Hammack?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Friendship. What is this?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Can I help you, Jane?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I think I got it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You got it. Okay.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Let me see what is this. It says friendships. Does this one say friendship?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Friendship 81.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: What was that? Oh no, that was with McDonnell Douglas. This has to be it. This one is Life magazine pictures.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I love looking at these old pictures. [Flips through Life photos]

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Isn’t that fun? I love to too.

Sandra Johnson: What is that from?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: These are some of the Life photos, right?

Sandra Johnson: Oh yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You look so young to have four kids. How old were you here?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Probably 35, I don’t know.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You don’t look 35. You look so young.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Here’s the guy, the 65.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh my gosh. Wow. Your Hi-C in the back.

Sandra Johnson: Those are wonderful.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I know. You had four boys. How hard was it to find somebody who would watch them? I really have to ask. I have one, and I can’t find anybody to watch him.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t know. When we went on the longest world trip my cousin came, and before we got back she went into labor so they had to farm the kids out with other people in the neighborhood.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh my gosh, [Pete] cut their hair.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s funny.

Sandra Johnson: Those are wonderful.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: These are great. That’s nice that they shared them.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: That’s my dad.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Is that out at the ranch or is that at your place?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, that’s our place.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You must have had your hands full, seriously, with all those kids. It’s a great picture of you.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: This is where we watch the launch and see.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You went out for the Apollo 12 launch, correct?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, I haven’t looked at these pictures for years.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I bet.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: That’s why I’m hanging over your shoulder.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, that’s cute.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: This guy, [my son], is a United Airlines pilot.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, followed in his dad’s footsteps, huh?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did he also go into the Navy?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, he went to Embry-Riddle, where they teach you to fly to become an airline pilot. It’s a four-year college but it’s with emphasis on [flying].

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Is this part of the world tour?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, that was the first one of our trips that we made. This was an ambassador.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s quite a difference. Nobody wearing shoes.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, they’re all barefoot.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, are these those cats that you were talking about?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: That was Haile Selassie’s palace. He gave me a purse, which has real leopard skin on it. Which now is very fashionable.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I bet. Do you still have it?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. This was our doctor. That’s Jomo Kenyatta.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Who’s the physician? Do you remember?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: This was Chuck Berry.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Chuck Berry, okay, didn’t recognize him.

Sandra Johnson: It’s because he’s young there.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s probably why. I’ve seen older photos of Chuck.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, everybody’s [older].

Sandra Johnson: Everybody was young then.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Of course.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you receive any sort of cultural training before you went on the world tour?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes. We spent two days in the State Department learning about the countries we would go to, and what things to do and not do.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I bet there was quite a few things. Certain hand signals and things.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you go the same places that the guys went, or did the wives do other things?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Sometimes they had separate press conferences, but otherwise we were always together. There’s Haile Selassie and Jomo Kenyatta.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Were the swords given to the crew?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, but somebody, I forget who it was, maybe Haile Selassie gave him a beautiful—it was more like a dagger with lots of jewels in it. Of course we had to give it back.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Right, yes, those were state gifts, right? Not personal gifts.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Anything that’s over $50 you have to give back.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Is that it? Is that a lion? That is a lion.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: That is.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You walked past this lion?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Sandra Johnson: That’s crazy.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s amazing. I think I would have been shaking a little bit in my shoes. This must have been Skylab, much later.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I can’t remember when that was taken.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think I’ve seen the pictures of you. You had long hair.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: The kids are bigger. I don’t know what all that stuff is.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I love these dresses.

Sandra Johnson: Very Jackie O.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes.

Sandra Johnson: Or Jackie Kennedy at that time. We’re talking about the styles of those dresses.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: This was the king and queen of Greece. Wonder what this thing is, something I wrote obviously, and it’s also about, “They were taken to the LRL [Lunar Receiving Lab].

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Maybe that was your memories after the Apollo 12 mission.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Must be. I said, “Pete had a ball bounding nearly weightless on the Moon. He weighed 15 pounds. He was singing, ‘I was walking on the Moon one day.’”

Sandra Johnson: I’ve seen the video of that.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I love that bikini. That is so iconic of the ’60s. That type of bikini.

Sandra Johnson: After four kids.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, that’s impressive, four children and still looking like that and being able to wear a bikini.

Sandra Johnson: No kidding.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I don’t think I would wear one today. It’s funny how they just label everything “astronaut wives.” There’s not much detail there, “astronaut wives.”

Sandra Johnson: I guess Life magazine.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, on the back [they just labeled them] “astronaut wives.”

