Astronaut Cernan was ‘a guy you could have a beer with’

Russ Meyer felt a sense of awe the first time he saw Eugene Cernan.

That was 1972. On Meyer’s home television screen, Cernan was walking (and driving) around the Taurus Littrow lunar valley, picking up moon rocks.

After that, Meyer got to know him, at first because the Apollo 17 mission commander became a Cessna customer. Cernan bought a Cessna 421 Golden Eagle. Meyer ran Cessna.

“He always said he wanted to get a Citation X,” Meyer said. “We never quite got that done.”

Cernan was many things to the world: moon walker, pilot, astronaut. A good and self-effacing public speaker who enthralled crowds, made them laugh.

He often told how he’d traced his young daughter’s initials into the dust of the lunar surface. Cernan told a Wichita audience the story several years ago. When he told his daughter he’d done that, just after he’d come back from the moon, the kid looked bored and asked whether she still got to go to summer camp.

Cernan became two other thing Meyer liked: an advocate for aviation business and a friend. He still felt that sense of awe every time they met and talked. Cernan had spent three days on the moon, walking and working and driving around.

“But he was a guy you could have a beer with,” Meyer said. “Like Neil (Armstrong, another Meyer friend), Gene would never bring up the moon in conversation. He and Neil would answer any question anyone put to them, but they’d never bring it up on their own; they were humble that way.”

Meyer loves all his departed friends; he’s lost several now, and it hurts. He lost Armstrong in 2012 and his friend, golfer and pilot Arnold Palmer, in September. “We’ve lost some very good people,” he said.

And now Cernan, who died Monday at age 82, a fellow pilot who did much good behind the scenes for the aviation industry. Cernan kept many close ties to Wichita aviation for decades – and became one of Meyer’s key allies, in Washington and elsewhere.

Meyer was Cessna Aircraft’s chief executive officer for 27 years, until 2004, and has spent most of the years since then as a general aviation advocate, traveling frequently to Washington to talk Federal Aviation Administration regulations and federal law. Cernan helped him frequently.

“Any time we got criticized in aviation, any time we wanted to accomplish something or promote something in business aviation, Gene and Neil and Arnie were always the first to volunteer to go to Washington,” Meyer said.

“The other thing he did that many people don’t know: Gene and Neil would get on an airplane, without fanfare, and go wherever the military wanted them to go – to the Middle East, to Iraq or Afghanistan – to talk to the troops.”

They had good times together, Meyer and Cernan.

In 2009, in Dayton, Ohio, Meyer was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame. Palmer introduced him at the induction ceremony, and Cernan, Armstrong and six other lunar astronauts looked on, along with thousands of other people.

At one point that night, Cernan came over to Meyer, who was sitting with his family and Palmer, and playfully grabbed both men’s hands, the three of them laughing and carrying on like boys at a prom party.

“I saw him a year ago,” Meyer said. “He still looked like he could pull on a flight suit and climb into a lunar lander.”

Meyer never got over that sense of awe; he felt it every time the two men got together.

“Heck, I still get it every time I look at a full moon,” Meyer said. “I look at it and think: ‘Are you kidding me? We did that?’ ”

Two of his friends did that.

This story was originally published January 18, 2017 at 6:59 PM with the headline "Astronaut Cernan was ‘a guy you could have a beer with’."