Prime Minister Harold Holt at the Opening
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Prime Minister Harold Holt addresses the gathering. From left: Edmund Buckley, Bryan Lowe, Harold Holt, Robert Seamans. (Only a few months later, on 17 December 1967, Prime Minister Holt disappeared, presumed drowned, while swimming in heavy surf near Portsea, Victoria.) Photo from Ron Hicks. |
John Saxon recalls the opening day –
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“After the official opening ceremonies, the Prime Minister toured the site.
I was stationed at the main ops console and was primed to demonstrate the NASCOM network to the PM. I had expected to ask ‘Goddard Voice’ – the operators who controlled the voice communications from the Goddard Spaceflight Center – to connect me through to a few exotic locations (Hawaii, Alaska, London etc.), O.K. it was exotic to speak to those sorts of places in those days {:-)).
Instead the PM did not let me get into my tour and said, “I understand you can talk to anyone, anywhere, from here – so I’d like to talk to my old friend Hubert Humphrey the Vice President”.
So I called Goddard Voice and asked for the White House – after about a 2 microsec delay – a White House operator answered. I explained I had the PM who would like to talk to the Vice President. He responded that the VP was in a car somewhere but they should be able to link up. A 10 sec or so delay and there he was.
I was mightily impressed.
The eventual
conversation was fairly predictable political stuff – ‘cooperation
between our fine nations etc...’, but I had to keep putting the headset
back on the PM, and more importantly trying to key his ‘Press-to-talk’
at the right times. I have to admit that takes a little practice before it becomes
second nature.
I’ve attached a picture which has recently come my way (ex-Tom Reid) – I think that’s my hand on the left.
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| Scan: John Saxon. Click for a larger version. |
Apart from the PM I see Willson Hunter (the NASA Rep to Australia at the time) at the end of the console (without the glasses) and Robert Seamans (Deputy NASA Administrator) with the sunglasses. Don’t know about the other two.
Hamish Lindsay adds –
Mike Dinn
suggests that the man wearing glasses at the end of the console is R J (Dick)
Fahnestock, the JPL Rep.
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Prime Minister Harold Holt speaks with US Vice President Hubert Humphrey using a headset at the Ops Console. From left to right: Photo from Ron Hicks. |
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Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt holds a computer generated portrait of himself printed out on the teletypewriter. The first Station Director, Bryan Lowe, is on the left, and Dame Zara Holt, looking startled, is in the middle. Photo taken by the (now defunct) Australian News & Information Bureau. Scan by Hamish Lindsay. |
How we created the computer printout of Harold Holt – by Ron Hicks
“Bryan Sullivan and I got a large photograph of Harold Holt from The Canberra Times and scribed it with horizontal and vertical lines making little rectangles where each teletype character would print.
Next we printed every teletype character in large blocks and stood back and selected a grey scale from 1 to 20.
We pasted up a huge sheet of paper on the wall in Bryan’s lounge room and marked it off in rectangles proportional to the lines scribed on the photograph.
We then painstakingly examined each and every little square on the photograph and assigned it a value between 1 and 20. One being a space character.
Then, using a black marker, we wrote the appropriate character in each rectangle on the paper.
Lo and behold, when we stood back from the wall, there was old Harold.
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The Portrait |
That was the easy bit.
Now we had to carefully type the thing into the Univac 642B computer in complete secrecy.We figured (correctly) that, when the entourage came through the computer room, time would be of the essence. So when the group entered the Telemetry Section, we started the computers printing and stopped them just half-way through the picture. The idea was to grab Holt’s curiosity when he came through and keep him there while the rest of the picture printed.
It worked. We hit the front page of most of the newspapers in the country.”
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Prime Minister Harold Holt, Ron Hicks and Bryan Sullivan. Photo supplied by Ron Hicks. |
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From left to right: John Crowe
– TLM engineer Photo supplied by Ron Hicks. |