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: There’s other people in the photo.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: This must be something that I wrote that I didn’t ever do anything with. What is this?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You can tell it’s one of those homes [in Clear Lake] because of those rafters.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I think I wrote this to my mother, and she saved it. It says, “This summer has been really busy. Luckily, because I haven’t had time to brood about the fear for Pete’s flight which is just two weeks away.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I bet you had to have nerves of steel during that time.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Luckily I was young. I couldn’t take it today.

Sandra Johnson: It’s a lot different when we’re younger. We don’t worry as much.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You don’t think through all the ramifications of something happening. But with four kids.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Kept me busy.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Were you active at all in their school?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, pretty much. More so after we left Houston and went to Denver. The kids were in Denver Country Day School, and I just practically lived at that school. I just got so interested in everything to do there.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: This is a great one.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: When I was in Houston I did some volunteer work for the junior league though, so that was one day a week.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I noticed that you were quite active in that group. Were you active in any other local groups, maybe in the Clear Lake area?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Just the theater group.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Just the theater group?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I have to ask. Did the boys draw on the back of these chairs? It almost looks like it.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I can’t tell.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I can’t tell if the chairs are—see?

Sandra Johnson: Oh yes. It may be a design.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Maybe.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t know what that is.

Sandra Johnson: I think it’s a design in the chair.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I never knew there was a design on them.

Sandra Johnson: Maybe they drew on them. You didn’t know.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Maybe they did, because they’re not the same. I bet they did.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You know how kids do that. They just pick up a pencil.

Sandra Johnson: I had some furniture with crayon on it, so I know.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Where did your kids go to school when they were in Clear Lake?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They went to Seabrook Elementary School and then we went to Denver after that. I think maybe Peter had one year in the high school there. Oh, no, he went to TMI here, Texas Military Institute [San Antonio, Texas].

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Were you making ice cream?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Is that it? It looks like it. What did you think of the schools in Clear Lake? Were you happy with the quality of education?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I assumed they were okay. I don’t know. When we left there they went in private schools, and they all managed to get through, so I guess they were good enough.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did a lot of the wives spend time at the schools?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know, really.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I was reading that Marilyn Lovell said living in that area was really the best time of her life. Do you think that was the case for you?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It was exciting and fun and scary, and it was everything, but I don’t know whether it was the best time. I can’t say. I know that the last few years before I was divorced was not my best time. Since I’ve been married to Seymour has been my best time.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: How long have you two been married?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Twenty-seven years.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Twenty-seven years.

Sandra Johnson: It’s a long time.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That is a long time. Definitely up there with your first marriage. You might surpass that.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t know. He’s 92.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: He’s 92.

Sandra Johnson: Neither one of you look your age.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: No, you don’t.

Sandra Johnson: You may surpass all of us.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: That’s my mother and father. He’s putting her necklace on or something, I don’t know.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did they come out to your house quite often since you were nearby?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, they went to the launch, yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What did they think of you marrying an astronaut?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They knew Pete before he was an astronaut for quite a long time. In fact, he came out two summers before we were married. He came to the ranch and spent part of the summer at the ranch. That was a whole bunch of other stories because Daddy played tricks on him and he played tricks on Daddy and on my brother and everybody, so they all had a great time. They got to know him really well before we were married even. Oh, I forgot I had that picture. That’s a funny one, one of the neighbors took that picture.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, really?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I like that one.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, I thought that was a NASA photo for a long time.

Sandra Johnson: Didn’t they do some of those funny—NASA took some photos. It was the crew photos that were a little funny.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think in one of the books I read about Pete he came out to your ranch and had on new clothes for the first time he went out to the ranch.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, for the first time he came out, yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: He made some comment about needing to roll around and—

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Get it looking like—yes, making his hat look like it was well-worn.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What was Clear Lake like in the ’60s? Where would you shop?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, when we first got there there was just this little country store there, it was the only place. We could go out to Ellington [Air Force Base] if we were military. We could go out to Ellington and buy at their exchange and their PX. There was a tiny little store, and that was all there was in Seabrook, practically dirt floor. It was just the most rustic place. Could barely buy anything but the bare essentials.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I’ve heard some folks talk about how rural that area was, that there were a lot of wild animals still in the area. Did you encounter that?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t remember seeing any wild animals, but I guess there were.

Sandra Johnson: You were talking about the store. Do you remember the Henke & Pillot store in Seabrook?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Sandra Johnson: Because that’s where we shopped. I grew up in that area.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, really? That’s the store, I guess. I’d forgotten the name.

Sandra Johnson: Yes. It was the only one.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: When you said it I remembered it.

Sandra Johnson: I was wondering if that’s the one you were talking about.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It was no Walmart.

