NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript

Frederick D. Gregory
Interviewed by Rebecca Wright
Washington, D.C. – 29 April 2004

Wright: Today is April 29th, 2004. This oral history is being conducted with Fred Gregory for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright. Mr. Gregory currently serves as NASA’s Deputy Administrator, and we are talking today in his office at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., about his first days with the agency and those days that led up to selection as an astronaut.

Thank you again. We appreciate you taking time from your schedule to visit with us. We’d like to start by you sharing with us how your interest in aviation began.

Gregory: I think it was because my dad, who was an educator, but he was also an engineer, very early in my life exposed me to areas that I’m sure that he would have liked to have participated in as a kid. So I think that when he took me to see things and visit and touch, I think he was actually taking himself.

One of the places we always went was to an Air Force base nearby Washington, D.C. It was Andrews Air Force Base [Maryland], and as a kid, I can always remember him taking me there. If I sit and think, I can’t remember exactly why, but we were always near it. As an example, in the late forties or early fifties, they had sports car racing at Andrews. They would use the taxiway and the runways for these car races. He would always position himself and me across from a hangar, and there would always be airplanes. There would always be airplanes on the ramp or in the hangar that I could see. And though the object was to watch the sports car racing, you couldn’t avoid seeing the airplanes in the background.

He was not a flyer. There were a lot of his friends, however, that I later learned were Tuskegee Airmen, but who visited our house quite often and talked about flying, but I never really associated their knowledge of flying with anything that had to do with the military. I remember, as a kid, when I was very young, taken to a very small airport and put in an airplane and I was of the belief that they were going to take me flying, but I recall that my mother banged on the window and told the pilot not to take off, and so my first flight was actually a taxi around the runway. But I guess I never really identified who these people were relative to their importance, but I do know that as a kid, as a very small child, I was always exposed to airplanes.

I think I was intrigued with the military in the fifties, and I know much, much earlier than that there was a very active Junior ROTC [Reserve Officer’s Training Corps] program in the high schools in Washington, D.C. The program was mandatory for tenth graders and voluntary for eleventh and twelfth graders, but it was such an important program, as far as we were concerned, and it was so visible, that in our senior year perhaps two-thirds of all the boys in the high school would be in the program. So it was a very, very large program.

So I think I gained an appreciation for the military during that period of time in high school through that exposure. Then I connected the airplane and the military, and decided that military aviation was what I was going to do, and I probably had made that decision by the time I was fourteen years old or so.

I began dating a young lady who attended a rival high school in Washington, D.C., and the first date that we went on was to an air show at Andrews. So I had a brand-new driver’s license, a brand-new girlfriend, and we drove to Andrews to watch an air show. I don’t think she really understood or appreciated at that time the love and passion that I had for both the military and the airplanes, but on June the 3rd we will celebrate our fortieth anniversary. [Laughs] So she was either very patient or in fact had those same kinds of motivations.

But I think it was the early exposure that I had from my dad to an area, an environment that he would very much have loved to have been in, but did not have the opportunity.

Wright: You received an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy [Colorado Springs, Colorado]. Can you tell us how that selection happened?

Gregory: At one of these air shows I was challenged by the Air Force flying demonstration group, called the Thunderbirds, and I can recall talking to one of the pilots, actually going to talk to one of the Thunderbird pilots, and I asked him how I could become a Thunderbird pilot. As I recall, though I may be in error, he went to the University of Colorado [Boulder, Colorado], or at least a university in Colorado, and he said that they were building a new Air Force Academy in Colorado, and he said if I wanted to become a Thunderbird, I should go there. This is before the school was completed and probably before groundbreaking in the site, in its present site north of Colorado Springs. So I think probably by the age of fifteen, fourteen or fifteen or something like that, I had decided that that’s where I wanted to go, was the Air Force Academy.

But as all young kids’ dreams are not necessarily fulfilled immediately, I knew my parents would accept this trip to Colorado, but I also had what I believed were kind of family obligations, and there was a history in my family of attending Amherst College [Amherst, Massachusetts]. My grandfather, I believe, had graduated in 1898, and my uncle, Dr. Charles True, graduated in 1926, I believe. So I was kind of the appointed one, or anointed one, to go, and so I applied and was accepted to Amherst.

