From the Streets to the Stars

By Henry J. Dinenno

This book is an inspirational, humorous description of my life from a hard core juvenile delinquent to a top executive in a major corporation. It begins on the streets of New York City and recounts the thievery, property damage, weapons and gang wars that defined my juvenile years. It recalls a transitional phase where the death of my grandfather, a move from New York, my family, my friends, and the heavy handed brothers of Notre Dame High School gradually erased the influence of my juvenile years.
My work during the design phase of both Project Apollo and Space Shuttle, and the unbelievably exciting launches at the Kennedy Space Center are covered with an insiders perspective on how these great teams dealt with successes and failures.
Throughout, I reflect on how the experiences of my delinquent and transitional phases, and my renewed relationship with God, helped me to grow and to use my career successes to help others.
Finally I describe a special invitation to the Planetary Congress of the Association of Space Explorers in Vienna where I spent several days with more than 80 astronauts and cosmonauts that were truly the stars of my world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465385260

Henry J. Dinenno

After receiving his bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering, Mr. Dinenno positions of increasing responsibility at Rockwell International in both the design and launch phases of Project Apollo and the Space Shuttle. He was part of the Challenger accident investigation, and was the Associate Program Director of the team that built Challenger’s replacement. Later in his career he was the Vice President of Advanced Space Programs for national and international ventures. He has received numerous commendations for his technical, management, educational and humanitarian work.

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Copyright © 2011 by Henry J. Dinenno.

Library of Congress Control Number:          2011918923

ISBN:                      Hardcover                      978-1-4653-8525-3

                                 Softcover                      978-1-4653-8524-6

                                 Ebook                            978-1-4653-8526-0

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Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

A Humble Start

The Streets

and The Gang Wars

My World Changed Forever

Watch Out, Connecticut

The Taming of the Delinquent

College Bound

Whitey’s and the Frat Rat

The Making of an Engineer

California and the

Apollo Rockets

A Nuclear Rocket, Sin City, and Moonport, USA

Saturn V Launches Begin

This Was it,

But What’s Next?

The Space Shuttle

Program Ramps Up

Challenger to Space Station to Endeavor

Vice President Dinenno

Europeans do it Differently

An Italian Vacation

Experiencing the

Former USSR

A Trip to the Stars

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family, especially my father who took the necessary unselfish steps during my childhood to remove me from the New York streets before I destroyed my life. This book is also dedicated to Pat and my children who lived through the effects of my financial insecurity and the resulting workaholic attitude during my early adult years.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my loving wife, Suzie, who rescued me from myself, taught me how to really live, and gave me the opportunity to do for her son what my father had done for me.

Foreword

This book represents a compilation of my memories of events that occurred during my life as well as the recollections of others who have better memories than me and have related them to me.

On some occasions, I have changed or omitted names in order to protect the innocent and the guilty.

Introduction

In this book, I describe my transition from being a juvenile delinquent on the streets of New York City to being a senior engineer on the Apollo and Space Shuttle Programs, then as an executive manager, and finally being the vice president of Advanced Programs and Business Development for the Space Division of Rockwell International.

I’m writing this book for several reasons. First, to show parents whose children are growing up in poor, crime-infested inner cities that their decisions and the courageous actions they take can have an enormous impact on their children’s lives.

Secondly, to encourage young people who are growing up in any kind of difficult or oppressive environment to break free, study hard, work hard, and create for themselves a successful adult life.

The third reason is to explain some of the difficult and wonderful things that I’ve lived through, as well as to show the impact that my parents and the Holy Cross Brothers of Notre Dame High School had in turning me from a child who most assuredly would have ended up in jail to an adult that had a successful career in the space industry.

A Humble Start

I was born at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in the Bronx on a stormy summer day to Italian/Irish parents (Henry and Clare Dinenno) just before the start of World War II. My father wasn’t present at my birth; he was on duty in the US Navy somewhere in the Pacific. My mother brought me home from the hospital, and she and her sister (my aunt Mary) raised me until I was about two years old when my father returned from the navy. My parents held all the hopes and dreams for me that first generation Americans have for their first child.

My mother and I lived in the same apartment building as several of our relatives including my aunt Mary, one of my uncles, and my mother’s parents. The apartment building was located on Jacobus Place in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx. Marble Hill was different than most of New York City in that it consisted of a mix of apartment buildings and private residences. It truly was a hill, and because of the hill’s shape, I can see how it may have looked like a marble before any construction began on it.

Marble Hill was located along the banks of the Harlem River between Broadway and the Henry Hudson Bridge just across the river from Columbia University’s Bakers Field. Around the base of the hill were apartment buildings and at the top of a hill were private residences. Most of the apartment buildings were like ours—older buildings made of red brick and six to eight stories in height. Even though it wasn’t a slum, it was still a good breeding ground for juvenile delinquency.

