Jay Barbree

Barbree grew up on his family's farm in Early County, Georgia, and entered the United States Air Force in 1950, when he was 16 years of age. Following the Air Force, Barbree began his broadcast journalism career at WALB in Albany, Georgia, where, in 1957, he saw Sputnik's spent booster rocket orbiting in the sky and then wrote radio and television reports about the Soviet Union's launch of the first artificial satellite. In 1995 he recieved the NASA Award - for being the only journalist to have covered the first 100 manned spaceflights. Barbree was the author or coauthor of eight books, including two memoirs. In 1993, Shepard, fellow Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton, journalist Howard Benedict, and Barbree collaborated to write the book Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon. Barbree married Jo Reisinger, whom he met while covering her participation in Florida beauty pageants, in 1960. They lived in Merritt Island. They had three children.