For Wilshire Baptist Church
So here we are, recalling the marvel and magic of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon 50 years ago. I don’t know what it means, if anything, to anyone born after that event, but to me it was and still is a huge cosmic event. And yet, the strongest memory I have of those days is driving out across the coastal plains with my grandparents in search of the man in the trailer.
It was 1969 and I was 10 years old and had been deposited with my brother and sister at my grandparents’ house in Orange, Texas for two weeks while our parents were on vacation. Thanks to the timing of the visit, we sat on the floor in front of the TV like people all around the world and watched the grainy black-and-white images of men walking on the moon. When the astronauts returned safely to earth, they were ushered into an Airstream trailer that had been modified into a mobile quarantine facility (MQF), and we were ready to go back outside and play.
But while the story on TV had ended, it had really just begun for us, because there was a man in the trailer with the three astronauts named John Hirasaki, and he was a native son of Orange County. This was of great interest to my grandfather, because Hirasaki’s own grandfather, Kichimatsu Kishi, was an immigrant from Japan who had pioneered rice farming in southeast Texas. My grandfather had been the county agricultural extension agent and knew the family, so he and my grandmother drove us out into the countryside to see the swamps and coastal plains that the Kishi family had transformed into valuable, productive land.
What I didn’t understand at the time — and have just discovered recently through reading — was the sacrifices that the Kishi family made in coming to the United States, and the risks their grandson, Hirasaki, took inside that trailer with the astronauts. Nobody knew for sure what type of pathogens the astronauts might bring home from the moon, although Michael Crichton had described a horrific scenario earlier that year in his science-fiction novel, “The Andromeda Strain.” For that reason, a three-week quarantine was planned for the astronauts when they returned. They’d be joined by a physician and an engineer in the MQF and at a larger quarantine facility in Houston. They’d also be joined by a large number of white mice that would serve as the first signal that something bad was happening.
When the call went out for a NASA engineer to be quarantined with the astronauts, four volunteered and they drew straws with Hirasaki pulling the short one. He was just 28 at the time, and his job was to maintain the MQF from the inside but also to move the moon rocks from the recovered Apollo capsule into the MQF. In doing so, he was one of the first five people to see the moon rocks in person.
Was he anxious? Hirasaki said he read Crichton’s book but was not deterred. “The concern of contamination was very real. The probability of that occurring was very small,” he said in an interview years later.
The mice survived, and the astronauts, the doctor and Hirasaki were released from quarantine after 18 days. “It was a wonderful feeling to be outside and just feel the fresh air and the wind on your face,” he said later in an interview with ABC News.
While Hirasaki was still in the trailer with the Apollo astronauts, we were rattling across the rice fields of Orange County in a Chevy, seeing the land that gave birth to this unsung American hero. I can’t imagine that we three kids were a very attentive audience in the back seat as my grandfather pointed to this and that and made frequent reference to “old man Kishi.” But something obviously stuck with me to be thinking about it now. I do remember feeling detained and cooped up, perhaps like Hirasaki and the astronauts. Maybe I was impressed with my grandfather’s pride in these people from another country who had touched his own life. Today I am mostly just struck by the selfless sacrifice of Hirasaki and others like him who risk all and work quietly and humbly behind the scenes for the greater good.