We lived in a basement apartment that was down a small concrete step entryway. We were the same level as a storage room (which was known as the carriage room) where people kept old clothes, appliances, baby carriages, etc. That level also housed the garbage collection area, which was fed by all the garbage chutes in the apartment building above; consequently, we had a lot of rodent and roach problems in our apartment. There were barely enough windows to meet code requirements, and the apartment was always dark and dingy. I think that’s why I had so many childhood diseases (measles, mumps, chicken pox, all kinds of flu, and scarlet fever, which damaged the hearing in my right ear).

I believe my mother and Aunt Mary would have preferred me to be a little girl because they dressed me in fancy clothes and curled my red hair. They would take me for strolls on the sidewalk that ran above the Harlem River to get me out of that dingy apartment. These were my first innocent experiences with the street, but all that changed in just a few years. People used to tell them what a beautiful little girl I was. During my childhood, my aunt served as my second mom. After she got married, things changed a bit because she had five children of her own, but she always treated me like I was her eldest child and I treated her like she was my second mom.

The navy was an important part of my father’s life. He had grown up in Storrs, Connecticut, and went to work in construction before even graduating from grammar school. He then became a cook at the University of Connecticut. In his late teens, he decided to join the navy. About the same time, my mother’s two brothers both joined the navy. After basic training, my father and my two uncles were stationed on the same ship, and they became good friends. Every time they had leave while their ship was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, all three would visit my mother’s parents in Marble Hill and occasionally my father’s parents who lived in Storrs, Connecticut. On one of these visits, my father met my mother; they began dating and eventually got married.

When my father got back from his tour of the Pacific, he came home and saw his son for the first time. He was shocked. After giving my mother a big hug and kiss, he took one look at me and said, This is my son? He was very surprised by my long curly red hair and my cute little outfit. He told my mom that we would be back in the little while and that we were going to the barber shop and were going to get some boy’s clothes. I have some pictures of the before and after, and I have to admit that with my long curly red hair in my frilly outfit, I did look more like a girl than a boy. Shortly thereafter, my father was discharged from the navy and became a plumber, a trade that he learned in the navy. Most of his clients were in Harlem and Greenwich Village, and as I got older, he had all kinds of stories to tell about how many of his clients lived. He was always a good auto mechanic, so he took some trade school courses and got a job working for the Checker Cab company. After a while, he became the head mechanic at one of the service depots where he worked for the next several years.

My mother’s parents, James and Catherine Vaughan, were both smart, hardworking Irish people. My grandfather was a very religious man. He belonged to the Order of St. Francis of Assisi; he had a robe just like the priests and took it with him once a week to a meeting of the Order. In fact, when he died, he was buried in that robe. Their apartment was on the third floor and had a view of the Harlem River, so it was a much more pleasant place to live than our basement-level apartment. I spent a lot of time there especially when it rained because at our apartment water ran down our stairway, past the constantly clogged drain, and right into our living room—rain even blew through the seams between the walls and windows. Our apartment was damp and musty for days after a good rain.

My grandfather was the chief clerk of the superior court in downtown New York City. That position afforded him a badge. He used it to help me a lot when I started getting in trouble with the police.

Grandpa Vaughan had a wonderful Irish tenor voice and would sing at church during special holidays. He also was a wedding singer and sang some of the most romantic Irish songs I’ve ever heard.

My grandmother was an excellent housekeeper and cook. She was the financial manager of the household and was an avid New York Yankees fan. In fact, for many years she would listen to the radio and transcribe every single Yankee game by hand. She was also an excellent pianist and played for me often. During the holidays and at parties throughout the year, my grandfather would sing Irish songs and my grandmother would accompany him. It was wonderful and I remember it clearly to this day. I think these things contributed significantly to my love for sports and music in my later years.

My grandfather—God bless him—spent a lot of time with me. Each night I’d go to his apartment, and he’d help me with reading and math. My reward for doing a good job was being able to watch Howdy Doody on their television. This was a great treat since my parents didn’t have a television.

On weekends, I got to stay over at my grandparent’s apartment, and I loved watching boats going by on the river and the New York Central trains going by along the riverbank. I particularly liked the sounds of the boats and trains at night. It gave me a certain sense of security knowing that even though our household was resting, the world outside was still going on as usual.

Each Sunday, we would go to church, and afterward he would take me to Van Cortland Park. Sometimes we’d watch the soccer games, other times we’d watch the model airplanes, and sometimes we’d just walk around enjoying nature. He would smoke his weekly cigar on these outings. He was my buddy and really took the place of my dad while my dad was working very long hours to keep our family afloat. My grandfather was an extremely good role model, as was my father, and their influence really impacted my later life; but unfortunately, they had little impact on my early life on the streets.

