Accolades pouring in for James Lovell since his death in Lake Forest should all include the phrase “nice guy.” Despite journeys around the moon and becoming one of the nation’s most-acclaimed astronauts, he was just a regular guy, in awe not merely of his aviation accomplishments, but of being a witness to history.
I know this from interviewing him in the 1980s, marking the 10th and 15th anniversaries of the fateful Apollo 13 mission to the moon which began on April 11, 1970. He set aside time for a young reporter, including a tour of one of the largest corporate offices I have ever seen.
After leaving the Navy as a captain and retiring from the NASA astronaut corps in March of 1973, Lovell — whose death at age 97 was announced on Aug. 8 — joined Centel Corp. At the time, Centel was an early telecommunications firm based in Chicago, off the Kennedy Expressway at Cumberland Avenue.
His office, which took up nearly an entire floor of the multi-story building, had expansive views of O’Hare International Airport. It was filled with memorabilia from his Navy career and 11-year stint with NASA as a member of the “Next Nine” astronaut bunch.
At the time of his death he was the longest-surviving member of the astronaut corps. While originally a jet-jockey, Lovell didn’t carry that swagger with him. He was always accessible at the family’s 300-seat restaurant, Lovell’s of Lake Forest, near Waukegan and Everett roads, which opened in 1999 and closed in 2019.
During my interviews with Lovell, he didn’t rush our time together, excitedly convincing me the billions the U.S. spent originally sending men into space was well worth the effort and money. He knew of what he spoke after spending time during four missions in the dark void of space, 200,000 miles from Earth.
He was a hero for helping bring back the three-man Apollo 13 crew, which also included Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, safely to Earth. He pointed out to me that the computer inside the tiny 1980s-era personal calculators was more powerful than what was aboard Apollo 13.
If you have never seen the 1995 Ron Howard movie “Apollo 13,” based on Lovell’s book “Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13,” starring Tom Hanks as Lovell, it is time well spent. What was supposed to be a routine mission, where Lovell was to take a walk on the moon, abruptly shifted with the explosion of an oxygen tank in the command module two days after liftoff. The mishap could have set the U.S. space program back for decades.
That’s when the famous words were uttered: “Houston, we’ve had a problem”, which our culture turned into: “Houston, we have a problem.”
Lovell made four voyages into outer space, starting with piloting the two-week Gemini 7 mission in 1965 and as command pilot of Gemini 12 in 1966, followed by two Apollo flights. He eventually totaled more than 713 hours in space, and was the first man to twice see the moon close up.
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When he retired, he had logged nearly 8,000 flight hours as a Navy fighter pilot and test pilot. Lovell racked up numerous military and national awards for his service to the nation, including as deputy director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston from 1971 to 1973. He split his time between Lake Forest and Horseshoe Bay, near Austin, Texas
He was inducted into the U.S. Astronauts Hall of Fame in March of 1993. He was awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton in 1995.
An additional honor was naming the old Downey Veterans Administration Hospital and North Chicago VA Medical Center the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center, which opened Oct. 1, 2010. It is the nation’s first federal health care center that partners the VA with the Department of Defense to serve veterans and active-duty personnel.
Lovell, an only child, was born in Cleveland and grew up in Milwaukee. He studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was later admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating with an aeronautical engineering degree in 1952. He went on to be among the first to orbit the moon in Apollo 8 just before Christmas of 1968, where Anders took the iconic “Earthrise” image emerging from beyond the lunar horizon and Lovell named a mountain on the moon for his wife.
In a statement, his surviving family members, including two sons and two daughters, hailed him as their “hero.” “We will miss his unshakeable optimism, his sense of humor and the way he made each of us feel we could do the impossible,” they said. “He was truly one of a kind.”
Surely a true American. He will be laid to rest next to his wife, Marilyn, who died in 2023, at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, following a private military memorial service.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
X: @sellenews