When 90-year-old Columbus resident David Jones was a kid, he used to see airplanes in the sky and think to himself, “Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to fly a plane or work on one.”
He had no way of knowing he would not only one day help to create those planes, but he would assist in building spacecrafts for some of NASA’s earliest space missions.
Born in Crawford in the 1920s, Jones lived there until 1943 and later joined the U.S. Coast Guard. There he worked as a steward on a destroyer escort which went from the U.S. to North Africa during World War II. He was in the Coast Guard for “two years, 27 days and one hour” — in his own words.
After his service with the Coast Guard ended in December 1945, Jones trained as a mechanic in St. Louis. In the 1950s, he and a friend opened a shop where they repaired and painted cars.
Then, in 1956, Jones found out that McDonnell Aircraft Corporation — a St. Louis aerospace manufacturing company that built airplanes for the U.S. military — was hiring. Excited for the possibilities, Jones applied.
“I had always wanted to work on planes,” he said.
He was hired and took a six-week long training course. After passing it, he was assigned work on the assembly line, putting together parts for planes. There, he worked on planes for the Air Force, such as the F-4 Phantom jets. It was soon after, in 1960, that Jones would get his big break in moving from making aircrafts to making spacecrafts.
One Friday, his supervisor at McDonnell told him to report to the space program the following Monday.
Jones remembers rumors that had spread about a large room in the company’s building that was said to house engineers working on spacecraft.
“You could pass by it, but you didn’t know what was going on inside,” he said.
Monday Jones reported to that room, where — spread out across tables — were the parts of the space shuttle.
“And I saw it. Everything. The components. Everything was round,” he remembered. “And I was wondering how in the world this is going to fly with no wings?”
Jones laughed, as he remembered how, because he was so used to putting together airplanes, he was shocked to see plans for a structure so different in composition.
“But after we put it all together, then they had a rocket,” Jones said. “They were going to send it up. And that’s how we started working. Putting modules together. It was amazing to see that.”
That was a few years after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and triggered the space race between itself and the U.S.. Jones said at that time he remembers having to work “a lot of overtime.”
“The United States was trying to get ahead of Russia in the space program. And we were working all kinds of hours,” he said.
Despite the competition with the Soviets and the fight against Communism that were a part of America’s motivation for working on the space program, Jones said he was never particularly invested in the conflict himself.
“You would think about it, but I never let it bother me too much,” he said. “But you couldn’t help but think about it.”
Nonetheless, Jones remembers it as an exciting time. It was then that he worked on eight Mercury spacecrafts and 12 Gemini spacecrafts. He also met astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, all of whom he said were friendly. He remembers seeing a few of the space capsules launch from Cape Canaveral. The first one he saw wasn’t the first one to launch, he said, but more likely the fourth. He remembers it as March or Februrary, and that snow covered the ground as they left St. Louis to see it.
“And we got down to Florida, people were wearing shorts,” Jones said with a laugh. “I remember seeing that. … That was ’61 or ’62.”
Watching the spacecrafts being launched was always exciting for Jones, but his favorite thing about the job was acting as ground support for the astronaut during their flight simulations.
“It was just a good experience,” he said. “I loved working with them.”
Jones worked for McDonnell for 20 years. He moved back to Columbus in 1976 to be closer to his grandmother who was living by herself. In Columbus, he worked for Army Corps of Engineers and later as a lock foreman at the John C. Stennis Lock & Dam.
“I was the first black lock foreman on the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway,” he said.
Jones retired in 1990.
He still lives in Columbus, where he stores keepsakes from the days he spent building spacecrafts, including: a plaque which went into space on one of the Gemini missions and which has been signed by several astronauts; a piece of the heat shield from one of the spacecrafts; and a photograph of his mechanic crew signed by the crew members and several astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin, Virgil Grissom and L. Gordon Cooper.
The picture shows Jones with 15 other men. He is the only black man among them.
“It was exciting,” he said.
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