Sandra Johnson: No, basic groceries.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Not back then. How did things evolve over time? Do you think things changed during the years that you were in Clear Lake? Or did it take a lot longer for that area?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It built up pretty fast. I’m sure it did. They started putting hotels in and lots of restaurants, and people moved there for different reasons. It built up. You all will remember probably if you were there.

Sandra Johnson: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did your kids have an opportunity to go out to the Space Center much and spend time with their dad out there? Or did you get a chance to go out there?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They didn’t go out there much. I took them out there when they were in the LRL.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, the LRL, the Lunar Receiving Lab.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: LRL, yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That must have been fun with four kids.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They were out there in the CapCom [console] in the mission control. We could hear. We went there every day, [but] not every day during Skylab.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: When there were missions going on were your kids in school, or did they get special dispensation to stay home?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, they were in school. I remember one day Christopher, he was in kindergarten, and he would not get in the car pool. I was carrying him out to the car trying to make him go, and it was reported that I was forcing him to go to school. I got the worst letters from people. “You’re just a cruel horrible mother. How could you do such a terrible thing?” There were a lot of people. Oh, and then one person said something about why was I wearing sunglasses. There are such crazies out there really. I probably didn’t get as many crazy letters as some people did, but there are people that don’t have anything better to do than write some dumb thing. I think a lot of them maybe went to NASA and then they threw them away.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you get fan mail? Did NASA handle mail for the wives?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, they handled the mail that came there, because people didn’t know us. They didn’t know where we lived, so they just sent letters to us in care of NASA.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: How odd. What did you think when you got that first bundle of mail?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I was kind of hurt that they said mean things, because they didn’t know me. “How dare you say mean things about me? You don’t know me.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: They didn’t know the circumstances either.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I did notice in some of the press coverage that I’ve seen, because there were clippings from the Apollo 12 mission over at the Methodist church, that they all seem to be about your boys, and the fact that they weren’t behaving, that they were doing things.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They were doing it to entertain, and they were being egged on too, believe me. The reporters were trying to make them do it too, because they’d get some better pictures. It’s not that they were really bad boys so much as they were being egged on.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I just figured it’s kind of hard for kids to sit still for long periods of time.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Of course.

Sandra Johnson: Boys will be boys.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Especially boys, yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: It’s very challenging. I did want to ask about the Apollo 1 fire and the loss of the other [astronauts], if you would talk about some of those [events].

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, gosh. That was so terrible. I remember I was babysitting for a neighbor’s baby, and I got the phone call about the fire. I was crying so much and she was crying, the baby was crying. I was in the rocking chair crying. She was crying, and I was crying. It was awful.\n\n Then I remember when Elliot [M.] See died. They called me to go over, because I was across the street. I ran over there and they said, “Don’t say anything until someone comes to tell her officially. Don’t tell her what you’re over there for.” I had to try to pretend like nothing had happened. I can’t remember who came over, Deke or somebody came over to tell her. Oh, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Just to go over and, “Hi.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Make polite conversation.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes. After he died I went over every night about five o’clock just to talk to her while she was cooking dinner, because I thought, “This is the worst part of the day, when you expect him to come home.” I thought maybe that would be a good time to distract her.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That was really nice.\n\n [Break in interview]

What sort of support did NASA provide the wives?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They always [sent] a security guy in your house all during the flights, so if there’s any problem [you had assistance]. Of course we had the free doctors and nurses, that was a wonderful thing. I even took my niece one time out to their dentist, and they gave her a filling. Nobody said anything wrong with that. She was staying with me, and I thought well, I’ll just take her out there.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you get to fly out on the Gulfstream when you went out for launches?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes. Quite a lot of times. I think it was the Gulfstream that I went to Ed [Edward H.] White’s funeral. We went a lot of times to the White House; we were in the Gulfstream, yes. Of course I get that mixed up with all those McDonnell Douglas planes that we flew all kinds of places with. I really went to a lot of countries, with McDonnell Douglas, because Pete worked for them after he left NASA. Those were a lot of fun trips too, almost the same idea, because we were well wined and dined and taken on tours.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: One of the pictures that we saw in here was a picture of your family with Lyndon B. Johnson.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What was he like?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I got to know him better one time we went out to their ranch and had lunch with him. This was just an official thing, and we didn’t really do much talking on that. He was trying to keep [the boys] from picking up the phone that went to the [Soviet Union].