In the eyes of my family, I was a totally different kid than I was on the streets. I was the first child of my parents and the first grandchild on either side of the family, so I really got special treatment. But none of these things kept me from getting in trouble on the streets.

My early childhood was fairly normal until I was about six years old. That’s when I began to go out onto the street alone to play and began meeting other kids. By the time I was seven years old, I was hanging around with a group of older boys who were constantly in trouble, and because I was part of the group, I started to get into trouble as well.

Soon I was organizing a group of boys my age into a gang that we called the Marble Hill Jaguars. Our neighborhood was ethnically pretty diverse and so were the key gang members. There was Michael and Joe who were Irish, Mike who was German, and Philip and Thomas who were Czechoslovakian. At first, our crimes were small: we stole little things like candy from a neighborhood store, used our slingshots to put out streetlights, let the air out of people’s tires, threw eggs at people’s cars, and so on.

We also did some fun things together like taking one of the covers off a fire hydrant, jamming a piece of wood in it, and then opening the valve to create a spray of water that we used to cool off on hot days. We would also take the elevated train (the El) to Miramar pool, which was near 207th Street. One of us would pay to get in and once inside create a diversion like pouring red Jell-O near the diving board and screaming it was blood or setting one of the trash cans on fire. When the staff responded to the diversion, the rest of us would sneak in.

It didn’t take long for us to graduate to bigger crimes. Joe, Mike, and I would ride the El from West 225th Street to Times Square where we would visit the Lionel train store and shoplift as many small accessories as we could. When we got back to Marble Hill, we would sell them, and we used that money to build our gang’s treasury. We also expanded our shoplifting to several other stores that sold military figures, tanks, trucks, and other things that were easy to take and easy to sell.

We were always looking for a way to make more money from our trips to Times Square so we decided to eliminate the train fare by climbing up onto the roof of the train station and jumping over to a car when the train pulled into the station. It was a little tricky because right after this station the train went over a bridge that had beams that were only about eighteen inches above the top of the car. It was real important that we flattened ourselves on the top of the railroad car as we went under these beams.

One kid that wasn’t in our gang decided to ride the train in the same way, but he did not get his head low enough to avoid it being hit by the beams. He was knocked off the train and into the Harlem River where he was found dead later that day. After that, we decided that we should pay the fare but only if we couldn’t duck under the turnstile when the attendant wasn’t looking. That’s how we made all our trips in the future. As we got more organized, we started to divide up responsibilities. Mike, Joe, and I were the providers of the loot. Michael, Philip, and Thomas were the sellers. Our little enterprise was working well, our treasury was growing, and so was the size of our gang.

We began to worry that the shopkeepers would start to notice us, so we decided to take our work to other areas of the city. Street vendors looked like easy targets, and the merchandise they had was much easier to sell. We started working the areas around the port authority, Central Park, Radio City Music Hall, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Normally Joe and I would get into a fight to cause a distraction. The vendor would usually try and break up the fight and that’s when Mike would grab what he could and run. We were now into higher-end merchandise like earrings, necklaces, pendants, cufflinks, and switchblade knives (which we kept for ourselves).

Business was booming. We had customers in our neighborhood, our schools, and even from other neighborhoods. We used the money that we collected to buy things that we could make into small weapons to defend ourselves from other gangs. By now I was eight, and we began making wooden guns with rubber bands that shot razor blades, high-powered slingshots using ball bearings as ammunition, and later, with the help of some of the older boys (Anthony and Charlie), we made a zip gun. We also bought some less harmful weapons like a rawhide whip and a couple of small wooden baseball bats that we cut down to a size that was easier to conceal.

Philip stole a key to the carriage room from his parents, and since they had nothing stored in there, they never missed it. The carriage room was up the street from our apartment and had the same kind of step-down entry to the basement. It was a room about as big as our entire apartment and was a great place for us to hold meetings. And we were always cautious to not be seen entering the room. The backdoor of the carriage room had the same lock as the front door and led to a passageway that eventually ended up in the garbage collection area. We found a small closet about halfway down this passageway that was ideal to store our weapons and treasury in, and it was dark and isolated enough that it could not easily be found. It was so dark where the closet was located that we needed flashlights when we went there. We bought a hasp and a padlock and then put our weapons and most of our money in that closet. We also stashed our loot in there until we felt things had cooled off enough that we could sell it. I guess we were lucky since it never was discovered or broken into.

As the Jaguars grew more powerful and larger in number, we began to attract the attention of some of the other gangs in the area. This led to a number of events, any one of which could have landed us in juvenile hall.

