I was part of a team of writers/reporters put together from all over the country to go to suburbs southeast of Houston to cover the Apollo space missions for United Press International. I especially think about one of them this time of year, Apollo 8, the first mission to orbit the moon, which rocketed into space exactly 48 years ago tomorrow, circled the moon 10 times on Christmas Eve and finally splashed down in the Pacific on Dec. 27. At that time, there was a weekly magazine called Life and reporters and photographers from that magazine had exclusive access inside the homes of the Apollo astronauts. But the fawning public wanted every bit of news about the astronauts and their families as could be fed, so when I wasn’t at my desk at the UPI Space Center bureau, I was parked outside an astronaut’s home, just in case one member of the family left the house for any reason. Because if one of them left the house for any reason, that was news. One of my favorite Christmas gifts of all time was delivered to me late Christmas Eve of 1968, when Barbara Lovell, the then 15-year-old daughter of Apollo 8 astronaut James Lovell, walked out of her home and up to my car to bring me a couple of homemade cookies and a cup of steaming hot coffee.
Beginning with Apollo 11, the first moon landing, the returning astronauts were placed in quarantine for three weeks to make sure they did not return bearing some kind of lunar disease. For reasons too complicated to go into here, I was the UPI reporter chosen to remain behind after the missions were completed to cover the "astronauts-in-quarantine" period. Nothing happened while the astronauts were in quarantine. Nothing. There were no news announcements from Mission Control about what the astronauts were doing while quarantined and, frankly, even if there had been, I sincerely doubt anyone would have given a green bean. To put it mildly, there was nothing in my journalistic career more boring and totally non-eventful than covering astronauts in quarantine.
Except executive sessions.
Now, to be fair, I have to admit that although some of them seem like it, I never seen an executive session last as long as an astronaut’s quarantine. But executive sessions are also far more frequent. Between July 1969 and December 1972, there were a total of six — count ‘em, just six — Apollo moon missions and only half of those resulted in quarantines (Apollo 13 didn’t count, because it’s moon landing was aborted and the quarantine requirement was abandoned following Apollo 14).
So naturally I reacted with some measure of glee this evening when I learned the City Council’s Thursday specially called meeting, which was created just so council members could go into a prolonged executive session to hash out revised terms for City Manager Scott Sellers’s contract extension, had been cancelled and will not be rescheduled until some time in 2017, even after the Council’s first regularly scheduled first meeting of the year on Jan. 3. No date has been set, but I’m betting it was also be a special called meeting.
So that mean’s there’s only one executive session on tap for Thursday evening; however, I’m anticipating that one will be a doozy because during that time, the Kyle Housing Authority Board will be interviewing prospective candidates to be the authority’s interim director and then debating among themselves which of those candidates should be named to the position, starting Jan. 1.
As for me, I will be wistfully thinking about a Christmas Eve visit from an astronaut’s daughter, bearing homemade cookies and hot coffee.
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