I went to Amherst, and it was very clear once I got there that that was not going to satisfy my life’s dream to fly or to pursue a military career or to be an engineer of sorts. So I think my dad, realizing and recognizing this, began to search for a sponsor, a congressional sponsor, for his son. As I understand it, he walked the halls of Congress, going to all of the black congressmen, looking for a congressman who would nominate his son, me, for an appointment to the Air Force Academy.

He found a congressman the first year, and I can’t recall the gentleman’s name. I think he was from Detroit [Michigan], but I can’t recall. But I was nominated as one of his alternates. The congressman could nominate a principal nominee and then designate ten alternates. So I was one of the alternates. If the principal qualified, then the principal was accepted at the Academy. If the principal did not qualify, then they went down the first alternate and second alternate and finally, if they finally, in the eleven total nominees, they would get at least one person who would qualify.

So the principal did qualify, and that was Charles [V.] Bush, who was in the first class. He was one of the first three African Americans to attend the Academy in the class of ’63. I was the only alternate who also qualified, so eleven were nominated, the principal qualified and myself qualified. So that meant I would not go in the first year.

So I transferred from Amherst to American University in D.C. for my second year as I awaited with great hope of getting that principal nomination the following year. Adam Clayton Powell, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell from New York, took me as his principal nominee the next year and so all I needed to do was qualify medically. I qualified medically and was accepted into the next class of 1964.

During the four years there, since he was the congressman from New York City, my address, my legal address, as I understand it, was the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem for those four years, so that I could be a New York resident. And you would ask, well, why would I go off and search someplace else? Well, Washington, D.C., did not have a congressman or senator, as they still don’t. So there was no method for getting an appointment from a congressional source here in D.C. So that’s why my father went and looked for it. But he did a lot of work. My mom tells me that he spent a lot of time just knocking on people’s doors, but I think that kind of goes back to this if he had had an opportunity, he may have done this as a teenager. And again, I think that I may have been his replacement unit. [Laughs]

Wright: Could you share with us some of your experiences being at the Academy, especially since you were definitely in a minority? It was the early sixties and, as you mentioned, there weren’t many African Americans at the Academy at that time. Did you feel like you were at the place where you could start fulfilling your dream of mixing military education and aircraft all together?

Gregory: You know, the intriguing thing is that when I watched these airplanes fly, I was always fascinated why fighters could maneuver very quickly and why passenger aircraft were very comfortable for passengers—they had different characteristics—and why helicopters flew. So I was intrigued not only from the freedom that you got from flying at high altitude and looking down, soaring, reaching out and touching, but I was also intrigued about what the different characteristics were of these aircraft and why some had different capabilities that others didn’t.

So though I didn’t realize it at the time, I thought with the name Air Force Academy, there would be airplanes there. In fact, there were no airplanes at the Air Force Academy when I arrived. They had some airplanes that were identified with certain programs, such as navigator training, and during our first summer we had an orientation ride in a T-33, one of the first operational jet fighters or trainers. But I was interested in engineering, and from that, using that engineering and the math to understand the characteristics of airplanes. So though I went out there to be in the military, I went there specifically because the Air Force flew airplanes, and I knew that the courses there would immerse me in an understanding and an appreciation for aeronautics and the flight of aircraft.

What I didn’t realize when I went there was that that was a little more than 50 percent of the course of study. I didn’t realize that I also would concentrate in English, economics, history, law, geology, human studies. I didn’t realize that. I don’t think I appreciated the importance of that almost 50-50 division between a liberal arts and an engineering degree, and I wondered why I had to take these other courses. In the course of my life, though, I have learned how important that really was, and that was a great engineer is only great in the environment if he or she is surrounded by engineers, but the world is not composed of just engineers. There are other kinds of people who have other interests, other areas of interest, and that if you are to be successful, you have to understand their language too. So you have to be able to talk. You have to take it from the advanced degree to almost—this is not meant as an insult—but take it back down to the fourth grade so that everybody can understand not only why it works, but why it’s important and why you are so passionate about it.

