| Our Special Guest |
The book "Rocket Boys" was a real
thrill for us to read. After only the first chapter, we decided to share
the story by taking turns reading it to one another at bed time. Since
we are both interested in rockets, we often stopped reading to grab our
notes and actually do some of the calculations or research some of the
ideas mentioned in the book. When we reached the end of our reading journey,
we thought that it would be wonderful if we could locate Mr. Hickam to
thank him for writing such a great story.
It took a little research,
but we were able to locate a "Mr. Homer H. Hickam" on the internet.
We sent out a short letter along with our web address. We thought
it would be great if he really got the message, and wondered if he would
actually stop by in cyberspace. In a couple of days we got a really great
email...
| Subject: Re: Rockets
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 99 09:11:30 -0600 From: Homer Hickam < > To: "Rutherford" <ruthven@swbell.net> Dear Jerry and Carol: Thank you so much for your wonderful e-mail. I am very glad that you liked Rocket Boys. I wrote it for people like you. The film based on the book (titled for no apparent reason: October Sky - actually it's an anagram) will be out on Feb. 19. I hope you like it, too. Keep working on those rockets but don't blow yourself up! Best Always, Homer Hickam PS - Carol, great poetry! You're very talented.
You are, too, Jerry
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| By
Tracy Jones
SEPTEMBER 21, 1998:Surely Coalwood,
W.V., is the kind of place developers envision when they promise that their
tree-sheltered, sidewalk-lined neighborhoods will bring back the America
of yesterday. In the late '50s and early '60s, Coalwood was a quiet town,
the fathers at work in the local mine, the mothers at home, the kids in
orderly classrooms or roaming the streets and nearby hills under the watchful
eyes of the adults around them. Rocket Boys (Delacorte Press), retired
NASA engineer Homer Hickam's tale of how he learned to build homemade rockets
in Coalwood, reaffirms much of what the nation thinks it remembers about
the prosperous post-war years. But what makes it an even truer work is
Hickam's scrupulous avoidance of any unearned nostalgia about that time and place. Hickam, whose book has been
made into a motion picture of the same title (filmed in Oliver Springs
and Knoxville last year), says he fought with himself to keep his description
fair and accurate. "My tendency when I write about Coalwood is maybe to
wax a little much about how idyllic it was, when in fact there were a great
many tensions," he says. "Not the least of which was that every day our
fathers disappeared into this mine and they weren't necessarily going to
come back."
Due, he says, to a recession
in the steel industry and the closing of several mines nearby, "Coalwood
in the late '50s was starting to fray around the edges. In the fall of
1957, when [the Russians launched] Sputnik and everything started to change
for the United States, life in Coalwood started to change, too."
As then-14-year-old Hickam
knew, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were rushing to be the first in space.
The Soviets won the first leg of the race with Sputnik, the first man-made
satellite to orbit the earth. Hickam remembers clearly what that moment
meant.
"My whole life there had always
been life in Coalwood, and life everywhere else. All of the sudden, with
Sputnik passing right overhead, there was something connecting us with
the whole rest of the world."
Educators all over America
were pressured to start turning out scientists to join the space race.
Overnight, Hickam says, homework doubled. "The wonder I write about, of
seeing Sputnik, was laced with fear. The Russians had been painted as these
awful bogeymen who were going to take over the country if we weren't careful."
Buckling down to serious study just wasn't Hickam's way. Although he was
favored by the town's "Great Six," the town's formidable cabal of elementary
school teachers (the name itself is a corruption of "grades one through
six"), he had never connected the many books they pressed on him with any
future ambitions "It took Sputnik to give me a grander dream," he says.
That dream, tackled at the
age of 14, was that he and his buddies would build and launch rockets from
Hickam's backyard. A spread in Life magazine gave Hickam the basic design—all
he needed, he figured, was a cylinder of some sort and the 12 cherry bombs
he'd been saving for a special occasion.
The first rocket didn't work.
In fact, it blew up his mother's pride and joy, her brand-new white picket
rose garden fence. Although she was officially angry about the destruction,
Elsie Hickam was also intrigued. Did her younger son really think he could
build a rocket? If so, could it be his way out of Coalwood and into college?
Hickam says his mother's challenge
was a turning point in his life. "It never really occurred to me that my
mom was worried about my future. It was really a shock when she drew me
aside and said, 'I've been watching you your whole life, and it's time
you got a plan to get out of this place.'"
Thus the Big Creek Missile
Agency was born. The first rocket (after the cherry bomb incident) went
6 feet in the air, and the last one, launched as Hickam was about to head
for college, went almost 6 miles. Along the way, Hickam and the five other
members of the BCMA won a National Science Fair medal, taught themselves
calculus and trigonometry, and got themselves out of McDowell County and
coal mining and into college. Four, including Hickam, became engineers.
"Without us realizing it,"
says Hickam, "all the adults in town were pushing us out." Because his
father was a mine superintendent, Hickam had a slightly more privileged
existence than the other boys. Still, his father, a miner's son, had been
a miner himself until the company boss recognized something special in
him and made him his protégé. He remained sensitive in many
ways about his lack of formal education.
"He had a job that ordinarily
required an engineering degree, and he didn't get the respect of a lot
of people because he didn't have that degree. That was something I always
heard, how important it was to get that 'piece of paper.' It wasn't how
much you knew, but you needed those credentials."
Hickam's father is a formidable
figure throughout the book, a smart and stubborn man who didn't suffer
fools—or dreamy sons—gladly. But Hickam does not mean for Rocket Boys to
be an indictment of his late father.
"I never doubted the love and
support of my parents and all the adults around me. That was a given. The
problem was understanding what form it existed in and coming to grips with
that terrible stoicism." For those raised in the Depression, as his father
was, Hickam says, love was demonstrated "by the roof over your head and
the food on the table. The assumption that the family loved one another
was just that—that's the assumption and you go along with it.
"My dad came out of a lot of
turmoil," Hickam continues. "He saw his father struggling his whole life.
I think Dad worked so hard that when he got to a certain level [of success],
if he could have kept everything static after that, he would have been
happy. That's impossible, of course."
Certainly Hickam's own life
changed in ways he never predicted when he was looking at rockets in Life
magazine. His distinguished career with NASA took him to Russia, Europe,
and Japan, where he trained the first Japanese astronauts. He is also a
scuba instructor and has organized and participated in many diving rescues.
Practically the only place he hasn't been is in space, although at 55,
he still holds out hope.
Coalwood and McDowell County
have also changed. As Hickam's mother predicted long ago, when she urged
her son to go to college, the mine closed, and the county population has
declined from about 200,000 in the early '60s to about 70,000 now. Walking
through Coalwood recently, Hickam says, "was like walking through the ruins
at ancient Greece."
But there are still students
at Hickam's alma mater, Big Creek High School, who are eager, as he once
was, to get out into the bigger world.
This summer the county held
a reception for Hickam and the four other surviving rocket boys at the
War Hotel—once a place, Hickam says, of shady reputation, now a renovated
and refurbished jewel. Hickam gave the commencement address for the graduates.
"My message to them was that
they were going to be surprised, when they went out into the world, by
what a good education they had been given in south West Virginia. And they
were going to surprise a lot of other people by that education." And, he
told them, they had another advantage they had probably never considered.
"I told them they were coming
from a real place, not a manufactured little suburb but a place that has
its own personality, and that living among these old hills you absorb their
personality, too, and you take that with you for the rest of your life.
I wanted them to realize they
were special just because of the place they were coming from."
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