Glenn’s Pending Liftoff Has Cocoa Beach Looking Up

Perhaps locals have become a bit blase about the industry that turned their sleepy seaside town into a bustling Space Age resort. After all, more than 90 manned shuttle missions have blasted off from nearby Kennedy Space Center since 1981, and rockets go up with thunderous regularity.

“Normally for a shuttle launch, you could get a hotel room or a spot in the park to watch it,” said Rob Varley, executive director of the Space Coast office of tourism.

Not this week.

When 77-year-old Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) and six fellow astronauts head for the heavens aboard the shuttle Discovery on Thursday, the roar will come from both igniting rocket fuel and the cheers of up to 300,000 visitors--including President Clinton.

The crowd is expected to be the largest since the 1969 Apollo moon mission, a testament to the excitement generated by the launch that will return to space a genuine American hero. In 1962, Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth. Aboard Discovery for a nine-day scientific mission, he will be the oldest person ever in space.

The launch will be broadcast live worldwide and covered by up to 2,500 journalists watching from the press gallery a mile from the launch pad. CNN has even lured Walter Cronkite, a friend of Glenn’s, out of retirement to help with its coverage.

Intense interest in the launch, scheduled for 11 a.m. PST, is providing an economic windfall to Cocoa Beach and Brevard County, where all 10,000 hotel rooms have been sold out for months. Even the best viewing spots are gone, with 10,000 people having paid $20 each for tickets to enter Space View Park, along the Indian River.

“We figure the economic impact at something like $20 million,” Varley said. “That’s pretty hot for us.”

County school administrators have given students the option of skipping classes Thursday, fearing massive traffic jams will lead to gridlock on the two-lane roads and causeways leading to Kennedy Space Center. Many schools will dismiss students early, and supplies of drinking water are being loaded onto school buses in case students are trapped on the roads. “There will be serious, serious traffic problems,” warned Jay Cullen, a spokesman for the Titusville police.

Glenn’s return to space also has given a boost to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which hopes the enthusiasm it generates will translate into support for the ambitious, $50-billion international space station. The joint U.S.-Russian project is to get underway Nov. 20, when a Russian rocket will carry the first portion of the space station into orbit.

“We haven’t had this much interest in the space program since Return to Flight [the first launch after the Challenger disaster] 10 years ago,” said NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham. “John Glenn conjures up all sorts of images in the minds of people all over the world. It’s a real thrill for us to launch him into space again.”

For a man who has been a U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot, a test pilot, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, a successful businessman and, for 24 years, a U.S. senator, Glenn’s designation as a “payload specialist” aboard Discovery seems like one of the less prestigious of his job titles.

Critics have suggested his inclusion on the flight is more politics and public relations than science--he is to be a guinea pig for several experiments on aging. But his mission has captured the world’s fancy.

Longtime residents of what is called the Space Coast especially seem to appreciate the romance and symmetry of seeing Glenn fired back into orbit at an age when many contemporaries are long retired.

“It’s like a homecoming, or reunion,” said Cocoa Beach Mayor Joe Morgan, who was among residents who welcomed Glenn to town in 1960. “We’re just delighted to see John Glenn here again.”

His return also serves as an occasion to reminisce about the days when space loomed as the next frontier and America was losing the race with the Soviet Union. “It was a heady time,” recalled Rachel Moehle, a public relations officer for the Cocoa Beach area Chamber of Commerce. “Sputnik had gone up [in 1957], and America was under the gun.”

After the Soviets then beat the United States with the first manned space shot, President Kennedy vowed to put a man on the moon. And almost overnight, it seemed, Cocoa Beach was awash in NASA engineers, German rocket scientists, contractors and laborers.

“We were all younger then,” said Morgan, “and it was a competitive time for the country. We were trying to beat the Russians. People worked 60 hours a week, slept for 20 and the rest of the time they spent at the local pubs.”

This has always been the other Florida, the Florida not of Miami Beach and high-rise hotels but the Florida of scrub pine pastures and wide-open beaches. In his book “The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe called this area “so Low Rent that nothing on Earth could ever change it.”

But with Glenn and the other six original Mercury astronauts in residence, the area did begin to change. In the years before Glenn made his first trip into space aboard the Friendship 7, this quiet one-motel town looked less like a retirement haven than the site of a round-the-clock fraternity bash.

“Party, party, party--it really was,” said Mabel Gressett, who worked at Ramone’s restaurant and catered meals for the Mercury astronauts. “It was a wild time, because everybody was on expense account.”

Indeed, parties were the movable feasts in those days, fueled by alcohol, smoked mullet and the belief that America was on the cusp of a new age, the Space Age. “You could travel around here without any money at all, because the buffets were free and everybody bought drinks for everyone else,” said Tom Daugherty, who worked the bar at the Ramada Inn. “And if you needed money, you could write a personal check on a napkin.”

This city’s reputation for space race bacchanals prompted NBC to air an October 1961 report on “Cocoa Beach, Nighttime Boom Town” that mentioned prostitution and bongo-drumming beach parties. Some locals were so outraged they burned narrator David Brinkley in effigy. The network and Brinkley were targeted in a letter from then-Chamber of Commerce President Wilbur Gold, in which he accused them of giving “more aid and comfort to our enemies than assurance to the citizens of America and the Free World.”

Today, the population of Cocoa Beach peaks at 25,000 in winter, and it looks like many other small beachfront cities: hotels, restaurants, surf shops and T-shirt emporiums. It is certainly more sophisticated than it was 36 years ago.

But some things remain the same. At the age of 88, for example, Gressett has another catering job, this time for Dan Rather and the CBS news crew.

And Morgan once again feels like a part of history. “This is an exciting time for us,” said the 62-year-old mayor, a retired banker. “You know, when you live here, and rockets go off all the time, sometimes you’re not as attentive as you should be.

“But with John Glenn back, this is phenomenal. We have a lot of people here his age, and they identify with him.

“He’s brought the world to our doorstep again.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.