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, the red line?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, the red line.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Why did you get invited out to the ranch?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, that was fun, that was when we had the film that they took of landing on the Moon. We showed that out in their garage. I guess we were in the Gulfstream. We landed there and LBJ took the men on a tour of the ranch, and Lady Bird took us back to their house. She was just a lovely person. She took us all around, every room in the house. We sat on her bed and looked at pictures like you’re looking at our pictures. We had lunch there, and it was very nice. When [the men] came back from looking at the ranch, LBJ sat on the hearth. Everybody was around [him]. I was sitting in his chair, which was one of those big leather BarcaLoungers. It had the presidential seal embossed on the back. When he came in I thought, “Do I get up and give him his chair, or do I sit here?” I sat.\n\n He was talking to us, and everybody’s sitting around him staring at him. All of a sudden he reaches in his pocket, and he takes out a handkerchief (hawking noise). He opens it up and inspects it in front of us. He was rather a diamond in the rough.

Sandra Johnson: I think he was who he was.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: He was who he was, yes.\n\n SEYMOUR

Getting to the salacious part?

Yes. All the parts that Jackie Kennedy didn’t get in on so she couldn’t publish my book.\n\n SEYMOUR

What’s the purpose of the—

Interview?\n\n SEYMOUR

Interview, yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: We have an Oral History Project at the Space Center that has been ongoing since 1997.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They knew Jack Kinzler. They interviewed Jack Kinzler, and they knew all of the people.\n\n SEYMOUR

Jack Kinzler.

Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes. We’ve interviewed a lot of folks, but we have not interviewed the wives. We are trying now to capture some of that history before we lose any more of it because we’ve lost so many wives.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh I know, 28.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, that’s a lot. That’s what we’re trying to capture before we can’t anymore. There’s only, unfortunately, two of us.

Sandra Johnson: There’s two of us.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Trying to capture all this history.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It’s going to be a big book.

Sandra Johnson: Maybe one day.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: We have over 1,400 interviews on our portal.

Sandra Johnson: Yes. Since ’97.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: You can condense it down though to 1,400 pages.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Oh, no.

Sandra Johnson: No. Whatever you approve of in the final process, that’s what will go online. Then yes, people can use it for research, for writing books, and doing what they want to do. It’s interesting.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: It is.

Sandra Johnson: The wives are a side of the story that people don’t always get to hear. It’s what was going on day to day, normal life.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: A lot of those memories you don’t really think about. They’re just the day-to-day [activities].

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: A lot of people can’t even remember. Like I can’t remember much anymore.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I thought we’d talk about a few of the missions though, because I figured some of those might have made an impact. We talked about the worldwide tours. I wanted to ask about the Gemini V mission because that was Pete’s first mission.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: First one.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You were with Trudy Cooper, and I was wondering if Trudy gave you any suggestions or insight before that mission happened.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, I don’t think so. In fact I didn’t know her very well until we went on that trip together. She took her two girls, because they were old enough to travel at that time. Mine were all little. I’m trying to think. Oh, there was one thing that was funny. Her girls went out with one of the security people when they were in—what country was it? I can’t remember. Some country that this guy took them, I think it was in Greece, so that Trudy and Gordo could go to a dinner party with the king and queen. The girls were not invited.\n\n When they got back, the girls said the guy got lost. It was dark, and he was driving along the street, and all of a sudden there was a whole stone staircase. He drove right down the staircase. They said every time the car hit a step he would say, “Shit, shit, shit, shit,” all the way down. That entertained us for a while. The girls were like 15 and 16. They must have been kind of scared by that time.

Sandra Johnson: “Where is he taking us?”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That would be my concern. “What’s at the bottom of this? When’s it going to end?” Tell us about that mission and watching it in your living room, watching the launch.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. People came over. All the neighbors came over and sat around, sat on the floor, brought pillows and blankets and spent the night. The neighbors really kept me company.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you have squawk boxes back then?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: How closely were you following the mission, with four boys?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I listened to it all the time.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I was looking at one of the transcripts, and you actually wrote a poem for Pete, which I thought was [sweet].

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I’ve forgotten how that went.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I actually wrote it down, so I can read it to you.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: You can read it to me. Thank you.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes. It’s, “Twinkle twinkle Gemini V. How I want you back alive. Up above the world so high, I saw you today as you went by. Twinkle twinkle Gemini V. Tomorrow you take a great big dive. Leaning toward the ocean blue. And I send my love to you.”

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Good for me.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes.

