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A self-proclaimed "good old boy," Tim Baker hails from a small community in Alabama, not even big enough to be considered a town.
But despite his rural beginnings, Baker went on to participate in an important part of American history before serving as the assistant director of Truman's Physical Plant.
Baker graduated from Auburn University (Ala.) with a degree in civil engineering. He was hired as assistant director of the Physical Plant in 2007, a job he accepted after leaving his three-department supervisor position at his local Home Depot — a post-retirement job that was supposed to occupy his time and, at his wife Krista's request, get him out of the house.
Long before Baker lived in Missouri, though, he attended Auburn University from 1974 to 1978 studying civil engineering. During his fourth year at Auburn, he was unable to find a civil engineering job, and instead took a semester off to work for a large electrical company.
Two and a-half years later, he went back to school at the University of Alabama-Huntsville to study electrical engineering. He never received a degree, but instead received engineering certificates after being hired to work for the McDonald Douglas Astronautics Corporation at NASA facilities. From 1980 to 1993, Baker performed numerous jobs for the company, originally working on nuclear projects.
On one unforgettable assignment, Baker and a team of engineers worked to repair the experimental support structure used for equipment on the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Baker was assigned to the project after the job was taken away from the original contractors because they were running behind schedule, resulting in several missed launch dates.
"We had to get launched in time, in order to catch Haley's Comet, and we did," he said. "We literally worked for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for several weeks there, getting the thing together. We finally got it all done."
Baker said he was in Mission Control on the day of the infamous launch, because he was the lead electrical engineer for the following launch.
"I sat there and watched about the first minute of it going up, and at about that time I saw another engineer coming down the hall that I needed to talk [to]," he said. "I stepped outside the door to talk to him. I heard somebody say, ‘What the Hell?' I turned around and looked through the window, and there was a cloud of smoke up in the air. I'll never forget this one fellow there that was one of my co-workers. He said, ‘It blew up.'"
Seventy-three seconds after its launch, the Challenger had exploded, killing all seven of its passengers.
There was uncertainty about the cause of the explosion, and Baker and the other employees were asked to leave the premises.
"We were all scared that that something we had done during that vertical integration of the Haley's Comet experiments had come lose and fallen back and hit one of the satellites. They had proven to be very volatile during testing," he said.
During the investigation, it was found that the support structure had remained intact and was not the cause of the explosion. Leaking o-rings were actually the cause, Baker said.
Aside from this tragic incident, Baker says he enjoyed his time working for NASA and that he occasionally does miss it.
This summer Baker addressed students involved in the Joseph Baldwin Academy and Upward Bound programs about his experiences at NASA. He said he finds it most important to encourage students to reach for their goals.
"I've met some kids that think because they're from a small, rural area and went to a small high school, that they might not be able do some of the things that they would like to do," Baker said. "I encourage them that they can. It may take you several steps to get where you want to be. Thomas Edison failed 100,000 times before he got the light bulb right. He never gave up."
Karl Schneider, Director of the Physical Plant has worked closely with Baker since 2007.
"He's a really good person to have for electrical engineering, wiring, things like that. He's been a great help," Schneider said.
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