Page 146 - Cousins - Celebrities, Saints & Sinners
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Pete Conrad
8th Cousin
1 time removed
Common Ancestor
Father: Wallerand Dumont Born: Died:
Comines, Nord, Nord-Pas-de- 2 June 1930 8 July 1998
Calais, France Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Ojai, California, USA
1637 - 1713
Mother: Grietje Kijs Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. (Captain, USN), was an
Zwolle, Overijssel, Netherlands American NASA astronaut, aeronautical engineer, naval
1635 – 1728 officer and aviator, test pilot, and commanded the Apollo
12 space mission, on which he became the third man to walk on
the Moon. Conrad was selected in NASA's second astronaut class.
He set an eight-day space endurance record in 1966 along with
his Command Pilot Gordon Cooper on his first spaceflight, Gemini
5. Later, Conrad commanded Gemini 11 in 1966, and Apollo 12 in
1969. After Apollo, he commanded Skylab 2, the first crewed
Skylab mission. On the mission, he and his crewmates repaired
significant launch damage to the Skylab space station. For
this, President Jimmy Carter awarded him the Congressional
Space Medal of Honor in 1978.
After he retired from NASA in 1973, he became a vice president
of American Television and Communications Company. He went
on to work for McDonnell Douglas, as a vice president. During his
tenure, he served as vice president of marketing, senior vice
president of marketing, staff vice president of international business development, and vice president of
project development.
Pete Conrad was born in Philadelphia, the third child and the first son of Charles Conrad Sr. (1892–1969)
and Frances De Rappelage Conrad (nee Vinson; 1899–1981), a well-to-do real estate and banking family.
Conrad was considered a bright, intelligent boy, but he continually struggled with his schoolwork. He
suffered from dyslexia, a condition little understood at the time. Conrad attended the Haverford School,
a private academy in Haverford, Pennsylvania, that previous generations of Conrads had attended. Even
after his family's financial downturn, his uncle Egerton supported his continued schooling at Haverford.
However, Pete's dyslexia continued to frustrate his academic efforts. After he failed most of his 11th
grade exams, Haverford expelled him from school.
Conrad's mother refused to believe that her son was unintelligent, and she set about finding him a
suitable school. She found Darrow School in New Lebanon, New York. There, Conrad learned how to
apply a systems approach to learning, and thus found a way to work around his dyslexia. Despite having
to repeat the 11th grade, Conrad so excelled at Darrow that after his graduation in 1949, he not only
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