Sandra Johnson: It’s sweet.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: A little bit of doggerel.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I thought that was very sweet. Were you writing much poetry? Or you were just moved by the flight?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, I guess my muse flew in and flew out again.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I also thought it was amusing because you had told the CapCom that you had read the Gemini horoscope for the day, and you passed that along to him as well. You said that you should get your house in order and the evening was good for dining out.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I guess you were going out for dinner that night.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Maybe so.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did Pete take up any items for the family in that first flight?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, he did. I can’t remember which he took on which flights, but he did. They made a whole lot of those coins out of some silver. Pete had it because they were silver bars that had been on a sunken ship hundreds of years ago. He got them from Teddy Tucker, who was a treasure diver in Bermuda. He gave him one to have those things struck into coins.\n\n I designed a pin for the Apollo flight of the Moon with a little clipper ship flying around it, the Yankee Clipper. James Avery made the pins.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Do you still have that pin?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You wear it?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Never wear it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Never wear it.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I sent it to the cleaner’s one time, and I’m afraid to ever since. But they got it back [to me]. They found it at the bottom of a great big bin.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think I had read that you had that pin made for the other two wives for that mission.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That was really nice of you.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Nobody had ever heard of James Avery. I don’t know how I heard of him, because at that time he was working in a little tiny studio in Kerrville [Texas], and now he has international stuff.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: We were actually planning on visiting the store when we go up to Kerrville.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, Kerrville is a fun place. We visited there when we were on that last reunion we had last spring. It’s really fun.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What was the media interest like in that first flight? What did you think of all of that coverage?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They were camped out in our yard the whole time, and of course they had television cameras all the time and other cameras. As I said, the kids always were out there, ready to do anything that they told them to do.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Would you go out and do interviews during key parts of the mission?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you get any media training from NASA? Was that something [NASA offered]?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No. I guess they figured we could do it okay.\n\n SEYMOUR

Camped out literally? Or just as a figure of speech?

They stayed there all day, and I don’t know how late into the night, because I didn’t [check]. They did have some tents, but I don’t know that they slept in them. They just had them because it was hot in August. What flight was that?\n\n SEYMOUR

They cooked hot dogs.

No, I fed them.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You fed them?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, I did take them food sometimes, cookies and lemonade and stuff.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s nice. Obviously you did like the media.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, I did.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: They probably liked coming to your house.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes. The Life magazine and World Book people were allowed to come in our house. They were very nice people.\n\n SEYMOUR

You were under contract, right?

Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What about the Apollo 12 mission? So much has been made of that crew, the fact that there were three best friends flying into space.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: There were three Navy.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes. Was that the same for the wives? Were you close with Sue [Bean] and Barbara [Gordon]?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I remembered Barbara and Sue, because their husbands went through test pilot school, but not in our class, so I knew them but slightly, but not very well. When we got on that crew, of course we got to know each other a lot better. Then on that trip we did very well.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Was Apollo any different from Gemini? Were there major differences that you noticed?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I think there was more to [Apollo], a whole lot more going on during it.\n\n SEYMOUR

What was the question?

Difference between the Gemini flights and the Apollo flight. Of course the Gemini flights were just orbital flights. I guess it was more interesting. What do they call that period of high activity? Something like that. They have an acronym for it. They had a lot more of those on 12. I guess the only big one on [Gemini] 11 was when Dick Gordon got out of the spacecraft, and he got terribly winded, or his heartbeat got up to like 400 or some astronomical thing. Pete kept saying, “You better come back in; you better come back in.” “No, I don’t want to come back in.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: There was a quote that Lily had in her book that I thought was very interesting. I wanted to ask you about this. She said that you felt a change coming over you as Pete was getting ready for Apollo 12, that it was your own personal countdown.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I wonder what you meant by that.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: What did I think? What did I feel like? I guess I just knew each day it was like when you’re a kid and you’re crossing off the days till Christmas. I was just thinking it’s getting closer and closer and closer.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You were finally going to achieve that goal of the Moon landing, when you ran in and told Pete when he was in the shower.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Right.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I was curious if feminism had any role in that. If you were thinking that you wanted to take on a new role for yourself.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, I don’t think women did very much. Very few women did in those days. Nowadays they do, right off the bat, but not then.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Tell us about that launch and hearing about the lightning that hit the Saturn rocket.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. That was exciting. We were in a boat on the Banana River. My parents were on board, and Dodie [Dora J.] Hamblin was with us. We were up on deck for the countdown. We could see the spacecraft off in the distance. We saw the launch. Of course we could hear it too because we had the radio.\n\n Then we saw the lightning. [Makes lightning noise] I didn’t know it hit [the spacecraft]. I just saw it looked like it was close. Then we heard Pete talking about all the buses dropped out. I guess they did have communication because I heard him say that. I don’t know what they didn’t have. A lot of their telemetry they didn’t have.\n\n Finally they kept doing like you do with a fuse. You just do it on and off until it comes back on again. Finally they got them all back on again and said, “You’re go for the mission.” That was a very exciting time.\n\n SEYMOUR

And we can’t make the television work.

