In December, 1994, the editor of Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine called me with an urgent request. The Above and Beyond section of the magazine needed an article for the next issue. I had the reputation of being a fast writer with aerospace lore at my fingertips. Could I, would I, please provide something? I like a challenge so I replied affirmatively. I glanced at a small cylindrical object I was using as a paperweight. I picked it up. It was a sophisticated but tiny rocket nozzle. Its story was only a hazy memory. As I talked to the editor, pieces of it started to come back. "You know," I told her, "when I was a kid - growing up in a place called Coalwood, West Virginia - would you believe it? We - some boys and I - we were miner's kids - we built rockets. We won a medal - a science fair... no, the National Science Fair medal." The editor was silent for a moment and then said, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm - "OK, if that's all you've got. Write it and fax it to me and we'll see." I wrote the article in three hours, the memories tumbling out of places I had not looked for decades. I didn't remember everything but enough for the 2,000 words required. I sent in the fax and forgot about it. The next day the editor called. She loved it. Would I send pictures? The medal? Anything I had? The magazine was going with the story as a major feature.
I was surprised at her reaction but I was to be absolutely astonished when the article came out. Letters and phone calls from parents all over the country, even in England, came in a rush. They were inspired, touched in a manner most unexpected. They called me just to hear my voice and tell me how proud my little story made them and, in a couple of instances, begged me to speak to their children. There was more to come.
One day a letter came in the mail from a small motion picture producer, wondering if I had sold the rights to my story. I hadn't, of course, and naturally, as a free-lance writer always looking for new markets, I found myself intrigued by the possibility. Within a few months, I had acquired a powerful literary/film agent who sold the story as a major motion picture to Universal Studios in Hollywood. The agent said that I should write a book about those days, too, and, of course, I said I would. A book on our adventures as rocket-builders would, I thought, actually write itself. After all, it had all been so simple. We were kids of the late 1950's. We were stuck in a coal camp and we were enthralled by the space race. Of course we built rockets. Of course, we kept building them even when they blew up. Of course, we kept working and learning until we had designed sophisticated rocket engines, capable of flying for miles into the sky. Of course, we had won the Gold and Silver Award at the National Science Fair, 1960. And then there was also something about John Kennedy being there with us... Didn't I, I realized, tell him while he was still a Senator that if he ever got to be President he should take the country to the Moon?
Maybe the story wasn't so simple, after all.
Something had happened once in my life, something so very special that 35 years after it had been done, and I had nearly forgotten it, it had been brought back to me to relive. I sat down and began to write. I wrote of the boys. I wrote of our rockets. I remembered the first one, and the next, and the next. And as I wrote, it was as if there were others there whispering to me, just shushes of conversation coming as if behind a thick curtain. Don't forget us, they said. And there was one. He wasn't whispering but he was there. Every time I tried to turn away from him in the book, he moved like a phantom to stay in my view.
My father.
And then I knew where I was going, what I had to write the entire book for. I had to write it all down so that I could get to a special moment in my life. The moment lay there, far in the distance, and all I had to do was to relive it all to get there.
I wrote, and as I wrote, the little town of Coalwood came alive again. The miners trudged up the old path to the mine, their lunch pails clunking against their legs, their helmets perched on their heads. My father was there amongst them, wearing his old snap-brim hat, his cow-hide coat, encouraging them in the day, gathering his foremen to him for their instruction. The people of the town bustled in and out of the Company store and gathered on the church steps after Sunday services to gossip. My mother was in her kitchen, in her refuge in front of the big painted picture of the beach and the ocean. My dog waited in my basement laboratory, his stubby tail wagging at the sight of me as I picked up and inspected the implements of my chosen trade, the high school rocket builder - the potassium nitrate and sugar, the zinc dust and sulphur, the moonshine we used as a propellant binder. In my room, there was my old desk and the book our Miss Riley had given us, the one with all the answers written in a mathematical script no one believed we could learn but we had, against all odds. I looked and my wonderful little cat still slept on my pillow on the bed beneath the window from which I could see the mine and the tiny machine shop where the kindly machinist had built our first rocket. The church bell was ringing as once more we boys stood on the roof of the old Club House and peered through the telescope a junior engineer had loaned us, to see once more the bands of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, the craters of the Moon. The old high school was there, the halls ringing with the excitement of youth, the classrooms echoing with our lessons, the awareness slowly dawning on us that we were the designated refugees of our town and our school - that we were being prepared to leave and never return. Everything and everyone was still there, all in their places, defining the path, urging me along it, to where my dad waited.
It was on a hot, black slack dump we called Cape Coalwood, our firing range, a place my dad had been forced by the people of Coalwood to give to us. All the rockets, the ones that blew up and the ones that flew were launched again. All the failures, all the successes, all had to be experienced. When I at last reached our final rocket, he was standing there, looking up at it as it flew out of sight. But the boy that was once me wasn't looking at the rocket. He was looking at his father. The father was saying something and I strained to hear what it was, difficult because of the cheering of the town in the background, and the muffling of the decades that had passed.
I watched the boy and I knew he was waiting hopefully for the father to turn to him and put his arm around him. But it didn't happen. Instead, the father began to cough the wracking cough of the miner and it was the son - me - who reached out.
And so my book was written as it was meant to be, not a boy's adventure, or a young adult's inspirational tale. It was written for all of my generation who had parents who came out of the Depression and fought World War II and struggled from the day they were born. It was written for all of us who watched our parents sacrifice in a million ways every day so that we might have a better life. It was written for all of us who observed by deed every day how much our parents loved us but never experienced it through touch or word. It was written for all of us who have tried our entire lives to find a way to reconcile that dichotomy. Once, even if it had to be in the wilderness of West Virginia in a tiny coal camp on the black dust of a slack dump, one of us was allowed to find resolution and reconciliation.
And that's what I think The Rocket Boys, both the book and the movie, is really about; reconciliation. To recreate those days turned out to be one of the most difficult things I have had to do. I reached as deeply as ever I could into my soul to bring them all back, all the miners and miner's wives and teachers and preachers and each of the boys, because it took them all, urging me, compelling me, to get me back to that place on that slack dump.
It was worth the journey, at least to me.
Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
Homer Hickam's Web Site is located at www.homerhickam.com. Visit this awesome site when you get a chance and tell 'em we sent ya!