Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, a basketball sized satellite weighing 183 pounds. October 4, 1957 changed the world. The Space Age began.
I remember lying in front of our black and white television as John Glenn and others paved the way for Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon - on the moon!
I watched as a tiny silver spec called Telstar (look it up) orbited over my house and dreamed of being in space. I think I still would go given the chance!
One of my son’s first words was astronaut; and as a result, we spent many, many days exploring the Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He went to Space Camp. I went to Camp Marriot with a suitcase full of books - really! Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Gate are all favorites at my house.
A favorite book is Rocket Boys: A Memoir by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
Hickam was a NASA engineer at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. His memoir recalls how his life changed with the launch of Sputnik. He was fourteen years old in October 1957 when Sputnik orbited over his Coalwood, West Virginia home. His hero became Wernher von Braun. He and his friends became the Rocket Boys designing, building, experimenting with whatever materials they had, teaching themselves physics, mathematics, and engineering in order to build and fly model rockets. Their efforts led to Hickam’s winning the Gold and Silver Award at the 1960 National Science Fair for “A Study of Amateur Rocketry Techniques”.
One of [the judges] was a young man who spoke in a Germanic accent. I was flabbergasted when he said he was on von Braun’s team. “You mean you actually know Wernher von Braun?” I gasped. I couldn’t imagine that. It was like being interviewed by St. Paul or somebody out of the Bible.
The young man turned and said, “You know Dr. von Braun’s here today, don’t you?”
I sat off in search of the great man himself.
Hickam never met von Braun. When he returned to his area of the Science Fair, he found that he had been awarded the gold and silver medal and that von Braun had seen his exhibit, picked up one of the rocket parts on display.
Hickam might not have met his hero, but he continued in the work his hero helped begin in Huntsville. And, in 1997 one of the Rocket Boys’ rocket nozzles was launched into space aboard space shuttle Columbia.
In my book . . . Always reach for a star - whatever and wherever it might be.
As always, there is much about A Memoir for a librarian to love:
I [Hickam] loved to read, probably the result of the unique education I received from the Coalwood School teachers known as the Great Six,” a corruption of the phrase “grades one through six.”
When I was in the fourth grade, I started going upstairs to the junior high school library to check out the Black Stallion series. There, I also discovered Jules Verne. I fell in love with his books, filled as they were with not only great adventures but scientists and engineers who considered the acquisition of knowledge to be the greatest pursuit of mankind.
