Preview of Rocket Reporter-

Rocket Reporter- Elvis, Huntsville, & the Space Shuttle Remembered. Now available at ROCKET REPORTER (lulu.com)

New Book Recalls Time Covering Space Shuttle

My new book is called Rocket Reporter- Elvis, Huntsville, and the Space Shuttle Remembered. It is about the two years I worked as a local television news reporter in Huntsville, Alabama.

The reporting assignment included the first three launches of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Huntsville was the home of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The northern Alabama city was a company town that centered on the space program.

The book is also about the three visits made to Graceland Mansion in Memphis, Tennessee.

I’ll share more about that part of the book later this summer. But for now, the focus is on a twenty-four year old newly married man who has taken his wife on a new journey to a seemingly foreign place.

The move from upstate New York to the heart of Dixie might be seen as an extreme culture shock. But for my wife and me, it was a new adventure. Here’s a preview:

April 1981

As the managers for the Shuttle Columbia got ready for lift off from the Kennedy Space Center, our television news department in Huntsville, Alabama was getting ready to cover the historic moment as a local news story.

Our local news department philosophy was that the network (in our case ABC News) was handling all the specifics about the lift off and mission.

As a local network affiliate, we saw our role as explaining to our viewers what contributions were being made by local employees at the Marshall Space Flight Center and any space-related subcontractors.

The press credential issued to me from the Marshall Space Flight Center permitting my crew and me entry to the NASA facility for one of the first three launches of the Shuttle Columbia. Photo: Newvine Personal Collection

My job as the space beat reporter was to cover those local aspects of the bigger story. Every night leading up to the launch, I would report on some facet of the local impact of the shuttle on northern Alabama.

I would attend satellite news conferences first with the crew, and as the launch got closer, with the launch director and key members of his team. Satellite news conferences were a relatively new technology back in 1981, but that did not matter to any of us. The manager of the news conference would start the briefing.

After the launch director and members of his team spoke, the conference manager would have an engineer switch the audio to each of the NASA centers including the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Edwards Air Force Base in California, White Sands in New Mexico, and eventually to Huntsville.

We would ask our questions of the launch director or whoever was on the dais, and try to connect the answer to the local impact the space shuttle would have on viewers in our audience.

The weekend prior to the launch, I co-anchored the six PM newscast from the Marshall Space Flight Center.

But we had serious transmission problems getting the signal from Marshall to our receiver on Monte Sano Boulevard.

Most of that live reporting was lost due to those problems, but it turned out to be a good thing for the station.

After the weekend snafu, the station’s engineering department scouted out new locations on the Marshall property and performed signal tests.

They found a better location to originate our live reports for the upcoming launch. Had we not attempted the weekend live report, we might have lost an opportunity to do live reporting on the day of Columbia’s liftoff.

Much like NASA doing a shake-down test of systems prior to a launch, our station did a pre-launch shake-down of our Live Eye capability on the weekend newscast prior to the start of the mission.

The day of the launch (April 12, 1981) achieved exactly what we had hoped it would accomplish. NASA had a successful liftoff, the station delivered stories on the local efforts that helped make the mission a success, and our live signal from the Marshall Space Flight Center was clear.

Everything, to use NASA nomenclature, was nominal.

If there was such a thing as a club for journalists covering the space program, I guess I was now a member.

From Rocket Reporter- Elvis, Huntsville, and the Space Shuttle Remembered, by Steve Newvine. Available now at Lulu.com ROCKET REPORTER (lulu.com) Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

He thanks the members of the Merced Senior Club for inviting him to talk about his books and his twice monthly Our Community Story column at one of the group’s meetings recently.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced. 

He thanks the members of the Merced Senior Club for inviting him to talk about his books and his twice-monthly Our Community Story column at one of the group’s meetings recently.

Say Cheese in Hilmar-

Company’s Visitor Center Satisfies Area Children

Hilmar Cheese Visitor Center in Hilmar, Merced County. Photo: Steve Newvine

Growing up in dairy country in upstate New York, a grade school class trip to a milk processing plant was always a possibility for me. Some things never change.

Whether it’s 1968 when I was in grade school, or fifty-five years later in Hilmar. On any given school day, it is not uncommon to find a busload of school children taking the tour of Hilmar Cheese in northern Merced County.

Grade schoolers from Ceres Unified take part in a make-believe ice cream making activity at the Hilmar Farms Visitor Center. Photo: Steve Newvine

The company’s visitor center is a hit for school groups who want something close to the home, full of interesting things to see, and that ends with ice cream.

On a breezy morning in early May, grade schoolers from Ceres Unified School District, their teachers, and several parent chaperones took the free tour in Hilmar.

The easiest way to get there is to head west for five miles at the Lander Road exit from highway 99.

“They love it here,” one of the Hilmar Cheese gift shop employees said as a customer acknowledged the large crowd of youngsters.

The view overhead looking down on the Hilmar Cheese Visitor Center Gift Shop and Café. Photo: Steve Newvine

Hilmar Cheese has been part of the northern Merced community since 1984 when eleven dairy farms banded together with an idea scribbled on a napkin at a coffee shop.

The Visitor Center honors that humble beginning with displays showing how the company has grown over the past four decades. The Center welcomes children and others just about any day of the year with the exception of the major holidays.

The tour is free, and ends at the gift shop and café. There’s also an outdoor waterfall with a walking path to give visitors a chance to walk off any extra calories from lunch at the café.

A giant mural on the side of one of the buildings at Hilmar Cheese. (upper) The same mural in a photo taken from behind the waterfalls feature at the Visitor Center. Photos: Steve Newvine

The company says twenty-percent of all the cheese sold in the US comes from Hilmar Cheese.

In many cases, the cheese is sold under a different brand name. Cheese from Hilmar Cheese is sold in over fifty countries.

In most of the tours given by the team at Hilmar Cheese, visitors learn how cheese is made with hands-on exhibits about cows. They can see workers packaging large crates of cheese.

The visitor center includes a timeline that tells the story of how Hilmar Cheese got started back in 1984. Photo: Steve Newvine

On this particular morning in May, the children were involved in a game that simulated the ice cream making process. The youngsters were wide-eyed and anxious about the game.

That might have been the result of a subtle promise by the group leader of real ice cream for everyone at the end of the tour.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

His books California Back Roads and Can-Do Californians are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at Lulu.com.

Both are also on sale right now at the Merced Courthouse Museum gift shop.

Steve will be the guest speaker at the Merced Senior Center morning meeting on May 12.

For more information, call the Center at (209) 385-8803 or email at tommysoto31@gmail.com

At that event, Steve will have his new book Rocket Reporter available.

The book is the true story of his two years in Huntsville, Alabama where he covered the first three launches of the Space Shuttle Columbia.