““My task to keep everyone focused wasn’t easy. A cartoonist pictured two workers in hard hats on a scaffold, one about to jump, holding a notice that he had been fired. The other guy was on a telephone, asking: “Can we get Gene Cernan up here to give Smith that ‘It’s not the end, it’s the beginning’ speech again?” There were a lot of Smiths out there, for some 13,000 Cape workers had lost their jobs over the past several years, and another 900 would get pink slips as soon as we blasted off. Many of the Grumman troops literally worked themselves into unemployment when our lunar module went out the door at Bethpage, and more would be gone at the moment of liftoff. But during one visit there, a supervisor told me, “We’re giving you our heart and soul on this one, Geno. This is the best LM that’s ever gonna fly.” That””
