The Astronaut Wives Club

This past week, ABC premiered a TV show based on Lily Koppel’s 2013 novel The Astronaut’s Wives Club: A True Story.

A mix of seven budding sartorialists and social climbing housewives are on their own missions to help their husbands make history in space, but they experience loneliness, isolation, betrayal and even death along the way.

Left: Life Magazine , 1959


Below: The astronaut wives on their way to Cape Canaveral, 1959

Old Florida beaches, the 1950s Florida pastel-colored architecture and the vintage fashion is what attracted me the most to the show. Much of the storyline takes place in Cape Canaveral, Florida. ABC did a splendid job in attempting to recapture central Florida in the 1950s.

Left: Cape Canaveral, 1959. Courtesy of Spaceline



Below: Brevard County, FL (Cape Canaveral) in 1958, photo courtesy of Florida Memory

I have yet to read the book, but I watched the first episode and was pleasantly intrigued at how the storyline swept past introductions and broke right into mini-storylines pertaining to each wife.

The story begins in the Kennedy era, where the race to get a man in space before then Soviet space program is no easy feat. Louise Shepard, wife of Alan Shepard, becomes the show’s protagonist when her husband makes history by becoming the first American to travel into space.

Shepard, along with glamourous Renee Carpenter, a preppy Jo Schirra, prim and proper Annie Glenn (wife of John Glenn), and other characters like Betty Grissom, Trudy Cooper and Marge Slayton all in part create a storyline that makes us feel like we are back in Florida in the 1950s and 60s’.

Renee Carpenter is my favorite Astronaut Wife so far. Her optimism and willingness to break social code, along with her bright, gaudy clothes makes her hard not to look at. It was rumored she was also great friends with one of my favorite icons, Jackie Kennedy.


Below: The Carpenter's and the Kennedy's, courtesy of JK Library

To get an idea of Old Florida during the 1950s and 60s and to watch a great show, The Astronaut Wives Club plays on Thursdays on ABC at 8 p.m.



Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/books/review/lily-koppels-astronaut-wives-club.html?_r=0
http://nypost.com/2015/06/12/these-badass-women-inspired-astronaut-wives-club/ http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mercury/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mercury/index.html