nderstandably, Edwin Eugene Aldrin’s Clark senior yearbook profile offers no clues that he would seek a life largely spent in the skies. The Wright brothers had made the first powered airplane flight at Kitty Hawk only 12 years earlier, and aside from the World War I exploits of ace fighter pilots, the notion of being airborne still seemed an outlandish prospect. The Worcester native, who was nicknamed “Shrimp” for his diminutive size, majored in German as an undergraduate, was a member of the Kappa Phi fraternity, performed in the
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play “The Enemy of the People” and pulled the trigger for the Senior Rifle Team. His profile describes a young man teeming with “good humor and optimism” who never seemed ill at ease, and it takes a good-natured poke at his study habits: “He has never become thin with overstudy or worn away his expansive smile with too much strenuous work.” Aldrin played along. “Life is too short and art is too long,” he wrote in the yearbook, “for the over-consumption of my grey matter.” The truth is that Edwin Aldrin was driven. Following graduation he studied math and physics — Goddard was his professor in 1915/16 — at Clark and Worcester Polytechnic Institute before earning his doctorate in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Decades later, Buzz would also enroll at MIT, becoming the first astronaut to hold a doctorate. (Buzz Aldrin notes his own advanced education did not endear him to the other astronauts, and he consistently earned low scores in NASA’s peer-rating system. “Here was this egghead from MIT without test-pilot
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“Dad was aware in the mid-1920s that Goddard needed funding for his rocket work,” Aldrin says. “He knew Guggenheim had a lot of money, but it was obvious that Guggenheim wouldn’t know who Eddie Aldrin was. So Eddie went to Charles Lindbergh and asked him to put in a good word with Harry Guggenheim. He did, and Goddard got his funding. Everyone thinks it was Lindbergh who did all that, but it was really Dad who saw the need.”
Edwin Sr. had met his wife, Marion Moon, when he was working as an aide to Gen. Billy Mitchell. The cosmic coincidence of her maiden name would only be realized four decades later.
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