Astronaut Check-up: An Interview with Rose Church

During the test program, if I thought the astronauts were getting a little drowsy and not responding very well, one of my methods was to tell some of the jokes that were off-color because they were the only ones they would laugh at. That would wake them up.
And another time, the doctor would be playing some sort of a joke on me, and they'd say, "Rose, we're going to lunch. You monitor this segment of the test program." And that segment was the urine dump system. And they had to try it even because our test programs would go 8 hours to 24 hours, and so we'd have a lot of fun during that time.
With Gus Grissom, again, he was a wonderful, a very good test pilot, and he did a lot of complaining during the space program testing. And I always visualized him walking down the corridor, and when he would walk, his legs would swing outward like a farmer behind a plow; I don't think he was a farmer, though. He had a funny walk. He was very good.
And some of the other test pilots, other astronauts . . . Wally Schirra was always fun to work with. He was like a little boy, always had a grin on his face. Frank Borman used to hate it when I had to shave little circles on his head because he was one of the first astronauts to have his EEG monitored, the brain waves. And when he signed my book, he wrote, "Thanks for the haircut, Rose."

INTERVIEWER: And Neil Armstrong? You also worked with . . .

Oh, Neil Armstrong, he was a quiet sort of a guy. When they picked him to go to the moon, be the first astronaut to walk on the moon, I thought to myself, "Now how is he going to communicate with the people on Earth." But he did very well with his little saying about one step for mankind and so forth. He did very well.