Our biggest rival was the Adrian Avenue Boys. They were really upset because we were selling our stuff in their neighborhood, and we were able to buy weapon-making materials with the money we made. They kept warning us of consequences. They started to get specific and threatened to hurt one of our members and possibly attack us. We ignored those threats. But we shouldn’t have because eventually they followed through on them.

The Streets

and The Gang Wars

My parents had decided to send me to St. John’s Catholic School. They felt that I wouldn’t do well in public school because I was so hard to discipline. They were right. St. John’s was about a half mile away in Kingsbridge. I walked to and from school every day, which wasn’t bad in good weather but was miserable in bad weather. In spite of the fact that I got in a fair amount of trouble with the sisters because of behavioral problems, I did pretty well scholastically. I had two major problems in school: fighting and shooting off my big mouth. The sisters were tough. I got my hands slapped with a triangular ruler at least three times a week, I had to wash my mouth out with soap almost every day, and I stood in the corner so often that I started to like it. After-school detention was also routine. I wrote so many compositions about nonsensical subjects that I started repeating myself. Fortunately, the sisters used to rotate assignments for detention supervision, so my repetition didn’t get noticed.

I used to get to school early so that I could play ringaleerio (a hide-and-seek-type game) before classes began. Every day I would be one of the last ones to leave for class, would run up the stairs as fast as I could, and barely make it on time. One day, when I was making my mad dash to get to class, I burst through the double doors at the end of the hallway. I had no way of knowing that the mother superior was just about to enter the doorway from the other side. The door hit her hard and knocked her to the floor. The other sisters, who were standing at their classroom doorways, came running to her aid and were screaming for help. By that time, the school had brought in several brothers to teach the boys in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. One of the brothers heard the commotion and came running as well. The mother superior was bruised a little but had no serious injuries. The brother helped her to her feet and then told her he would take care of me. I was afraid he was going to beat the living daylights out of me, but instead, he gave me a stern lecture and ordered me to spend two hours at the end of every school day for a week in his classroom. During those two hours, he would first talk to me about my behavior, and then he would give me a reading assignment and finally a quiz on the reading assignment. He told me that every quiz that I failed would add an additional day of detention. Fortunately, I didn’t fail any, but from that time on, I avoided that brother like the plague.

One of the sisters, Mother Catherine, had taken a liking to me and convinced me to become an altar boy. I think she thought that being an altar boy would help me become better behaved. She arranged an appointment with the pastor and told him about her recommendation that I be an altar boy. He interviewed me, and although he was reluctant, he enrolled me in the training that I needed. So I studied up, went to practices, and became an altar boy.

There were two things I really liked about being an altar boy. The first was that if the mass I was serving conflicted with school, I got an automatic pass from school. I’d usually stretch the time I was away from school a lot longer than the mass actually took. I used this extra time to go downstairs and look at the Legion of Decency listing. This listing had all the current movies and would indicate which were acceptable or unacceptable in part by church censors. There was also a blacklist, which were the movies that were totally unacceptable. I would write these unacceptable movies down so that the boys and I could make every effort to see them.

The second thing I liked was the white wine. After mass, the priest and I would tidy up the altar and the sanctuary. I would always take longer than him, so he would leave me to finish up and he’d go back to the priest house. This gave me a chance to have a little of the white wine that was used during the Eucharist. I don’t think encouraging me to be an altar boy resulted in what the sister expected. But I was glad I did it.

I know this will sound odd, but I was pretty religious. I followed most of the Ten Commandments, I went to confession almost every Saturday, and confessed a lot of what I had done (not always everything). And I went to mass every Sunday even though I had served mass during the week. I really believed in the Catholic religion, and so did everyone in my family. I just had trouble following some of the rules.

I started showing an interest in girls at about nine years old. My first girlfriend was Rita. She was a pretty little Puerto Rican girl, and she spoke with a little accent. She was the first girl I ever kissed. The guys in the gang thought it was okay, but the adults in the neighborhood who used to see us hugging and kissing complained to her parents. Consequently, a month into my first romance, my girlfriend was forbidden to see me. For a while she sent messages to me but that soon stopped, and when she would see me on the street, she’d walk away without even speaking.

I got over it and started looking for a new girlfriend, after all a gang leader needed a girlfriend. I met my new girlfriend while hanging out on the Harlem River side of the sidewalk on 225th Street. She lived in a much fancier apartment house than ours. I don’t remember her real name but everyone, including me, called her Coconuts. She was a Jewish girl and was very well developed for her age. Even though I wasn’t Jewish, her parents accepted me and treated me very well. They even invited me to dinner and prayers during the Jewish holidays, which I enjoyed very