THE AVIAT0R’S SUIT
Michael Chriss
It can get really cold in an observatory. There you are, all alone, high up on a platform near the top of the telescope, the dome shutters wide open, and the winter temperature well below freezing. The dome is unheated, of course, so as not to create air currents that would blur your images. You have been there for maybe 3 hours or so, sitting in a chair, peering through a small, frigid eyepiece, trying to keep a faint guide star on the crosswires as you seek to photograph some faint and incredibly far away object, just barely visible to your icy staring eye. You do this every clear night, from sundown, all through the dark, until the sun rises the next day, while the world sleeps. Summers are pretty nice, even balmy, with the starry vault twinkling high over you. Spring and Fall are not too bad either, but winter is cold, bone chillingly cold.
I had always wanted to be an astronomer and my graduate school years were spent this way. True, I was at the Steward Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, so I suppose I could have been colder, say if I were at some site in Minnesota, but cold is cold, and the desert in winter is cold enough, thank you. And although I really enjoyed my time on the telescope, I recall the dread I used to feel in winter each night as the sun went down and I made ready for yet one more freezing night with the stars.
Of course I dressed appropriately: long johns, two pair of trousers, 2 sweaters over a flannel shirt, a scarf and mittens. You’d think that would be enough, wouldn’t you? It wasn’t. I suppose the reason was that I didn’t get to move around much during these night-long sessions. You see, using a telescope requires that you stayed glued to the guiding eyepiece, stick still, occasionally pushing a button on your hand-held control box, and seeing that the telescope responded suitably so that the track star remained absolutely stationary in the field of view. If you weren’t punctilious in this effort you paid a price: in the morning, when you developed your plates, you would find that what should be pinpoint star images were instead smeared out into oval shapes and unusable for accurate measurement. That meant, of course, that you essentially suffered for nothing because you then had to repeat the effort the next night. And deal with the cold again.
These were the post-war years and curious “yellow-front” stores were everywhere, selling an amazing assortment of war surplus stuff for dimes on the dollar. One of these stores was in downtown Tucson, right next to the cheap cafeteria where I sometimes went to consume a 25 cent meal of sorts, right next to the Congress Hotel. One day I spied in that store an olive green aviator contraption, a sort of overalls that were laced, up, down, and sideways, with electrical heating wires, not unlike an electric blanket. It was only $5- it couldn’t have been more because then I wouldn’t have been able to buy it on first sight and take it home with me. Oh boy!, no more cold nights for me.
There was one hitch though: these heated aviator overalls were made for bomber crews on missions that had them flying at 35,000 feet in subfreezing air. The wearers would plug in their suits to the airplane’s 24 volt system by means of something called a “Jones Plug”. Of course, we had no such plug-outlet system at the observatory – only the standard plugs and outlets that one finds at home, say for your toaster or lamp. No problem, I thought. I could just attach a regular plug to the suit, stick that into a 24 volt transformer, and I was in business.
So I scrounged around the basement shop in the observatory to see what I could find. What I found was a length of really heavy-duty wiring, the kind of gauge you would use in connecting Boulder dam to a dynamo. Keeping with this scale was an immense plug which must have been designed for charging a WW2 submarine battery bank. No matter, they would work -more than work!- and I lost no time in connecting the whole thing together and hard wiring the appendage into the waist socket of my liberated aviator suit. I could hardly wait for that night to try it out.
I decided that the best arrangement was to put the overalls on top of my long johns and under my outer trousers. I handled the problem of gaining access to the connector plug rather neatly by reaching into my pants and pulling the contraption out through my open fly, with about 18 inches of this industrial cable hanging down at the end of which was this humongous plug with two gigantic prongs. This end I then plugged into an extension cord which led to the observatory transformer, and I quickly selected my heat level with a twist of the dial. Within a minute I was feeling downright toasty. What a difference; what comfort; what bliss.
A few hours later I had ended the first exposure of the evening, unplugged myself, and headed down one floor to deposit the photographic plate in the darkroom and load another. Upon emerging through the door I saw that the light was on in Dr. Carpenter’s office. Dr. Edwin Francis Carpenter was the observatory director. He was an eminent astronomer and perhaps the most important person in my life at that time: my mentor for 8 years of astronomical studies, as well as my thesis advisor. I should also add that he was the epitome of the professorial image, in every way the proper Bostonian, and the model of what I had hoped to be one day myself. Of course I went in to greet him and to tell him how that night’s observations were going. I open his door, stepped in, and was arrested by the most astonished look on his face. He seemed to be staring at my fly.
You bet he was staring at my fly. I had quite forgotten about that thick as your wrist wire with the fist sized big black plug that was dangling out of my open pants zipper. Holy moly!! What must he have been thinking? Whatever it was, in his immaculately enunciated Bostonian accent he inquired, “How are things going Michael”, but all the while his gaze was riveted on my fly! I answered, “just fine”. We continued along those lines, and proper man that he was, he never mentioned anything else.
I wince whenever I think about it now. And I still do think of it, because, you see, I still have those aviator overalls, and they still have that colossal wire and plug attachment drooping from it. The overalls hang from a clothing rack in my basement at home. I see them every time I go down there. And even though it’s been over 60 years since Dr. Carpenter saw it that night, it still has the power to astonish. Only now it’s me who is the astonishee. As I approach old age I wonder whether it’s possible that I have achieved my goal of becoming like my professorial mentor: I wonder if I have now become Dr. Carpenter.