Rocket Boys

  PRAISE FOR

  ROCKET BOYS

  “COMPELLING … Rocketry gives Hickam’s story of his teenage years in the 1950’s and early 60’s a unique twist.… Fulfillment of a boy’s dreams is what makes Rocket soar.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “A GREAT READ … Rocket Boys is one man’s engaging account of growing up and leaving home, but … it is much more than that.… One closes the book with an immense feeling of satisfaction.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “[A] NOSTALGIC AND ENTERTAINING MEMOIR.”

  —People

  “Rocket Boys … rewards every mother and teacher who ever told children they could be anything they wanted if they worked hard enough.… The memory of a special time remains for Hickam and everyone who ever dreamed of soaring to the stars.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “THOROUGHLY CAPTIVATING.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “A REFRESHINGLY HOPEFUL BOOK about personal triumph and achieving one’s dreams, a book that can be recommended to all.… Hickam has written a wonderful story about when kids had to make their own fun with what was at hand. It’s an adult book about remembering childhood.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “Rocket Boys, while a true story, reads like a well-written novel. It deals with a wide range of issues, including the bittersweet experience of coming of age. It also provides an intimate look at a dying town where people still allowed kids to dream and helped them make those dreams become reality.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “A WONDERFUL READ … Rocket Boys is [a] message of hope and accomplishment.”

  —The Knoxville News-Sentinel

  “As our emotions are stirred and our nostalgia awakened, this wonderful and inspirational story really treats us to an enduring depiction about family, hope and love.

  —Nashville Tennessean

  “UPLIFTING.”

  —BookPage

  “It’s a big story, and Hickam tells it expertly … a second-to-none tale of hope and self-realization.”

  —Charleston Gazette

  “ENTHRALLING … Hickam recalls stories … with vivid de tail and historic accuracy. Rocket Boys is much more than the story of six boys who wanted to build a better rocket. It’s the story of a young man looking for more from his life than what his dying community will be able to provide.”

  —Huntsville Times (Ala.)

  “Great memoirs must balance the universal and the particular. Too much of the former makes it overly familiar; too much of the latter makes readers ask what the story has to do with them. In his debut, Hickam walks that line beautifully. No matter how jaded readers have become by the onslaught of memoirs, none will want to miss the fantastic voyage of BCMA, Auk and Coalwood.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “ABSORBING.”

  —Booklist

  “So skillful and moving is the prose that he would surely have won his way free of Appalachia using a gift for words if an affinity for science had not opened the door first. Hickam portrays people who were important to his life … [and] draws these and other figures with a deft hand that many authors never achieve. The book also offers something unusual these days: enthusiasm and hope that almost seem to come from a different civilization than our own.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Hickam writes with the wisdom of an adult embracing boyhood perceptions … it’s a small story about big dreams and blasting into new frontiers.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “DIFFICULT TO PUT DOWN … a poignant reminder of an extinct town. Hickam has a marvelous grasp of language, especially in his descriptions. Far from it being overly scientific, everyone should identify with something in these memoirs.”

  —Louisville Eccentric Observer

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  It’s All in the Game by Charles Gates Dawes and Carl Sigman. Lyrics reprinted courtesy of Major Songs (ASCAP) c/o The Songwriters Guild of America © 1951, and Warner Bros. Publications, Inc. Rights for the British Reversionary Territories controlled by Memory Lane Music Limited, London. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

  Love Is a Many Splendored Thing by Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain. © 1955 Twentieth Century Music Corporation. © Renewed and Assigned to EMI Miller Catalog, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission of Warner Bros. Publications, Inc.

  The author has sought to trace ownership and, when necessary, obtain permission for quotations included in this book. Occasionally he has been unable to determine or locate the author of a quote. In such instances, if an author of a quotation wishes to contact the author of this book, he or she should contact him through the publisher.

  Copyright © 1998 by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Delacorte Press, New York, New York.

  Delta® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33387-6

  v3.1_r1

  To Mom and Dad

  And the people of Coalwood

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE ROCKET BOYS of the Big Creek Missile Agency and their lives and times were real, but it should be mentioned that I have used a certain author’s license in telling their story. While I have used the actual names for each of the boys and my parents and most of the people in this book, I have used pseudonyms for others and also sometimes combined two or more people into one when I felt it necessary for clarification and simplification. I have also taken certain liberties in the telling of the story, particularly having to do with the precise sequence of events and who may have said what to whom. Nevertheless, my intention in allowing this narrative to stray from strict nonfiction was always to illuminate more brightly the truth.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I OWE A DEBT OF GRATITUDE to many people for this book. First, I extend my infinite appreciation to Mickey Freiberg of The Artists Agency in Los Angeles for recognizing the value of this work from its first glimmering. It was his belief in the story, and his confidence in my ability to write it, that gave me the opportunity I needed to proceed. Heartfelt thanks are due David Groff for his superb editorial assistance, and to Frank Weimann of The Literary Group in New York for taking the manuscript, with all his considerable skill, to the publishers. The assistance of Amir Fedder and Rich Capogrosso at The Artists Agency, and Jessica Wainwright, Lauren Mactas, and Kim Marsar at The Literary Group was also invaluable and much appreciated.

