This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts

to sports and from business to history and everything in between, including your stories.

Send them to Our American Stories.com. And now our next story comes to us from Craig Sumner,

who worked at NASA from the time of the Apollo missions to near the end of the space shuttle program.

Take it away, Craig.

I had a dad that was a Marine fighter pilot in this case in World War II in Korea.

And I got to put a little excerpt in here.

You know, what my parents did were kind of my benchmark.

And dad flew in the Pacific dropping bombs on Japanese islands,

and he flew one mission with Charles Lindberg. And where most of these Marines would take off

with a thousand pound bomb in the center and two 500-pound bombs on the wing, Charles Lindberg

took off with three, 1,000-pound bombs and went on to design a 2,000 pound bomb released in the center. Those stories

kind of stayed with me as a young person and I knew someday I wanted to fly. And so as I started

thinking about NASA, when it really started going in the 60s, I thought I really would like

to go work for NASA. I used to build model airplanes, the blue angels, you know, I'd build space stations.

So I had a dream, I had an interest in following that kind of a path.

I wasn't the strongest student.

When I first got started in school, I became a lot more serious later on and realized how

important that math and science was going

to be to be to be in order for me to be able to make choices.

You know, I'd finished up two years of college and I had an associate of science degree

in electrical engineering.

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