In fact, I became so interested in some of the other courses, that though my major was engineering, my minor was English. I came out in a dilemma about what was more important, and I think it pretty much set me up for the rest of my career, because I realized that the background diversity was extremely important and that without it, you were only a piece of a person, and you really had to be the whole piece of pie. I mean, you had to be the whole pie; you couldn’t be just a slice of it.

There were three African Americans in the class of ’63. The first class of the Academy graduated in ’59, and so this would have been five years later. It would have been Charles Bush who was from D.C., and, in fact, he and I had gone through school together. He was a year or so older than I was, but we were in the same junior high school, until he became a page, a congressional page, and then went to page school. But I knew Charles Bush very, very well.

“Ike” Payne, Isaac [S.] Payne and Roger [B.] Sims were the other two in that class. Roger, unfortunately, just died in February. He had attended his fortieth reunion last June and was celebrated because of his achievement, but had very severe diabetes and then died, passed away in February of ’04.

Ike Payne, I didn’t know him before, but after graduation, he also, as a pilot, was an engineering test pilot and went through Edwards Air Force Base [California], Edwards Test Pilot School, and so when I went through the Navy Test Pilot School [Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Maryland], the two of us were assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base [Ohio] in the test wing there and spent many, many years working together.

These were high-quality people. These were not tokens. These were people you would be very proud to work with and would learn significantly from. So they weren’t brought in just to change the color of the Academy. They were brought in because they were absolutely equal to the other members of the class.

I was in ‘64, and I was the only one in my class. If I back up again, that was not my first experience being in an integrated society of sorts. As a kid, I was in the first integrated Boy Scout troop in Washington, D.C., and my first exposure was in 1953, when this integrated Boy Scout troop traveled by train from Washington, D.C., to Irvine, California, to participate in a Boy Scout Jamboree, fifty thousand boys out there. So we traveled by train in a first integrated Boy Scout troop, and it was an experience that was almost a nonexperience, because what I found very early in my life—and at that time I was twelve—that if you have a very common interest, a set of drives, kind of a common goal, in the future, and if it’s shared, that discrimination seems somehow to disappear. People forget those kinds of weird things and they concentrate on all crossing the finish line.

I had that experience in ’53 and then again in ’54 and ’55, when we traveled by bus to a Boy Scout camp in northern New Mexico [Cimarron], Philmont Scout Ranch. It was the same kind of a thing. Though the schools were not integrated in Washington and the society wasn’t integrated in Washington, these Boy Scout troops were, and we found that we had common interests. We all had hangups about this and that and the other, but we were all fascinated by the adventure that we were on.

I can remember, as we traveled, we generally stayed at Air Force bases, spent the night there, and I’m sure that, as I learned later, that this was a very safe place to stay, because the military had integrated in the late forties. I didn’t realize at the time how important that was. But one evening, we spent the evening at Tulsa University [Tulsa, Oklahoma], and Tulsa was a very segregated city, I guess, because when we’d settled in and we were going to do a night activity, the night activity was to go to a movie theater to see a movie, and the several of us African Americans on the trip were told that we couldn’t go because the theater was segregated. The Boy Scout troop, the rest of the boys who were with us, upon hearing that, decided not to go at all. So I remember we spent the evening in the gym at Tulsa University, playing basketball and running on the track and just generally having a great time. And that was an important thing that I don’t think I realized at the time how important that really was to me.

And that same experience I had in the Air Force. It was as though “If he can’t go, none of us are going to do it.” And at this point I began then to realize that the military and the Air Force had, much earlier than the Brown v. Board of Education, or any of those activities that began to talk about integration, the military had already done this, and I believe they had done that in 1947 and 1948. So what I was now living, I was benefiting from the sacrifices and the horrors that had occurred before the military integrated.

