The Coalwood Way Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  1 - SONG OF THE CAPE

  2 - POPPY

  3 - IN ALL MY BORN DAYS

  4 - THE STOOP CHILDREN

  5 - THE COALWOOD WOMEN’S CLUB

  6 - FLOAT NIGHT

  7 - VETERANS DAY

  8 - A ROCKET KIND OF DAY

  9 - THE COALWOOD SKY

  10 - 11 EAST

  11 - A DISASTER OF SQUIRRELS

  12 - JAKE’S PRESENT

  13 - JIM’S DECISION

  14 - SNAKEROOT HOLLOW

  15 - A CUTE COUPLE

  16 - ROY LEE’S LAMENT

  17 - THE GATHERING OF THE GREENS

  18 - THE DUGOUT

  19 - TRIGGER AND CHAMPION

  20 - SIX HOLLOW

  21 - A COALWOOD GIRL

  22 - BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

  23 - THE LONG WALL

  24 - THE STARVATION ARMY

  25 - THE CHRISTMAS FORMAL

  26 - THE SECOND SON

  27 - A COALWOOD WEDDING

  28 - ONCE LIKE THE BEAUTIFUL SNOW

  29 - LIFE IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT

  30 - THE COALWOOD WAY

  31 - A PAGE FROM JEREMIAH

  32 - THE KINGS OF COALWOOD

  2 - THE CALL

  About the Author

  Also by Homer Hickam

  Copyright Page

  To Charlie, Linda D., and Susan Black,

  beloved family, who left us much too soon.

  Matters of faith are not really accessible to our rational thinking. I find it best not to ask any questions, but to just believe. . . .

  —Dr. Wernher von Braun, rocket scientist

  The Lord works us . . . even though we don’t know it.

  —The Reverend Julius “Little” Richard, preacher

  There are girls and then there are girls. But that girl there is a woman. Don’t ever get them confused.

  —Roy Lee Cooke, the Big Creek lovemaster

  PRAISE FOR THE COALWOOD WAY

  “Another classic coming-of-age tale . . . the rocket boy

  soars again.”

  —People

  “Hickam . . . has a wonderful story to tell.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Perceptive and honest . . . A charming and sentimental, yet

  realistic paean to the values, biases, and hopes of small-town America.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “[A] powerful story . . . since Hickam writes without pity but

  with love, he causes readers to care.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Recalling a lost era, [Hickam] brings his American

  hometown to life with vivid images, appealing characters and

  considerable literary magic.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “With keen memory and dedication to fact, Hickam mines

  his childhood, playing the trials of growing up and self-

  discovery against the unstoppable forces of change. Along

  the way emerge truths and realizations that resonate on deep

  levels. Indeed, Hickam is powerfully gifted in rendering the

  personal into the universal.”

  —The Denver Post

  “More than a good read, charming and often moving enough

  to bring a lump to your throat.”

  —American Way

  “A heartwarming tale of family love, small-town living and

  boyhood adventure that will take readers back to their own

  youthful days. I loved it!”

  —Abilene Reporter-News (Texas)

  “A story of heartwarming possibilities . . . original and

  nostalgically humorous . . . The Coalwood Way is the story

  of a rocket boy shooting for the moon. But it is also the story

  of the maturation of a boy, a family and a town.”

  —BookPage

  PRAISE FOR

  HOMER HICKAM’S #1 BESTSELLER

  OCTOBER SKY

  “Unforgettable . . . Unlike so many memoirs, this book

  brings to life more than one man’s experiences. It brings to

  life the lost town of Coalwood, W. Va.”

  —USA Today

  “Mr. Hickam builds a story of overcoming obstacles worthy

  of Frank Capra, especially in its sweetness and

  honest sentimentality.”

  —The New York Times

  “A stirring tale that offers something unusual these days . . .

  a message of hope in an age of cynicism.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A great read . . . One closes the book with an immense

  feeling of satisfaction.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Hickam has a great story to tell. . . . [His] recollections of

  small-town America in the last years of small-town America

  are so cinematic that even those of us who didn’t grow

  up there might imagine we did.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A refreshingly hopeful book about personal triumph

  and achieving one’s dreams.”

  —San Antonio Express-News

  “[Hickam] is a very adept storyteller. . . . It’s a good bet this is

  the story as he told it to himself. It is a lovely one, and in the

  career of Homer H. Hickam, Jr., who prevailed over the facts

  of his life to become a NASA engineer training astronauts

  for space walks, that made all the difference.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “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)

  “Compelling.”—Chicago Tribune

  “Thoroughly captivating.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “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] nostalgic and entertaining memoir.”

  —People

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  MEMOIRS ARE TOUGH things to write. How can you remember what somebody said or did forty years ago? I don’t have an answer. All I know is that I do. I’ve changed a few names and disguised some other folks to protect them but, otherwise, this is pretty much the way it happened, I swan.

