She's one of prominent figures in Leesville history

Carolyn Leach Huntoon may be the most famous person in the 1958 graduation class of Leesville High School.

An icon in the history of Vernon Parish, she is the only woman to have served as the director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. She also served presidents George W. Bush and William Clinton as the Department of Energy's assistant secretary for Environmental Management, a Senate-confirmed position.

Huntoon, who directed the Johnson Space Center from 1994-96, and some fellow classmates will gather for a mini-reunion at the Leesville High School homecoming festivities on Oct. 16.

"At our age it's too long to wait every five years to have a reunion, so we get together every year," she said.

In September of last year Women in Aerospace presented her with a lifetime achievement award for her "sustained and exemplary leadership at NASA, the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy, her exceptional scientific contributions towards understanding the effects of spaceflight on the human body, and her dedication and mentorship of astronauts and aerospace professionals."

The youngest of six children, the 75-year-old Huntoon credits her initial formation to her parents, Claude and Lucille Leach. Claude worked at a sawmill and when that closed he ran a plumbing business. Her older brother, Buddy, overcame childhood polio and served in various political offices including the U.S. House of Representatives from 1979-81.

Carolyn and her husband, Harrison Hibbert Huntoon, who runs a small textile company, live in Barrington, Rhode Island, and they have a daughter and two granddaughters.

'Good times growing up'

"I had good times growing up in Leesville," said Huntoon, who was a band member while at LHS. "I had good adult influence. My teachers were great in grade school and high school. They made me want to learn, and learn more and more. Dad wanted all of us to go to college, and we did. A lot of my good friends are still in Leesville."

Huntoon didn't venture far from Leesville to go to college, majoring in biology and medical technology at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches for three years before finishing her college career doing off-campus hospital training at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans.

"A lot of my friends from Leesville went there (NSU), and my two older sisters went there, and I loved every minute," said Huntoon, who joined the Delta Zeta sorority at NSU and served one year as its vice president. She was also a member of the Purple Jackets, a women's service group at the university.

She pursued her Master of Science and doctorate degrees at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, where she "enjoyed immensely" working for two years in the clinical lab at M.D. Anderson Hospital. While at BCM, one of her professors was Dr. Harry Lipscomb, who was selected as one of the principal investigators for two of the Gemini spacecraft medical experiments.

That connection led to her working with some of the Gemini astronauts and eventually getting hired by NASA, where she initially worked as a research physiologist and set up labs to test blood and urine samples of the astronauts.

"I encouraged her to try to get a job at NASA," said John Rummel, a former planetary protection officer for NASA who met Huntoon in 1964 and has been a friend since. "She did, and she went on to work with the Chris Krafts of the world, getting to that level of management."

Kraft, NASA's first flight director, worked such historic missions as America's first human spaceflight, orbital flight and spacewalk.

"I was working at the Johnson Space Center at the beginning of the Apollo Program and worked through it and Skylab, becoming very involved in Skylab and the experiments on board," Huntoon said in a NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. "My total involvement for a period of time was in the issues of taking care of the people on board, whether it was physiology, and then later the hygiene and safety."

Life science research pioneer

She became a pioneer in human life science research, creating and supervising projects in the Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and Space Shuttle programs. She also was instrumental in the astronaut recruiting process that for the first time sought to hire women and minorities. It was especially hard to recruit women at the time, she said, because no women had served as astronauts.

"We got quite a few to apply, and we ended up selecting a half a dozen, so it was good," she said of the first females who came on board in 1978. One of those women was Sally Ride, the first woman to fly in space.

"We became friends," Huntoon said. "I did quite a bit with her as she started having to speak with people around the world. I tagged along and was a friend and colleague in those situations." She said she was also invited by Ride's family to attend a special memorial service after she died of pancreatic cancer at age 61 in 2012.

Huntoon not only worked with astronauts but "understood that group's unique culture," said Rummel. "She was very much involved in working with that group from a management standpoint and very influential with that group. She had a very strong management style but she was very fair."

"She was an excellent scientist," said Dr. Arnauld E. Nicogossian, who worked with Huntoon at the Johnson Space Center for many years while he eventually became a senior adviser on issues such as aerospace medicine. "She was recognized by many national and international organizations, particularly for her work with the Russians with the joint Space Station."

