CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- America's earliest astronauts blasted off into space from a launch pad that one man ruled with such an iron fist, no terrorist or Soviet spy would dare cross his path.
German born, with a rich accent that remains to this day, Guenter Wendt was relentless in his pursuit of safety and security at NASA's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launch sites.
Such was his reputation that the astronauts respectfully called him "Pad Fuhrer."
Now, with the United States at war with terrorists, Wendt looks back on those heady days of the 1960s with nostalgia, remembering how racing the Soviet Union to the Moon was a significant part of how the country fought the Cold War.
"We didn't worry so much about car bombings and things like that because the security at the Cape was pretty tight in those days," said Wendt, who retired in 1989 after working 30 years at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center (KSC) as a government contractor employee.
"At that time terrorists were not that brave and they didn't have the means of doing things on a grand scale," Wendt told SPACE.com from his home in Titusville, across the Indian River from KSC. "And nothing ever really happened in the United States."
What officials did worry about was the success of their missions, the safety of their astronauts and the ever-present threat imposed by offshore Russian fishing trawlers that were loaded with a bunch of antennae and never seemed to drop any nets in the water.
"Their presence was ominous," Wendt writes in his memoirs, "The Unbroken Chain," published this month by Apogee Books of Ontario, Canada.
Managers were worried that the Russian spy boat would try to send a radio signal that would blow up a rocket shortly after liftoff. In those early days the system was finicky and had inadvertently been disrupted by such things as the radio from a taxi.
So engineers invented a command destruct code that could be hardwired into an electrical plug on the rocket. If the launch was scrubbed, it was Wendt's job to make sure the plug was properly replaced following each attempt.
"It was all highly classified and secured. We had to make damn sure that no one was going to blow up our vehicle as part of a terrorist act," he wrote.
Wendt said he kept a sharp eye out for any suspicious behavior, not necessarily due to fear of any security breach, but because safety was always uppermost in his mind.
"My frame of mind was always playing the 'What if?' game. You know, it was like you were always strung out on the end of a tree limb, and you think what if someone has a saw. What are you going to do?"
Sometimes that meant calling in the FBI.
"I had a straight line to an office in Orlando. If I thought something was funny I could have some surveillance done. But these were always small, localized things."
He recalled one incident, which didn't make it in his book, about a contractor manager he suspected of taking drugs at the launch pad. He couldn't make the accusation without a few facts because the manager might have had a prescription, in which case Wendt would be vulnerable to a nasty lawsuit. A quick phone call, a little leg work and officials proved that the manager was an accident waiting to happen. Wendt said the manager was escorted off the base, never to return.
However, it wasn't always serious; Wendt's practical jokes, creativity in sidestepping bureaucracy and the determined way in which he took personal responsibility for what happened on his launch pad is legendary along Florida' Space Coast.
His book, co-written with Russell Still, is filled with dozens of such stories -- some classic, many never revealed before -- about the astronauts, technicians, engineers and other officials Wendt interacted with for three decades.
From Alan Shepard getting arrested after being framed by Gus Grissom over an allegedly stolen car; to a sting operation involving black lace panties, a beautiful feminine voice that actually belonged to a gruff male and Robert Crippen, the history of manned spaceflight now includes some wild new chapters.
More than a minor supporting player in the drama that was America's race to the Moon, Wendt nevertheless stresses he was just one person in a long, unbroken chain of contributors responsible for the United States' success in space.
"Is one link more important than the other one? No. If one link breaks, the whole chain isn't worth a nickel," Wendt said. "In a chain, no one is insignificant."
Hence the name of his book: "The Unbroken Chain."
Born and educated in Germany, he crossed to America in 1949 and became a U.S. citizen in 1955. Contrary to what many assume, Wendt was not part of the German rocket team headed by Wernher von Braun.
He worked for both McDonnell Douglas during the Mercury and Gemini programs, and then following the Apollo 1 fire joined North American Rockwell in 1967. Hollywood producers, space historians and even underwater salvage experts now seek out Wendt's perspective on the U.S. space program.
He has consulted with Tom Hanks and both the movie "Apollo 13" and the HBO series "From the Earth to the Moon." He's appeared on the short-lived television series "The Cape," which starred Corbin Bernsen.
And more recently Wendt accompanied Curt Newport on the recovery of the Liberty Bell Seven spacecraft, which sunk following Grissom's Mercury flight in 1961.
A local icon of the space program in Florida, Wendt still has dreams for his adopted nation and often lectures schoolchildren and college students alike on the unrealized benefits that await all humanity in space.
The gist of his message: "We built the Model A Ford. Now you guys need to go out and build a Corvette."
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