Southwest couple embark on authorship together

John and Pat Getter worked together, rescued animals together, and now after 34 years of marriage, they've become authors together.

Pat Getter jokes that her first big break in journalism was interviewing her junior high school custodian when she was in seventh grade.

That evolved into being a reporter and show host for TV stations in major markets and later the communications point person for a major Fortune 100 company. As such, she was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and appeared on NBC's "Today Show" when that company recalled a multibillion-dollar product involving more than 600 lawsuits.

Now, she has published a book, "Find Your Inner Popeye -- Work Advice for Square Pegs in the Round Holes of Life."

Why use Popeye?

"He's been around since the dinosaurs," she said. "Popeye wasn't the most attractive guy; he had a speech impediment. But he was honorable ... the guy you could always count on."

The 68-page book uses an unpretentious conversational tone that advises workers on the finesse of leveraging their individualism -- not compromising or sacrificing it. It takes a team player to go to the championship, she notes in the book, but an individual can shine in his position.

Keeping your head down is the proper thing to do, one chapter says, such as when an under-qualified person is made your boss. Conversely, sometimes speaking up for the company good is the right choice.

"Underlings will often tell the boss what they think he wants to hear," she said. "But he really wants to hear the truth. He doesn't need everybody to be a 'yes' man."

The Getters met in 1976 when they worked at television station WLWT in Cincinnati. Both covered breaking news and went out in the field to report stories. John Getter also anchored the weekend news.

He later took a job with KHOU-TV in Houston.

There, his niche was the space program, and he covered the first 35 shuttle missions, becoming personally acquainted with the astronauts.

His books contain tidbits that never made the news.

The astronauts, for example, frequented a certain barbecue restaurant -- Pe-Te's Cajun Barbecue -- near the Johnson Space Center and arranged for its food to be one of their meals while in space. There was a catch: They had to wait to eat it.

"The first three days is when many astronauts get space sickness," he said. "It has to do with a fluid shift in the body."

Once their bodies were acclimated, they broke out the barbecue.

John Getter had his own introduction to space sickness. He spent 200 minutes in weightlessness on zero-gravity flights. There, weightlessness is achieved by the jet climbing to an altitude of 34,000 feet and then plunging toward Earth, effectively simulating what astronauts experience.

John Getter recalled covering the training of Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who was on the ill-fated Challenger shuttle launch in 1986 and how she ended their final interview as she prepared to depart to the launch site in Florida. Dressed in her shuttle gear with its bulky underwear, she brought up their running joke.

"She said, 'Don't shoot me walking away; you know how this thing makes my butt look big,' " he recalled.

He flew there a few days later to witness the liftoff in person, an awe-inspiring moment ... until everything went awry.

The O rings failed.

The shuttle broke apart.

He would later break the story on how the capsule had free-fallen for two agonizingly long minutes, the astronauts inside it alive until they slammed into the ocean.

His Moonwalker series has three books -- "Star Truck, Untold History of the Space Shuttle"; "Timeline, Untold Stories of Space Exploration"; and "To the Moon, Untold Stories of the Space Race," with the longest at 131 pages.

All four can be found at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com as both hardcopy and ebooks.

Contact Summerlin/Summerlin South View reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 387-2949.