  —Homer H. Hickam, Jr.

  Huntsville, Alabama

  March 14, 2000

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THERE HAVE BEEN many gifts and honors to come my way since the publication of Rocket Boys: A Memoir (aka October Sky), but none have been so wonderful as the recollections I’ve received from the citizens of Coalwood, past and present, as well as from folks from all over McDowell County and West (by God) Virginia. There are too many individuals to list so I will simply give my humble thanks and reflect that this book would not have been
possible without them. This includes Jim, my steadfast friend and brother. I would also like to thank Frank and Mickey, the greatest agents known to mankind; my editor Tom, who’s the very best at what he does; and David, my touchstone. Thanks are also due to Linda, my wife and assistant, who works so hard and does so much, as well as her parents, Walt and Sue, who are among my heroes. Of course, nothing would be possible without the continued, gentle vexations that come my way from one Elsie Gardener Lavender Hickam. As ever, I’m proud to know and love her.

  1

  SONG OF THE CAPE

  OF ALL THE lessons I learned when I built my rockets, the most important were not about chemistry, physics, or metallurgy, but of virtues, sins, and other true things that shape us as surely as rivers carve valleys, or rain melts mountains, or currents push apart the sea. I would learn these lessons at a time when Coalwood, the mining town where I had lived my entire life, was just beginning to fade away. Yet, as the fall of 1959 began, and the leaves on the trees in the forests that surrounded us began to explode in spectacular color, Coalwood’s men still walked with a trudging grace to and from the vast, deep mine, and its women bustled in and out of the company stores and fought the coal dust that drifted into their homes. In the dark old schools, the children learned and the teachers taught, and, in snowy white churches built on hillside cuts, the preachers preached, and God, who we had no doubt was also a West Virginian, was surely doing His work in heaven, too. At the abandoned slack dump we called Cape Coalwood, rockets still leapt into the air, and boyish voices yet echoed between ancient, worn mountains beneath a pale and watchful sky. Coalwood endured as it always had, but a wheel was turning that would change nearly everything, and no one, not even my father, would be able to stop it. When that brittle parchment autumn turned into our deepest, whitest winter, this and many other lessons would be taught. Though they were hard and sometimes cruel things to learn, they were true, and true things, as the people of Coalwood saw fit to teach me, are always filled with a shining glory.

  TO me, there was no better time to launch a rocket than in the fall, especially a West Virginia fall. There seemed to be a cool, dry energy in the air that filled us with a renewed sense of hope and optimism. I had always believed that our rockets were lifted as much by our dreams as by burning propellant, and as the lazy summer faded and a northerly wind swept down on us with its lively breath, anything seemed possible. It was also when the school year started and I always felt an excitement stir within me at the thought of learning new and wonderful things. Fall had other marvels, too. At the Cape, we were often treated to V-shaped flotillas of migrating Canadian geese, bound from the far north to places we had only read about or imagined. We always stopped our rocket preparations to gaze longingly at the great creatures as they winged their way high overhead, and to listen to their joyful honking that seemed to be calling us to join them. “If only we could,” Sherman said once to my comment. “Even for just a moment, to look down on our mountains and see them the same as angels.” Sherman always liked to remind us that we lived in a beautiful place and I guess we did, although sometimes it was easy to forget, especially since we’d never known anywhere else.

  Once, a rare snow goose, as purely white as moonbeams, landed on the old slack dump, perhaps fooled by the reflection from the slick surface of the coal tailings. We gathered around the great strutting bird, awed by the sight of her. Then I noticed that her wing tips were as black as the faces of Coalwood miners after a shift. O’Dell said the reason for the black tips was so the geese could see each other inside a white cloud. O’Dell knew a lot about animals so I believed his explanation, but it got me off to thinking. How did the snow geese decide what colors their feathers would be? Did they all get together up north somewhere a million years ago and take a vote? It was a mystery and the snow goose made no comment. She just looked annoyed. When she tired of us gawking at her, she flapped her wings and continued her journey, and I confess I was relieved. I knew the snow goose did not belong in Coalwood. Some people, especially my mother, said neither did I.

  Our first rocket of the fall was Auk XXII-E. A serious little rocket, it began its journey with a mighty spout of flame and turmoil and its shock wave rattled our wooden blockhouse as it climbed. I ran outside with the other boys, but no matter how much I strained my eyes, I couldn’t see it. All I could see were clouds that went, as far as I knew, all the way up to heaven. The seconds ticked by. We had never lost one of our rockets, but I was beginning to wonder if maybe this one was going to be our first. If it had fallen on Rocket Mountain, buried itself into the soft black West Virginia loam up there, maybe we had missed it. “Time, O’Dell,” I called nervously.

  O’Dell looked at the stopwatch he’d borrowed last year from one of the coal company industrial engineers and forgotten to give back. “I think it’s still flying,” he said.