  I think it wise for me to also thank the guardian angels that I have overworked over the years because they probably had something to do with my getting Tom Spain of Delacorte Press as my editor. Tom’s ability to find the core truths of this book (and sometimes even pointing them out to me when I didn’t see them) has shaped it into all that it is. Many thanks to Delacorte’s Mitch Hoffman for his many kindnesses. Karen Mender, Carisa Hays, Linda Steinman, and Vicki Flick have also been very helpful. Throughout this whole process, Carole Baron, Leslie Schnur, and all of their staff at Delacorte have been unfailingly enthusiastic and professional in their support of this book. I very much appreciate their efforts.

  I wish to express my appreciation to Chuck Gordon, Mark Sternberg, and Peter Cramer of Day
break Productions for taking what was then an uncompleted manuscript and working it through the Hollywood labyrinth, and to Joe Johnston, Larry Franco, Lewis Colick, and all of the staff of the Universal Studios motion picture production crew for translating my story to the silver screen. They made the impossible happen.

  I cannot thank enough my readers of the manuscript as it developed, especially Linda Terry, who saw it from the first very rough drafts and helped me to improve it through all the versions that followed. My thanks further to Linda for her love and support during the entire period of creation. I could not have done it without her. Much help also came from Big Creek High School classmate Emily Sue Buckberry, who kindly offered historical corrections, editorial commentary, and morale boosts throughout. Special thanks are due Harry Kenneth Lavender, my uncle, for his technical assistance on coal mining and life in general in the coalfields.

  Perry Turner and Pat Trenner, editors at Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine, are due many thanks for publishing the article, “The Big Creek Missile Agency,” which gained the attention that led to this book.

  Finally, much gratitude is owed to the men who were once the rocket boys for agreeing to let me write about them as they were so many years ago, to Mrs. Jan Siers, who gave me permission to include Sherman, to my brother Jim, who assented to my dredging up our teenaged conflicts, to several high-school classmates who wish to remain anonymous but assisted me and are in this book in one guise or another, and to my mother, who has maintained her sense of humor over the sometimes strange maneuvers of her second son to this day.

  —Homer H. Hickam, Jr.

  May 1998

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  1. Coalwood

  2. Sputnik

  3. Mom

  4. The Football Fathers

  5. Quentin

  6. Mr. Bykovski

  7. Cape Coalwood

  8. Construction of the Cape

  9. Jake Mosby

  10. Miss Riley

  11. Rocket Candy

  12. The Machinists

  13. The Rocket Book

  14. The Pillar Explosion

  15. The State Troopers

  16. A Natural Arrogance

  17. Valentine

  18. The Bump

  19. Picking Up and Going On

  20. O’Dell’s Treasure

  21. Zincoshine

  22. We Do the Math

  23. Science Fairs

  24. A Suit for Indianapolis

  25. The National Science Fair

  26. All Systems Go

  Epilogue

  All one can really leave one’s children is what’s inside their heads. Education, in other words, and not earthly possessions, is the ultimate legacy, the only thing that cannot be taken away.

  —Dr. Wernher von Braun

  All I’ve done is give you a book. You have to have the courage to learn what’s inside it.

  —Miss Freida Joy Riley

  1

  COALWOOD

  UNTIL I BEGAN to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives. I didn’t know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night. And I didn’t know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine.

  Coalwood, West Virginia, where I grew up, was built for the purpose of extracting the millions of tons of rich bituminous coal that lay beneath it. In 1957, when I was fourteen years old and first began to build my rockets, there were nearly two thousand people living in Coalwood. My father, Homer Hickam, was the mine superintendent, and our house was situated just a few hundred yards from the mine’s entrance, a vertical shaft eight hundred feet deep. From the window of my bedroom, I could see the black steel tower that sat over the shaft and the comings and goings of the men who worked at the mine.

  Another shaft, with railroad tracks leading up to it, was used to bring out the coal. The structure for lifting, sorting, and dumping the coal was called the tipple. Every weekday, and even on Saturday when times were good, I could watch the black coal cars rolling beneath the tipple to receive their massive loads and then smoke-spouting locomotives straining to pull them away. All through the day, the heavy thump of the locomotives’ steam pistons thundered down our narrow valleys, the town shaking to the crescendo of grinding steel as the great trains accelerated. Clouds of coal dust rose from the open cars, invading everything, seeping through windows and creeping under doors. Throughout my childhood, when I raised my blanket in the morning, I saw a black, sparkling powder float off it. My socks were always black with coal dirt when I took my shoes off at night.