I know or the computer.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: What did your kids think of their father’s role in the space program? Did they have a real understanding of what he was doing?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t know. It didn’t seem like it was so unique to them as it did to the older people that realized it. They just thought, not that everybody’s dad did it, but that all the other dads that worked on it were all in the same boat. I guess they just didn’t realize what was going on in the first [flight]. Maybe by Skylab they probably realized that that’s a unique thing. But the first couple flights, I don’t think they thought it was any different than what other people did.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you have folks over at your house for the Moon landing and all those activities?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, of course, they were there at the house for everything. All the periods of high activity—I forget what that acronym is that they used. That’s when different people would come over, like some of the other astronauts that were not doing anything would come over to the house too and hold my hand and explain to me what was going on so I wouldn’t be so frightened.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Had Pete given you a heads-up as to what was happening, what to expect?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, I debriefed him after he came back. I had so many questions. I made him stay up till midnight answering questions the whole time, but he didn’t have that much to say about it. He said he wasn’t afraid to go, and he said he was well trained. Of course didn’t keep me from worrying. He didn’t really try to make me feel better about it. I was just as scared when he was doing those test pilot flights. I guess I decided I would go along with that. That’s what I had signed up for, and I’m going to do it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did Pete tell you what he was going to say when he first set foot on the Moon?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That was a surprise to you?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, “a little guy like me.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did that get a big laugh from the group in your house?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, everybody liked that. Oh, and then the rector’s wife, Father Raish’s wife, told me that she had a dream the night before they landed on the Moon, that they couldn’t come back. That they were not able to take off the Moon and come back. I thought that wasn’t a very nice thing to tell me.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: No, I would not have said that.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: She could have kept that to herself.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, or said something afterwards.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Afterwards that’s okay.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you go to church during the mission, or did your minister come to your house?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, I did I guess during some of those missions. The first one I don’t think was over Sunday, but I went on Sunday. I have a picture somewhere of myself and my parents going to church. [The press] did follow you anywhere you went.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Would they follow you into the church? Or would they stand outside?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Not into, just up to the front door.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Were there any special prayers at the services for the crew?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I can’t think if there was, maybe so. Maybe Father Raish must have said something, because why wouldn’t he? But I don’t remember.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you have any concerns about Pete bringing home Moon bugs? There was that whole discussion.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Not at all. I wasn’t the least bit of afraid of that, I didn’t think there were any bugs on the Moon.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: More concerned about him coming home I guess.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Right.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: So many of the people we’ve talked to talked about how Apollo really unified that Clear Lake community, that they felt like everyone was behind Apollo, that everyone was like a family. I wonder do you think that was the case and why.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, I really felt it. Practically everybody I knew in Timber Cove was in my house all during all the flights. Everybody was so supportive, and they brought all this food. That was the other reason why that pool guy thought Pete had died, because he saw all this food spread out all over the place, and flowers everywhere. He said, “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: He thought it was a wake.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: He thought it was a wake.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s hilarious. Why do you think people in the Clear Lake area supported Apollo so much? Was it because they worked at NASA, or were there other reasons?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: A lot of them worked at NASA, sure. Also I think everybody in the world was interested in what was going on. This is something they’d never done before, so of course they were, and they probably felt they were even a little special because they were closer to it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I did want to ask you. We have just a few more minutes.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, is it time to go? Oh, you have 15 more minutes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, exactly. Like I said, we like to keep to time. Talk about Skylab. That was a very different mission, because that was much longer. He was going to be in space for a longer period of time.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Much longer, yes. I think Pete developed a little bit of a—it wasn’t a heart murmur. It was like you skip a beat or something in his heart. They were worried about that. Let’s see. Was one of those guys a doctor? Yes. [Joseph P.] Kerwin was a doctor. He didn’t think it was really very dangerous. He didn’t really feel as though it was anything to stop the mission for. I think that can happen anytime, have a skip of a beat. There’s a song about it, “My heart skipped a beat when I saw you.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Had things changed since Apollo had started to wind down with Apollo 17? Was there as much interest in Skylab as there was for Gemini and Apollo?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It seemed to me that it was pretty much [similar], but of course it would fade off during the long days. For the launch and for the recovery they were all back again. Then there was a little blurb every night on the news if there was anything that they were doing. They reported on that. It wasn’t as intense as it was on Apollo flights.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Were you following much in terms of what was happening to save Skylab? Was your husband ever concerned that he wasn’t going to fly that last mission because of what had happened?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I didn’t get to talk to him because he was over in quarantine. I guess maybe they were so they wouldn’t catch anything before they went. They were over in whatever—I can’t remember these names anymore. You know where they were.\n\n I guess it was before we left the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] that they knew that the solar panel didn’t come out. I guess we were kind of worried. What did they do? They had an EVA [extravehicular activity] that went out and pulled on it. I think attached something to it and pulled it out. It wasn’t very long before they did that, and then Jack Kinzler had that parasol that he invented. You can probably remember better than I do because you interviewed him. Believe me, my memory has gotten really bad recently.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did Jack ever come over and tell you about his solution and share those details with you?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I think he did after they deployed it. Yes, he did. He told us exactly. He went down to a sporting goods store. He bought some fishing rods and put them together, and they would fold up like that. He just told us how he dreamed it up. He said he even dreamed it the night before. He was thinking about it so hard that he dreamed to go get some fishing rods and Mylar and put it together, and he did.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Your kids were older now. Did they have a better understanding?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: For Skylab, yes. I had a terrible cold too, as I remember. We were on our way home. Can’t remember [if] they [took] us on a Gulfstream or not. I remember Peter going up to where they had the flight attendant and telling, “Bring Mom a Bloody Mary, she’s just so nervous.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: They definitely were older if they knew to ask for a Bloody Mary.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, they knew. He knew that I liked Bloody Marys. I still do.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Were they following the mission along the same way that you were?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, they were old enough then definitely to understand all that. I had a little boy come over here the other day, a little Latin American boy about five years old. He was so smart. He knew all the planets, how far they are, how long it would take to get to each one. He named them off like this. I couldn’t believe it. He came over here because I was looking for someone to take my sister’s dogs. She just didn’t want to part with them. She has to go into a retirement place, and they won’t let her keep the dogs. My friend told me about this Latin American family that had six kids. She said, “I’m going to ask them if they’ll take the dogs,” and they did.\n\n They came over here first because she said, “I’ll tell them that maybe I could find some space stuff for the little boy.” I found a few little things. I should have given him some of those—well, maybe not the matches that had the emblems on them. I found a few things, a couple pictures. He came over, and I knew that he was smart, because my friend that made the transaction, she said, “I bet you if I tell them that they’ll get some space stuff they’ll take the dogs.”