  “Then where is it?” I demanded. We couldn’t lose it. Like every rocket we launched, it held answers we had to know.

  “There it is!” Billy yelled as he began sprinting across the slack. I still couldn’t see anything but I ran after him anyway. He easily pulled away from me with athletic grace, his muscles like small coiled springs, his shoes sending up little puffs of black grit as he ran. How that boy could run! Nobody could keep up with Billy Rose when he had his sharp eyes locked on a rocket. I, on the other hand, tended to be a pretty slow runner. I think it was because I was so nearsighted. I was always afraid I was going to run into something.

  O’Dell trotted up alongside me, putting a hand on my elbow to straighten me out. “Time looks good,” he said, and then ran on ahead, his mop of blond hair bouncing as his short legs churned. He held his stopwatch in front of him, his finger poised to click it off the moment our rocket hit the slack.

  Roy Lee caught up with me next. He was in his Dugout clothes, a tight pair of draped and pegged black pants, brown loafers, a pink shirt with black piping, and hair thoroughly lacquered down into a swept-back DA. He had a date for the Saturday-night dance at the teen hangout in War and was headed that way right after the launch. “I never can see the blamed things,” he griped as he ran by me. Roy Lee’s long legs soon had him beside O’Dell, but Billy was still far ahead.

  Behind me, I could hear Sherman’s uneven gait, his left leg slung in an arc at each step, his built-up shoe scuffing the slack. Polio had given his leg a twist and turned it thin as a sapling. I slowed to let him catch up and run alongside me. “O’Dell said the time looks good,” I gasped.

  Sherman broke into a grin at my report. “Maybe it’s going to be a great rocket,” he said.

  A “great rocket” was what Quentin, the brains of our outfit, called the rockets that did exactly what we’d designed them to do. I sincerely hoped Sherman was right. Auk XXII-E used an untried propellant. With rockets, anytime you changed one thing, a lot of other things changed, too, and it was hard to predict what all they might be. In that, I guess they were a bit like me and the rest of the boys. Even though we were all seniors in high school and thought of ourselves as being grown up, the truth was we had a way to go. I was sixteen, they were seventeen, and every day, it seemed we grew a little, usually in some unpredictable way. Sometimes, I had trouble recalling who I had been the day before, or might be tomorrow. Coach Gainer called it the “teenage boy crazies.” When I got too afflicted with it, my mom always jerked a knot in my tail and said, “Straighten up and fly right.” And so I did.

  Quentin was downrange so that he could measure the altitude of our rocket using trigonometry. To do it, he had to see the rocket at peak altitude and aim at it with a device he had built out of a broomstick, a nail, a wooden ruler, and a plastic protractor. He called his invention a theodolite. But clouds had defeated him today, the rocket disappearing through the heavy layer that hung overhead. We would have to depend on O’Dell’s stopwatch.

  “Whoa! Stop!” Billy cried as we ran up to him. He had his arms outstretched to hold us back. I could hear the rocket whistling as it came i
n, and then, a hundred yards ahead, there was a big metallic retort and a plume of slack. The Auk had struck nosefirst. “Come on!” Billy yelled, and we ran on.

  “Thirty-one seconds,” O’Dell reported as we reached the rocket. I did a quick mental calculation. I had designed Auk XXII-E to reach an altitude of 6,000 feet. It had reached, according to the formula we used, less than 4,000 feet. That was a disappointment. The Big Creek Missile Agency (or BCMA, as we liked to call it) had been in business for nearly two years, ever since the sight of the Russian Sputnik flying through the starry sky over Coalwood had first inspired us to join the space race. We’d started off slow, our rockets mostly blowing up, but after a while we had gotten the hang of it. We had already sent rockets higher than a mile using our old rocket candy propellant. The new propellant we were using should have easily gotten us past the mile mark. Something had gone seriously wrong with this little rocket, and I itched to find out what it was.

  The smoking Auk was too hot to touch, so I gave it a quick eyeball once-over. The casement, which is what we called the body of the rocket, was made from a three-foot-long, one-and-a-quarter-inch-diameter length of seamless steel tubing. Steel tubing of that size and make was incredibly strong, yet it was now slightly bent. That wasn’t unexpected, since it was flying at over three hundred miles per hour when it had hit the hard slack. The wooden nose cone that had capped it had been reduced to splinters. One of the four fins welded to the casement had broken off. The machinists in the coal company machine shop would be interested in the damage. They had become dedicated rocket builders, sneaking in the work between jobs sent down by the mine. My father, the mine superintendent, had tried for months to stop them but had finally given up. “Bill,” Dad had said to their supervisor, “they’re your problem. Just remind your boys who pays their wages.” The machinists heard Dad’s reminder but it didn’t make much of an impression on them. Building rockets, after all, was a lot more fun than working on mine equipment.