Dealt with Challenger tragedy

During Huntoon's rise through the ranks, she was the associate director of the Johnson Space Center in January of 1986 when the Space Shuttle orbiter Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members.

"That was very hard," she said. "Those were friends. I was involved with their selection and training. I helped select them to go into space. When they were killed after the launch, it affected me a great deal, but being in the position I was in, I had to stand tall and continue with our work."

"She never appeared stressed," said Rummel, "and she was in a lot of situations in which she would've been expected to show stress. She was there in the front lines during the Challenger tragedy — deeply involved in that situation because she had such a high involvement with the astronauts. She had a different kind of relationship with them that most at a management level did not have with astronauts. As a group, they were a little leery of upper management, but they trusted her."

President Reagan, in his speech to the nation after the tragedy, said, "We will never forget them, not the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

Huntoon said she remembers Reagan coming to Houston to speak at the Challenger memorial service, providing the incentive to continue the work, saying the "dedicated men and women of NASA ... must forge ahead, with a space program that is effective, safe and efficient, but bold and committed."

NASA did "a lot of work" after the tragedy, said Huntoon, and "did quite a bit to study and understand exactly what went wrong. We decided, as you know, that the o-rings had frozen and so were not pliable when they should've been. We found a lot of things could be better, and things that needed fixing got fixed."

Huntoon went on to become the director of the Space Center, during which time there were 12 successful Shuttle flights. The City of Leesville, in 1994 when Huntoon took that position, formally celebrated Carolyn Leach Huntoon Day on her birthday, Aug. 25.

A lot of people to manage

"In that position, she was responsible for 14-15,000 people — about 3-5,000 civil servants and 12-14,000 contractors," said Rummel. "Her boss was the NASA administrator. Each center under her, such as the Kennedy Space Flight Center or the Ames Research Center, had different priorities within their center, so that was a lot of people to manage, and she did it with the same strong but fair leadership."

Although the first female to be the Center director, gender exclusivity wasn't foremost on her mind. In the Space Center Oral History she recalled she once got in trouble for saying in an interview that her hope was "that we would one day not need the Federal Women's Program. We don't have a Federal Men's Program. It should be all the same.

"You would've thought I had taken the Lord's name in vain," she went on. "I was really chastised for saying that."

That didn't set her back, though. She was chosen to serve on the Senior Air Force Advisory Council, where, Rummel said, she dealt with top-secret issues and helped guide the Air Force through advanced technologies and personnel issues.

She worked from 1996-97 as a science adviser for President Clinton, serving under John "Jack" Gibbons, then the assistant to the president for science and technology. She also worked on the faculty of George Washington University before being confirmed by the Senate in 1999 to be an assistant secretary for environmental management at the DOE.

Oversaw DOE cleanup

As the assistant secretary, Dr. Huntoon oversaw the DOE's cleanup of the nation's nuclear weapons complex at 113 sites in 30 states and one territory. Additionally, she was responsible for the management of seven of the department's field offices.

"As you know, you don't get rid of nuclear waste," she said. "You package it and move it." Some of the sites it was moved to are underground facilities in New Mexico at Albuquerque and Carlsbad. That work is far from over, she said, "but I think we accomplished a lot while there."

In retirement, Huntoon serves as consultant to several technical organizations and continues to write — she has written more than 200 papers, book chapters and books that reflect her research on the endocrine control of fluid and electrolyte metabolism and the physiological effects of spaceflight. She has fellowship status in the American Astronautical Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Aerospace Medical Association.

She said residents of Rhode Island, on first hearing her speak, invariably ask, "Where are you from?"

When she tells them she's from Louisiana, they'll say they figured by her accent she is from the South.

"Then," she said, "they inevitably ask, 'What are you doing here?' I tell them, 'My husband works here.' That usually satisfies them."

Her work through her career was as "a role model for women," said Nicogossian, "as far as how to make it as a scientist, how to break new ground. She was an outstanding leader and outstanding scientist, especially in space biology and medicine."

"She could always be counted on," said Rummel. "There was no doubt that her word was very good no matter what the topic was."

Even with a Louisiana accent.

Bob Tompkins is the storyteller for The Town Talk. Follow him on Twitter @Btom_TownTalk and like him on Facebook at www.thetowntalk.com