So if I can just jump ahead a little bit, in 1976 or ’77, when I was considering applying for the astronaut program, Ben [Benjamin O.] Davis [Jr.], General Ben Davis, who I had known for a very long time, because he was one of the gentleman—he and his wife had always come to our house and who had been one of these gentlemen who talked about airplanes. He called me and he encouraged me to apply for the astronaut program, and he said he wanted me to do it [not] because of him, but because of the Tuskegee Airmen. I asked him who the Tuskegee Airmen were, and he told me the story of the experiment, and I began putting all these pieces together and realized that it was a person like Ben Davis, his father, General Davis, and the Tuskegee Airmen that had so demonstrated their capability to contribute, to make a contribution, that caused this military change in 1947, which then allowed me to go to the Air Force Academy and be as a classmate as opposed to kind of an oddball that is in there only because someone directed that it occur.

A joke was told the day I arrived at the Academy, a racial joke. I’d heard jokes all my life like that. My parents told me just don’t pay any attention to them. Several hours later I was called to the officer in charge of the squadron that I had been assigned to. He apologized profusely for telling the joke and committed to me that I would never be exposed to anything like that in my life. He was Captain Carter. The gentleman’s name was Captain Carter. We called him Bobby Air Power, because first name was Robert and he was very fascinated with airplanes and flying, so we just called him Bobby Air Power. I knew him as he progressed up through his ranks, and he retired as a colonel.

Several years ago, I went to his funeral and I walked up to his wife and I told her about this incident that had occurred forty-five years before—not quite forty-five years, maybe forty-two years before. She knew the story and knew me, though I had never met her. She told me how traumatized he was when he came home that evening. So we hugged. But this was many, many years later, but it was very similar to the experience that I had at Tulsa University and it was really a settling experience for me. Things such as that allowed me the opportunity to do anything that I wanted, because I knew that the stage had been set, and it was a great opportunity then to just do whatever I wanted. And I think that’s what my dad wanted.

Wright: Soon after you left the Air Force Academy, you became involved with South Vietnam and being part of the missions. Tell us how that transition occurred.

Gregory: When you go into the Air Force Academy, you become, if you had not been before, a patriot. [Laughs] Absolutely focused on not only the protection of what you knew as your United States, but you began to believe or you believe that what you would do would establish a kind of the baseline for your next generations.

As soon as I finished flying school, I began volunteering for Vietnam, and, in fact, probably seven or eight months after I’d finished pilot training, I got orders to South Vietnam, specifically Danang Air Base at the northern part of the country, south of the DMZ [demilitarized zone] , but the northern part of South Vietnam, as a rescue helicopter pilot.

I was absolutely—I was just overwhelmed by it. I had no anxiety at all, and just thought that was what I was supposed to do. In June 1966, I headed over. I had a very fulfilling year as a rescue pilot, saved quite a few lives, rescued a lot of folks, and came home in June ’67, with a feeling of satisfaction.

I was still flying helicopters when I came back, and then I had the opportunity to transition to fixed-wing, so I chose fighters. So I moved from helicopters into fighters and was trained as an F-4, a Phantom pilot. They called them Phantoms. At the same time, however, I had applied to Test Pilot School, so I had one of these forks in the road. I was accepted to Test Pilot School, but I was also en route back to Vietnam as a fighter pilot, and I had to make a career choice and chose the Test Pilot School approach. So instead of going back to Vietnam in 1969 as a fighter pilot, I went to the Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River. But I was looking forward to the next tour also, because I would have been in a different kind of airplane, performing a different kind of a role. But as I look back, I think the choice that I made to go to Test Pilot School was probably the best one.

Wright: Was helicopter training your choice? Do you have a choice?

Gregory: Yes, I had a choice. [Laughter] You may find this funny, but at the Academy you are able to select where you want to go to pilot training, or they assign you where you want to go to pilot training. But I was just prepared to get married to this young lady I’d taken to the air show years before, and I began to look at the cities where the pilot training was located. And the one that seemed, you know, if I were going to take somebody on a honeymoon, I’d want to take them to a nice place. So I looked at some of the cities, and the on