Tony Jenzano: The ‘mechanical genius’ who brought the stars to Chapel Hill

Story by: Christian Avy

In 1959, long before NASA became an agency known by its initials, officials were looking for a planetarium to host their early astronauts for “celestial navigation training.”

They looked at many of the country’s largest and best facilities, such as the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, but none fit what they were looking for.

The problem was, each of these facilities required flights out of the way of any of NASA’s major operations from Virginia to the planned sites in Houston and Cape Canaveral. But the NASA officials noticed they would always fly over one small planetarium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

They reached out to Tony Jenzano, director of the Morehead Planetarium, to determine if his facility would be able to help train the future Mercury Seven astronauts.

Jenzano, the son of Italian immigrants, was a “mechanical genius” who took the planetarium to new heights during his tenure, and was instrumental in getting, and keeping the astronauts training in Chapel Hill.

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Jenzano grew up in Philadelphia, joined the U.S. Navy, trained as an electrician, and served in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Once he returned home, he worked in the Philadelphia shipyard wiring ships. He didn’t stay there for long. 

“He hated the job,” his daughter Carol Jenzano said. “He was married to my mom, in a little basement apartment, and he just wanted to do something different than what he was doing.”

Tony Jenzano took out a newspaper advertisement, offering his skills as an electrician. 

“I think he did it for two weeks,” Carol said. “He asked mom if he should do it again, and she felt that it was throwing good money after bad, but he did it again. The third week the Fels Planetarium called him, because they needed an electrician.”

Jenzano learned the ins-and-outs of every piece of equipment he worked with, taking them apart and putting them back together again.

“He just had that ability to question things and go play with it,” Carol said. “The kitchen counter was his workspace for taking the TV apart and putting it back together, and then he’d give it away! It was his jigsaw puzzle. His way to relax was to take something apart and put it back together again.”

Jenzano’s mechanical prowess soon became well known in the planetarium community. When Fels Planetarium director Roy K Marshall was hired as director of the Morehead Planetarium,  he knew he needed to call Jenzano to help with some of the equipment.

Jenzano planned to stay in Chapel Hill for a month or so while assembling Morehead’s new star projector, but he fell in love with the area. Wanting for his children to grow up outside of the city, he decided to move to Chapel Hill permanently and become the planetarium’s technician full-time.

Meanwhile, Marshall, who was also a famous radio and television science broadcaster (think Bill Nye but in the ‘40s and ‘50s), was still flying north every week to produce his television show. Before long, he decided to leave the planetarium, and he gave them some parting advice.

“You’d be stupid if you didn’t hire Tony Jenzano,” he said.

In 1952, Jenzano became director and under his guidance, the planetarium became one of the finest in the country.

“When he first started, he said: ‘You can’t be a good manager unless you understand every job,’” Carol explained. “So he did every job in the planetarium so that he knew it. He was a cashier for a week. He was a narrator for a week. He was the person who did the show for a week. He was an usher for a week. He did everything for a week. And he would say ‘I can now know what to expect, because I know what the job entails.’”

When NASA came calling for a space to hold its celestial navigation training, Jenzano quickly accepted and laid out the groundwork for how the training would get done.

To teach the astronauts the locations of the stars, and how to use them to navigate in case their equipment failed; the Morehead staff would use the planetarium’s state-of-the-art, newly upgraded Zeiss II star projector, one that Jenzano put together himself, along with a swiveling two-seated wooden contraption on barber chair mount, and a vision-restricting canopy pulled from a fighter pilot training device.

The bosses back at Langley liked what they heard from Jenzano, liked the town’s convenient location, and really liked the ability of the astronauts to keep a low-profile while on site. So, starting in 1960, Chapel Hill became a brief home to many of the first space travelers.

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Maybe the historical marker on Franklin Street that hints at Morehead’s relationship with NASA should add another line with Jenzano’s name on it. After all, if it wasn’t for him, the timeline on the bottom could have been a lot shorter than 15 years.

In 1964, the training program had been going strong for a few years, but by that point NASA had already moved from Virginia to Texas, and the Burke Baker Planetarium had opened in Houston that same year.

Michael Neece, the lead expert on the astronaut training program at Morehead Planetarium, has been a guide at the planetarium for years, and has even written a children’s book on the subject, explained that the training almost moved to Houston as well.

“They did a side by side comparison with that brand new facility in Houston versus the Morehead Planetarium, a storied institution,” Neece said. “And they said, ‘No, let’s continue at Morehead. They’ve been training us for four years, and they really know what they’re doing. They know how to keep us safe and not dying in outer space.”

Jenzano didn’t just welcome the astronauts into his planetarium, he and his family often welcomed them into their home.

“My mother was the hostess with the mostess,” Carol said. “She was the type of woman that all of them were crazy about. The astronauts would come out to the house and sit on the porch and have a drink at night after work, just like they were going over to their neighbor’s house.”

Without Jenzano’s hospitality and knowledge of the systems and stars, the training would have likely moved to Houston.

“Jenzano and his wife were just the hospitality king and queen of Chapel Hill,” Neece said. “They were just gracious hosts. They made sure that the astronauts felt protected, and like they were part of the family. I think that was a big piece of it.”

“The astronauts weren’t citizens of Chapel Hill, but they certainly weren’t unfamiliar with it,” Neece said. “Everybody knows Houston. Everybody knows the Cape Canaveral area in Florida. Almost nobody knows anything about Chapel Hill, but 62 of these guys came and trained here. And quite a few of them made strong, lasting friendships with the Jenzano family.”