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A Ride with Godiva. Busy as ever at Holloman, Bachelor Stapp still manages to lead his private version of the good life. He has bought a three-bedroom home at 300 Lovers Lane in nearby Alamogordo, where he lives alone and lumps it. He refuses to own a television set ("I am not ready for intellectual suicide"). His principal indulgence is some excellent hi-fi equipment.
A great deal of his spare time is still devoted to his curbstone clinic, still without fee. What little is left, Stapp spends as a happy-go lucky gardener. His fig, tamarind, apricot and northern bamboo trees lean in splendid disarray among the devil grass. Never having fully recovered from his career as a Wear-Ever salesman, Bachelor Stapp is also an accomplished cook. Visiting Air Force brass, or important civilians such as Northrop's Chief Mechanic Jake Superata (whom Stapp credits with much of the rocket research success), have learned to test their palates on Stapp-prepared specialties.* The Colonel himself can handle a man-sized portion. Most mealtimes, as he puts it in one of his famed "Stappisms," find him "hungry as a woodpecker with a headache."
Awaking each morning, he puts in a half-hour of concentration on his day's work and an hour of study with his medical journals before he breakfasts and drives to the lab. For the short ride, he carefully straps himself into his 1953 Cadillac (called Godiva, because "it rides beautifully but keeps me out of new clothes") with a lap-type safety belt. On the way home in the late afternoon, he does his own shopping at the base commissary. Time passes quickly. Says he: "Sometimes I feel beaten to death by a steady procession of Decembers."
For the Future. A lot of people—including his brother Celso, also a physician—are urging Stapp to quit. They fear that, while he may pull out of each ride successfully, the cumulative damage to his system may be dangerous. Stapp pooh-poohs such talk, is determined to go on riding his rocket sled. He knows that what he is learning by pressing to the edge of inhuman endurance will hold true even when today's planes are in the museums and tomorrow's speeds have dwindled to slow-motion space crawling.
"The human body," says Colonel Stapp, "comes in only two shapes and three colors. I don't expect there will be any changes, so what we learn about it now will serve us for a long time to come."
*Mach 1 is the speed of sound: 760 m.p.h. at sea level, 660 m.p.h. at 35,332 ft. (beginning of the stratosphere) and above. †50 gs for ¼ of a second, building up at a rate of 500 gs per second; 40 gs for 1/5 of a second, building up at 1,500 gs per second; 25 gs for one second; building up at 600 gs per second. * One of them: "Siberian Tiger Steak." Recipe: "Take a one-vertebra thickness of Tbone, rub with sodium glutamate, powdered ginger, powdered mustard, garlic, thyme and cumin seed before broiling."