When I started working day one at the Kennedy Space Center, my supervisor in Delaware North did not know where to place me – or what precisely she should do with me. Perhaps I was an enigma, more likely an oddball. So true to form, Delaware North did what my wife Maureen had said earlier – they started me off at the bottom of the ladder. I remembered the immortal words my mother had often said to me as a kid, “When all else fails Tony, lower your standards”. Those words were now my nouveau mantra.
Loading the KSC buses for visitors at the Apollo Saturn V Center is a very interesting job – you get to meet people from all over the world, with plenty of exercise to boot. Inside that Center is a real Saturn V rocket, left over from the Apollo Moon program, yet lovingly refurbished to Smithsonian standards. Within a few hours I was suggesting to my supervisors that we could both unload and load the buses, two-by-two. I’m sure that from that day onwards, I was most annoying to my KSC colleagues – perhaps a pain in the ass!
Towards the end of day one my supervisor approached me and asked if I would like to be interviewed for the position of Presenter at the Apollo Saturn V Center. It must have been the Irish accent.
From being a KSC Presenter and shortly afterward to that of a Communicator, and later to Manager of Education at Kennedy Space Center, does not sound like a giant leap for mankind. But it is, of a kind. As a Communicator, I had quickly evolved into the position of telling the NASA story – me, Tony Gannon from Dublin, Ireland. I felt humbled. At the Apollo Saturn V Center, the Launch Status Center, the Rocket Garden and later at the International Space Station Center (ISSC), I was honored to update visitors about the Space Shuttle program, the Delta and Atlas rockets, and the assembly of the Space Station. Commercial space was still some years off.
As the years passed at KSC, I took it upon myself to develop and write the Special Interest Tours book – the NASA UpClose Tour and later the Cape Canaveral Then & Now Tour. Both Delaware North & NASA KSC quickly snached up the tour book which I had written from home. Unfortunately, I was denied the opportunity to credit my name on my work. To this day, I still have the original document, and copies of the original NASA Guided Tour book. They are identical. Several million visitors feasted on the book and to be honest, that made me feel especially proud. However, I sometimes frowned when I thought about it all – me, an Irishman writing a historical account of the US space program. What’s wrong with these people?
Maureen joked with me, “Tony, if you had been born in the US you would have been the head of NASA by now”. Those were consoling words but irrelevant. I had become restless and needed to make a career move and seek fresh challenges. Almost out of the blue, a lifeline or rather a saviour, was suddenly before me.