Mission Accomplished

By Carolanne Roberts

Gilroy Chow’s series of successes started in the Mississippi Delta and much later looped back there again. The decades in between contain the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster – triumph, drama, colorful locales, achievement, an ongoing reverence for roots and, notably, playing a key part in history.

Chow’s vibrant memories are the fodder for many a good conversation.

“We would sit on the stoop, looking up at the stars, getting ready for our Boy Scout astronomy badges,” says the 1965 Mississippi State graduate, whose parents left the Delta for New York, NY, when Chow, their middle son, was six years old. “I had no idea that I would be answering President Kennedy’s mandate to send men to the moon.”

Nor did he have any inkling of a space-related future during his years at State as an industrial management major, a program which at the time was housed in the School of Business before later being moved to engineering. Chow embraced his classes, balancing them with the occasional game of bridge and gatherings with MSU’s 13 other Chinese-American students from the Delta.

The program, he says, “taught me vocational, technical and, best of all, life skills” that readied him to answer an ad in The New York Times. It landed him at Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation after graduation.

Even then, space seemed as far away as… space. As a student at State, Chow had heard U.S. President John F. Kennedy refer to space exploration as “one of the great adventures of all time.” The notion didn’t feel real until he had the opportunity to take the next step in his career with Grumman – a move to Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center was just starting to take shape. When he arrived, he saw launch pads under construction and an empty Manned Spacecraft Operations Building, its high bays awaiting the future.

“Our job was to get all the equipment for the Saturn 5 Lunar Module onto the site and to test it out,” he recalls. “Hundreds of pieces of equipment had to be made.”

That was 1966.

I worked all of Apollo,” Chow says of his seven-year NASA stint. “For one thing, I helped train the astronauts in the simulators. There are a lot of big names in sports and music, but consider that only 12 men walked on the moon – and I spent some time with eight of those 12. My grandson Jack met one of them at an Apollo reunion. I looked over, and he was talking to Harrison Schmitt, who later became a U.S. Senator from New Mexico.

But back in the early years, the atmosphere was less about stardom and more about deeply focused hard work. The most storied efforts came in 1970 with the Apollo 13 mission, when an oxygen tank explosion stranded astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert in space for several days and vented the contents of both of the service module’s oxygen tanks into space. Chow was one of the team of engineers on the ground who tag-teamed in 12-hour shifts to refit a carbon dioxide filter to eliminate deadly gas in the lunar module to which the crew had retreated.

“The atmosphere was intense around me, but you know your training, and in an urgent situation, you do not panic,” he recalls. “We knew there was a way to get the astronauts back, but a time constraint was there for sure. There were other elements that were equally important, and every one of them had to happen.” *

Of course, we know the positive outcome – a solution was successfully improvised, and the crew splashed down safely while tens of millions watched on television.

When the Apollo space program ended in 1973, Chow was led in a different direction.

“I looked at opportunities in Singapore, at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, in Iran and New York – or I could’ve stayed in Florida,” shares Chow.

His ultimate choice: Clarksdale – as in the Mississippi Delta, his birthplace, haven of family members. It brought with it a career shift. First, he worked in the family grocery business, then for 40 years as a plant engineer.

All around him, the Chinese culture provided a warm welcome and enriched his life. Chow and his wife Sally, who also grew up in the Delta, have two adult children and three grandchildren who carry on traditions, especially cooking the family’s trademark fried rice in a 26-inch heirloom wok, a wedding gift 52 years ago.

“Sally and I have pieced together this recipe through the years,” says Chow, who, ever the engineer, adds, “The secret is to get the temperature right for each separate ingredient – and get the proportions right.”

Chow worked on all of the Apollo missions.

Photo by Kirsten Shaw

A YouTube video features the Chows cooking with exquisite ease and precision, a ballet of culinary choreography. Hanging on a nearby wall is a treasured story from Southern Living celebrating the family grocery and that divine rice. His pride in them rivals that of the space sagas. Sally and Gilroy Chow are also involved with establishing and supporting the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum on the campus of Delta State University. His collection of official Apollo flight crew patches is on loan to the Mississippi Children’s Museum in Meridian, which he also supports. The couple travels to such events as an invitation-only Smithsonian workshop in California – and food events scattered throughout the country. The Chows were among roughly 30 Asian American chefs featured a few years ago in Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy: Stories of Chinese Food and Identity in America, a nearly year-long exhibition at New York’s Museum of Chinese in America.

Living in the Delta, far from Chow’s childhood days of delivering Chinese food by bicycle in New York, means being nearer his alma mater. He’s an MSU Bulldog Club member and season ticket holder for all sports. (The Chow men cheered the Bulldogs at all three championship College World Series games in Omaha in 2021.)

“Maroon and white are still my favorite colors,” he boasts.

Looking back, Chow realizes he hardly paused to appreciate his contributions in their own time. In fact, 20 years after Apollo, his young daughter showed him her American history book, displaying photos of Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11 and the era.

“That’s when it hit me, seeing us in the history books,” he says. “It represents people working together, furthering knowledge and meeting challenges. This really was the achievement of the century.

“In retrospect, I’m so proud of those days and so happy that I got to be part of them.”

Gilroy and Sally Chow have been involved with establishing and supporting the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, and they are also widely recognizedreserving their culture through cooking.

Photo by Kirsten Shaw

* See the article on David Garraway on p.6 to read about the MSU Films documentary XIII, in which Chow recounts his part in that Apollo mission.