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Quid pro quo.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Sandra Johnson: That’s funny.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: What is it?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Quid pro quo.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Quid pro quo, I always get that mixed up. That was it. He came and he was so cute. He was so excited about getting the space stuff.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I noticed during that Skylab mission that there were three big anniversaries, one being your twentieth wedding anniversary.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, I didn’t remember that.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, and Pete’s birthday and Father’s Day. I thought there were a lot of things that happened then.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, that’s right. All in June.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you celebrate those moments when he was in space or did you wait for him to come back?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: We probably did the birthdays, yes, but not the anniversary.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you get to talk with Pete for these missions over the phone?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: When I was in mission control. I didn’t really say very much, but we each got a chance to say, “Hi, how you doing?” Just to hear their—well, we hear the voice on the squawk boxes—just wish them luck and so forth.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you continue to have the security detail at the house for Skylab?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes. The whole time. All the flights, for the whole time.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you ever need the guard for any reason?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I’m going to ask Sandra if she has any questions for you, because we have a little bit of time.

Sandra Johnson: Yes, I was just curious. You said you were at Bryn Mawr when you met Pete. What were you majoring in?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: English.

Sandra Johnson: English. Did you plan on doing anything with that?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, it just was my favorite subject when I was in high school, so I figured I’ll go with that. Never knowing that I would be writing two books.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Right, and a memoir.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: But I did, because I started taking this class that they have here. It’s called ALIR, Academy of Learning in Retirement, and if you’re over 55 you can take all these courses. They have about 75 courses. I got in this writing class and had a wonderful teacher. I’m still going to it. I think it’s been 12 years I’ve been going and during that time I wrote the two books. Once a week we meet in that class, and I took a lot of other classes too. Everybody takes turns reading what they’ve written last week. It’s a critique group. That was a real impetus for me to write.

Sandra Johnson: No kidding, I imagine.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It’s fun, still fun. Except I’ve written everything I know.

Sandra Johnson: Oh, that’s funny. The only other thing I was thinking. You said you went into Houston to the secondhand shops. They still have a lot of those in Houston. Do you remember going into Houston for other things?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes.

Sandra Johnson: Did you do most of your shopping in the Clear Lake area, or did you go into Houston?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I remember there was a store called Walling’s that we all went to because it had really neat things. That’s where we bought our evening gowns, if we could afford them. Otherwise we got secondhand ones. I remember they had some sunglasses that I bought for $7. I thought, “How can anybody spend $7 on a pair of sunglasses? I can’t believe I did that!” But I wanted them so much that I did.

