Forrest McCartney
Keith’s note: Former Kennedy Space Center Director Forrest McCartney died yesterday after a short battle with cancer.
NASA Mourns Loss of Former Kennedy Director Forrest McCartney
“McCartney served as director of Kennedy under detail from the U. S. Air Force beginning Oct. 1, 1986. He came to NASA from the position of commander, Air Force Space Division and concluded a distinguished 35-year military career on Aug. 31, 1987, with a retirement ceremony at the office of the Secretary of the Air Force in the Pentagon.”
Bio at Wikipedia
Quote from Forrest McCartney: You know, life is too short to not enjoy what you do and you
ought to get up in the morning and look forward to going to work. You ought to feel good about what you
do. You ought to feel good about what
you accomplished and when you go home at night you ought to have a self-satisfied
feeling about it. And I summarized that
as whistle, you ought to whistle when you go to work, you ought to whistle when
you go home. And if you’re not able to do
that you ought to go find a job somewhere that you can do that, because life’s
too short and your health is too fragile to go through life not doing what you
want to do. http://kscoralhistory.ksc.n…
I worked at KSC in the 80’s and met the General on a few occasions even though I was a lowly CS at the time. He believed in management by walking around and I think he made a real impact at KSC during our ramp back up post Challenger to those that saw he didn’t just sit up on top of the Headquarters bldg and hide in his office. He would really engage you out on the floor – great guy that will be missed.