  Our house, like every house in Coalwood, was company-owned. The company charged a small monthly rent, automatically deducted from the miners’ pay. Some of the houses were tiny and single-storied, with only one or two bedrooms. Others were big two-story duplexes, built as boardinghouses for bachelor miners in the booming 1920’s and later sectioned off as individual family dwellings during the Depression. Every five years, all the houses in Coalwood were painted a company white, which the blowing coal soon tinged gray. Usually in the spring, each family took it upon themselves to scrub the exterior of their house with hoses and brushes.

  Each house in Coalwood had a fenced-off square of yard. My mother, having a larger yard than most to work with, planted a rose garden. She hauled in dirt from the mountains by the sackful, slung over her shoulder, and fertilized, watered, and manicured each bush with exceeding care. During the spring and summer, she was rewarded with bushes filled with great blood-red blossoms as well as dainty pink and yellow buds, spatters of brave color against the dense green of the heavy forests that surrounded us and the gloom of the black and gray mine just up the road.

  Our house was on a corner where the state highway turned east toward the mine. A company-paved road went the other way to the center of town. Main Street, as it was called, ran down a valley so narrow in places that a boy with a good arm could throw a rock from one side of it to the other. Every day for the three years before I went to high school, I got on my bicycle in the morning with a big white canvas bag strapped over my shoulder and delivered the Bluefield Daily Telegraph down this valley, pedaling past the Coalwood School and the rows of houses that were set along a little creek and up on the sides of the facing mountains. A mile down Main was a large hollow in the mountains, formed where two creeks intersected. Here were the company offices and also the company church, a company hotel called the Club House, the post office building, which also housed the company doctor and the company dentist, and the main company store (which everybody called the Big Store). On an overlooking hill was the turreted mansion occupied by the company general superintendent, a man sent down by our owners in Ohio to keep an eye on their assets. Main Street continued westward between two mountains, leading to clusters of miners’ houses we called Middletown and Frog Level. Two forks led up mountain hollows to the “colored” camps of Mudhole and Snakeroot. There the pavement ended, and rutted dirt roads began.

  At the entrance to Mudhole was a tiny wooden church presided over by the Reverend “Little” Richard. He was dubbed “Little” because of his resemblance to the soul singer. Nobody up Mudhole Hollow subscribed to the paper, but whenever I had an extra one, I always left it at the little church, and over the years, the Reverend Richard and I became friends. I loved it when he had a moment to come out on the church porch and tell me a quick Bible story while I listened, astride my bike, fascinated by his sonorous voice. I especially admired his description of Daniel in the lions’ den. When
he acted out with bug-eyed astonishment the moment Daniel’s captors looked down and saw their prisoner lounging around in the pit with his arm around the head of a big lion, I laughed appreciatively. “That Daniel, he knew the Lord,” the Reverend summed up with a chuckle while I continued to giggle, “and it made him brave. How about you, Sonny? Do you know the Lord?”

  I had to admit I wasn’t certain about that, but the Reverend said it was all right. “God looks after fools and drunks,” he said with a big grin that showed off his gold front tooth, “and I guess he’ll look after you too, Sonny Hickam.” Many a time in the days to come, when I was in trouble, I would think of Reverend Richard and his belief in God’s sense of humor and His fondness for ne’er-do-wells. It didn’t make me as brave as old Daniel, but it always gave me at least a little hope the Lord would let me scrape by.

  The company church, the one most of the white people in town went to, was set down on a little grassy knob. In the late 1950’s, it came to be presided over by a company employee, Reverend Josiah Lanier, who also happened to be a Methodist. The denomination of the preacher the company hired automatically became ours too. Before we became Methodists, I remember being a Baptist and, once for a year, some kind of Pentecostal. The Pentecostal preacher scared the women, hurling fire and brimstone and warnings of death from his pulpit. When his contract expired, we got Reverend Lanier.

  I was proud to live in Coalwood. According to the West Virginia history books, no one had ever lived in the valleys and hills of McDowell County before we came to dig out the coal. Up until the early nineteenth century, Cherokee tribes occasionally hunted in the area, but found the terrain otherwise too rugged and uninviting. Once, when I was eight years old, I found a stone arrowhead embedded in the stump of an ancient oak tree up on the mountain behind my house. My mother said a deer must have been lucky some long-ago day. I was so inspired by my find that I invented an Indian tribe, the Coalhicans, and convinced the boys I played with—Roy Lee, O’Dell, Tony, and Sherman—that it had really existed. They joined me in streaking our faces with berry juice and sticking chicken feathers in our hair. For days afterward, our little tribe of savages formed raiding parties and conducted massacres throughout Coalwood. We surrounded the Club House and, with birch-branch bows and invisible arrows, picked off the single miners who lived there as they came in from work. To indulge us, some of them even fell down and writhed convincingly on the Club House’s vast manicured lawn. When we set up an ambush at the tipple gate, the miners going on shift got into the spirit of things, whooping and returning our imaginary fire. My father observed this from his office by the tipple and came out to restore order. Although the Coalhicans escaped into the hills, their chief was reminded at the supper table that night that the mine was for work, not play.