Sandra Johnson: That’s funny. Did you-all do any cultural things? Because Houston had the ballet and the symphony.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh yes, oh, sure, we went to the Alley Theatre and went to lots of different things, yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I did have a couple of other questions that I was looking at. Do you feel like you made any sacrifice for the Apollo Program that your family, you personally or your sons, had to give up?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I didn’t have to give up anything. I gained a lot of things.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Like what?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I got all those trips and meeting all these celebrities and lots of fun things.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: So it was a positive event in your life.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, definitely. That’s not to say that I didn’t cry and scream and carry on and tear my hair out either.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: One of the things that I’m approaching the Apollo and Clear Lake community from is the women, the wives, who were at home taking care of things while their husbands were off traveling, working on the spacecraft, the lunar module, that they really helped to create that Clear Lake community. I wonder if you agree with that and could talk about that a little bit.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Probably so, because everybody was very close in that community and everybody helped everybody else. Everything they did. That part of it was a magical time, to have such wonderful neighbors.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: It seems like a very unique community at a unique time.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Absolutely it was.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I saw an interview with you right after the book came out, Lily’s book, and you said that the wives wanted their husbands to be first. I was wondering how did you balance that with your friendships with the other wives.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I guess we felt competitive but nothing like [the men] did. They were very competitive. We just didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize their place in line.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: You always felt like eyes were on you and what you did?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, or afraid that something might happen that would make them lose their place in line of a flight.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did your husband ever talk with you about any of the other husbands? Did you ever hear through the grapevine that husbands had talked to their wives about, “Hey, you really probably shouldn’t do this because that could jeopardize [my flight]?”

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I can’t remember anything like that. I think probably they must have trusted us, that we would do the right thing. We’re not going to let ourselves do anything that would jeopardize their flights. We’d be on our best behavior. We certainly wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of those flights.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Did you feel that that was confining, having to meet those goals as a wife and a mother?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t think so, because I wasn’t doing anything that would be confined. I was able to do what I wanted to do. I could go into Houston and do my charity work. I could do anything I wanted when they were away. I was ruling the roost at home.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s right. You were in charge of the home.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I didn’t feel really confined.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I had one other question. It’s another quote that Lily put in her book. It’s a quote that Marge Slayton had said. “You don’t share your personal life. Everyone was happily married. Everything was lovely.” We talked earlier about the number of divorces and how you thought it was related to what the guys were doing at the Cape and other locations.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes. I don’t know whether Louise Shepard—I think there was something, maybe it was in Lily’s book or somewhere I read, that she just would not believe what people were even telling her was happening with Alan [B. Shepard]. She wouldn’t believe it. She just died about two weeks after he did.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I was wondering if that quote, if you thought it was part of the NASA culture where you don’t talk about those things, or if it was part of the generation that you were from. Nowadays people share everything. They put everything online. My grandparents, you didn’t share a lot of those private details.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes, a lot of people in World War II would never talk about their experience overseas or during the war.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Exactly. I was curious what you thought about that. If that was a combination.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I don’t know why, it was just sort of a tacit thing. Just not going to talk about it. You’d answer questions but you wouldn’t just volunteer a lot of stuff. That was probably all in line with trying to make, just like Marge said, everything’s wonderful. Just trying to make people think everything’s wonderful because we don’t want to jeopardize their flights.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I think we’ve touched on the questions that I’ve thought of. Was there anything that you would like to talk about about the wives or your experience that we haven’t covered? I’m trying to look at my notes here to see if there’s other things that we would talk about.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I know that we all went over to each other’s houses while different flights were going on. We were all supportive of each other.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Would you talk about that in terms of the friendships and how those relationships were important?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: It just went without saying that we would all go over and sit with the wives whose husbands were on a mission. We all brought food over and did whatever we could do. It was just like we were relations.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Was that from the military traditions?

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Part of it was military. That would carry over.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Do you think that was also generational? Again people don’t spend a lot of time [together].

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: No, I think people still do that. Don’t you think they do?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Not as much.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Maybe not as much.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: We don’t have a lot of people who come over to our house. It’s almost like you go out with friends now instead of inviting people over.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Oh, I see what you mean, yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, we’ve tried. At least in our place, we’ve tried to invite people over, and we’ve had them over. But there’s not a reciprocal relationship.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: They don’t reciprocate.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: That’s why I think it’s very interesting.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: A lot of wives work though, and that’s why they don’t want to have dinner parties and have people over, because they’re tired by the time they get home. That’s probably the reason for it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, and the house is always a mess. Yes, there’s a lot of reasons not to do things.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: Yes.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Thank you very much for your time today, we really appreciate it.

Jane (Conrad) Dreyfus: I enjoyed it.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes. Thank you.