Remembering Guenter Wendt

Yesterday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette devoted its lead editorial to a late obituary and tribute to the late Guenter Wendt.

Who?

If you read the editorial -- they are subscription, but worse when it goes archive for even higher fee, so jump soon if you're a local -- it describes the life of the man who for almost all the major manned space missions was the last person seen by the American astronauts. He was the German who closed the hatch and saw to the final details. There's a throw away about how Tom Hanks used an insider joke about Wendt in Apollo 13.

In the piece, there is also the creepy detail that Wendt helped pack away the most precious cargo of the U.S. on all but one of it's great Space Race missions: Apollo 1. Different subcontracter, didn't have Wendt on the crew. Knowing the details of what caused that catastrophe, hard to say that Wendt could have changed fate; but he sure was there for the rest of Apollo.

Why remember an ex-Luftwaffe man who became just another stereotype German mechanic emigre for NASA in the Werner von Braun era? From the editorial:

Think of the backstage crew of an opera, or at a newspaper. Guenter Wendt was one of those millions upon millions. They may have a wrench in their hand and stripes on their shoulders at a Marine supply depot in Afghanistan, or a mouse in their hand at some computer in Washington, D.C., or two hands on a tractor’s steering wheel in Lafayette County, Ark., but they’re the ones who make the world go ’round. And they don’t mind that their names don’t appear in headlines. Not at all. They just do their jobs. Competently. Guenter Wendt was one of them.

That is why we remember Guenter Wendt.