Episode 75 (The Ballad of Captain Dwight)

the memory palace

Nate DiMeo

Radiotopia, Publicradio, History, Natedimeo

4.8 • 7.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2015

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The finale of the 2015 Summer Season.

Music

* Under the credits is Harlaamstrat 74 off of John Dankworth's Modesty Blaise score.

* There's Branches, by Keith Kenniff

* Then The Big Ocean, from Ben Sollee's score to Maidentrip.

* Then End of the World from Dan Romer's score to Beasts of the Southern Wild.

* There's The Sage, pulling once more from the dope-as-hell self-titled album from the Chico Hamilton Quintet.

* There's a loop pulled from Worm is Green's song, Brand New Day

* There's The Light, from my pal Jimmy's wonderful project, The Album Leaf. Go buy their albums.

* The piece at the end is the theme to Charlie Countryman from Christophe Beck's score.

* Oh: stuff gets heavy to Ghosts I from Nine Inch Nails.

* And finally (though out of order), playing over the fall-out from JFK's death is Now by Goldmund.

Notes

A selected bibliography.

* We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program, by Richard Paul and Steven Moss

* Voices of Contemporary and Historical Black Pioneers, Farmer & Shepard-Wynn, editors

* The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe

* Distinguished African Americans in Aviation and Space Sciences, by Gulbert, Sawyer, and Fannin

* The All-American Boys, Walt Cunningham's memoir.

* The Ebony article mentioned in the piece can be read here.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the memory palace.
0:02.4	I'm Nate Demet.
0:05.7	One white, one Asian, one negro.
0:11.2	That was Kennedy's dream for the moon.
0:14.1	He liked the sound of it.
0:16.3	Like what it would say one day, a decade or so out.
0:20.1	Like what it would say to the world when an American rocket took three American men from
0:24.5	different backgrounds to a whole other world.
0:28.0	The people of Earth would look up to the sky and see the American melting pot.
0:32.7	See all the peoples of the world represented.
0:35.3	The people who are white are African-American or Asian anyway.
0:38.5	It was a dream.
0:40.4	A dream we are told he had as a new president at a particularly dreamy, particularly brief
0:46.2	moment in his brief presidency when he could say July and August cannot be too hot and
0:52.7	half expected to be so.
0:55.2	So he sent his people out to find him a negro.
0:59.0	That is Edward Dwight.
1:04.7	When the Kennedy administration put the word out that it wanted a black pilot in the
1:08.6	astronaut training program, someone who met all the same military and academic and physical
1:13.5	criteria that were being applied to white candidates, there were very few people to choose
1:18.4	from.
1:19.4	It's something like flight time.
	...

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