WHEN he was growing up in rural southern Illinois, each member of Joseph Schmitt’s large family had their own job to do. Aunt Katie baked for everyone; he remembered the big pie-safe on her porch. His brother did the hog-butchering, while an uncle made all the family’s shoes. And he, as a boy, also had his special jobs. He delivered clean washing to his widowed mother’s customers, pulling it along in his little four-wheel wagon, and he shined shoes and cleaned spittoons in his brother-in-law’s barbershop. At a dime a shine, it took 300 of them to get enough money to buy his mother a new cooking stove. But even his pocket-change contribution kept the family going.

His grown-up career was the same to him: just playing his small part. By a real piece of luck, and because he was good with his hands—especially at mending flightsuits and rigging parachutes—he was taken on by NASA as a spacesuit technician in the most exciting years of America’s space project, and saw the first of almost everything. He was there when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947; when Alan Shepard made America’s first manned space flight, in 1961; when John Glenn first orbited Earth, in 1962; when Apollo 8 went round the moon in 1968, and when Apollo 11’s module landed on it in 1969, for him the most mind-boggling moment of all. The team had never worked so hard at anything. But he went on for many years yet, to suit up men for the first Skylab flight and the first Shuttles, before in 1983 he left to get on with all the stuff at home that needed fixing.

As a suit tech, he considered himself a low man on the pole. His job was to help design the spacesuits and then, before the flight, put the astronauts into them, one suit tech to each astronaut. First came cotton long johns and, in later years (after some accidents) a proper urine-collection device, which he thought up himself. Then came the heavy tailor-made suit, pressurised to five pounds per square inch. The extra-vehicular suits for Apollo 11 were a real piece of work: 28 layers of nylon coated with Kapton and Teflon, built to withstand a temperature range of 500˚F and assault from micro-meteorites. Each one cost $100,000. After the flight, he vacuumed the moondust out of them. He didn’t keep any.

Dinner with Rockwell

For suiting-up he worked carefully to a checklist, as he liked to do even when he packed his suitcase. Checklists saved people. He was looking for fatal air-leaks, especially around the zippers, consulting the suit-pressure instrument panel he had made himself. (It was crude, but it did the job.) Carry-on items such as pens and snacks had already been put in the right pockets. He itemised for stowage the things astronauts liked to take up—wedding rings, flags and the like. Communication lines were connected, and over-gloves, boots and five-pound helmets locked on.

The biggest deal, three hours before lift-off, was to hook the astronauts to portable oxygen ventilators to reduce the nitrogen in their blood. Without that, they would get the bends on re-entry. Because the ventilators lasted only half an hour, he would carry out spares to the launch pad, walking behind the smiling, waving astronauts with his head down. He had no wish to be photographed; he was the back-up man.

Besides, his job was not over. Inside the spacecraft he had to fix the astronauts in their restraint straps and check they were comfortable. In the early years, bent over them like a surgeon with a patient in his white cap and overalls, he would wish them a “real good flight”. Later on the close-out crew were not allowed to talk to the astronauts, so he used hand signals and smiles. His face and securing touch were Shepard’s and Glenn’s and Neil Armstrong’s last physical contact with Earth before, as Glenn put it, “there are no more hands”. But he made light of it. America’s astronauts were as fine a group of fellows as you’d ever want to meet, and he never saw them nervous. Business as normal.

He was therefore quite embarrassed when fame brushed by. First, he was on “What’s My Line?” on TV in 1963, where four celebrities had to guess what job he did. Then Norman Rockwell painted him, once suiting up John Young, and once right behind Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins in “From the Earth to the Moon.” When he asked why he had been put there, so close to those heroes, Rockwell said that was where he had always seen him.

For the TV show he had to go to New York City, his first visit, where he marvelled that the lights stayed on all night. For the Rockwell pictures he took a spacesuit to Stockbridge, Massachusetts in his car, so that Rockwell could capture all the colours. At dinner there he felt out of place with so many educated people, but luckily he knew to use the silverware from the outside. So he bluffed his way through.

Perhaps his best memento was the gold medal Glenn gave him after his orbits of Earth, with his initials, JS, on the back. Glenn took about ten up with him; the rest went to the president and other bigwigs. He felt “real proud” to get it, but kept quiet. So quiet that when, in his 80s, a long-abandoned Mercury space capsule was recovered from the seabed and he let slip at the barber’s that he had put Gus Grissom in it, the whole shop looked at him in disbelief, before the barber went on snipping.