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STORIES OF ME AND MY FAMILY |
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The
Rocket Why
does it seem to me that the days were brighter, the grass greener, and
the air fresher when I think about when I was a little kid?
Now that I am an old man, there doesn’t seem to be those kind
of lazy days around here anymore. Not like when I was a kid. Of course
then, I lived outdoors most of the time. I hardly took time to come
inside to eat. There were so many adventures to participate in and
activities to keep me outside until dark. Most every night, in the
summer, we ended the day playing a game of kick
the can. The game only ended when one of our moms would call us to
come in and wash up for bed. Kids could be left out alone in the dark
then on blocks like the one I lived on. There may have been bad people
who prayed on children, but we knew of none, and our parents felt that
it was safe to let us go and grow up on the block. Anyway all the
parents looked after us and it did not matter that we were not the kids
of one of the grownups, we minded what they said, and knew that the
punishment would be even worse from our own parents if we disobeyed one
of the neighbors. We
lived on 4th avenue right across from the old grade school.
There were many kids around to play with. The old neighborhood seemed to
be neatly segregated into small groups of kids by age. There were the
older group of boys like Larry Omerco and Steve Fox, who lived across
the street and another older group who lived down 13th
street. Of course the family who lived next to me had older foster girls
they took care of, but they didn’t count, they were girls!
We didn’t play much with girls. The foster girls were in cars
with guys form Fort Lewis and they were having their own adventure, but
that is another story. In
our world there was no place for them to become cowboys, car racers,
army men, or especially rocket men. The term astronaut had not been
heard of yet, so we just called ourselves rocket men. There wasn’t
much TV in those days either, but we had seen movies that showed funny
cigar looking spacecraft buzzing off to distant planets to fight the
dreaded “Ming”. We
watched Flash Gordon on the screen and followed him in the funny papers
so we called all bad guys Ming. One
of the first space programs we saw on TV was called Space
Cadets. The show most of the time had some actors standing behind
some kind of set so that it looked to the viewer as though they were
looking out the porthole in the front of a rocket ship. The actors would
lean to the right or left as the spacecraft turned and of course they
would all fall down if they hit something along the way. We played the
same and spent hours behind cardboard boxes pretending we were Space
Cadets. The
main racketeers on 4th avenue were Fred, my brother and
myself. Sometimes Byron Wollery from down at the end of the block would
play with us, but most of the time it was just the three of us. We all
had inquisitive minds and tried our best to figure out how things
worked. I know I spent a lot of my time thinking of things I could
invent and make for myself. The neighborhood was not a rich one. Most
everyone worked a blue-collar job. The homes were all neat and most
everyone took pride in keeping their yards and homes fixed up, but most
families were like mine, with little money to buy expensive play things
for the kids, so we made our own. There were, even in those days, kits
that could be purchased to build model rockets. I think it was my
brother who saw and add for a rocket in a magazine and showed it to the
rest of us. We all thought it would be real neat to build one like the
one in the magazine and if it worked as a model, why not build a larger
one and go off and fight Ming ourselves? The
first big problem, what to use for rocket fuel? We really had no idea.
The smoke coming out of the rockets we saw in the movies looked like
cigarette or cigars smoke, but we knew enough to understand a little
about thrust. No way would we get any thrust from a lit cigarette. We
thought about a balloon. We had blown up balloons and let them go
spinning around the room expelling the air out as most kids do. We
realized that the air in a balloon would not be strong enough to lift a
good size model and certainly not enough power or lift anything bigger
than a model. What would we use then?
It never occurred to us to go to the library to do research.
There were formulas available to use there that would allowed us to
safely make a solid fuel that was popular in model rocket building. We
chose to do the one thing we should not have done and that was to even
think about a liquid rocket fuel. We
took all kinds of things from our mother’s kitchens and dad’s
garages. Some of the liquids burned, God only knows what they were, but
most just put the match out. Then it came to us, gasoline!!!! We had
watched the old man across the street burn junk in his back yard and had
heard and seen the explosion that gasoline made when it was put on a
fire. We knew it was not too safe to mess around with gasoline, but hay,
we were going to be real careful. I got a old coffee can full of
gasoline from my dad’s garage and off we went to the ally behind our
house to do some rocket motor testing. At first we just pored the gas on
the ground and tried to light it. Some times it made a little puff but
most of the time the gasoline simply evaporated and nothing happened.
We got the idea that we had to confine the gasoline in some kind
of container until there were enough fire getting from the match to
gasoline to ignite it. We had a milk bottle and decided to put a little
gasoline in it and light it with a match. For some reason we decided
that it was probably not a good idea to light the gasoline directly in
the bottle as we were afraid that the milk bottle would explode in our
hands and not go up as we hopped. We made a fuse out of some old brown
twine we had buy soaking it in gas and letting it dry a little. One
of us, I think Fred lit the match to the homemade fuse and suddenly
there was a large bang and the milk bottle exploded into many pieces. It
scared us all, but we had learned that gasoline evaporating in a bottle
would form a fuel strong enough to blow up a bottle. The next problem
was to find something strong enough to withstand the explosion. Just to
test our theory, we used an old tobacco can we found in the garbage.
Sure enough the tobacco can survived the blast and we were sure we were
on to becoming great rocket men. We blasted several cans the next few
days and built our confidence for the next phase, which was a full
“boy sized” space ship. Fred’s
dad worked in a plywood plant. He would bring home pieces of plywood of
all sizes and store them behind his work shed to be used for his future
projects. He did not mind that us boys sometimes took some pieces of
wood to use as long as they were not the large thick pieces he was
saving for use in his projects. This wood along with the abundance of
apple boxes that were available from Holman’s grocery store, which was
on the corner of Pioneer and 13th street, gave us plenty of materials to
make a space ship. We
took some old long two by fours and nailed three apple boxes to them.
One box behind the other.
We selected some thin sheets of plywood and bent them into arches over
the boxes to make a cover. We fashioned a nose cone and fins from the
same plywood. After looking around my dads and Fred’s dad’s garage,
we got enough paint to put one thin coat on the completed rocket. We
took the rocket and put it on a long four by four tilted on one of
Fred’s dads saw horses. The rocket body was now ready for blast off
except we still did not have a rocket engine big enough to get us off
the ground. My
mom had a party at our house a few weeks before this time, where a
salesman had convinced her and several other ladies of the neighborhood,
that they should through out their old cast iron pots and pans and
replace them with the new-fangled aluminum pots and pans. This meant
that there were pots and pans of various sizes available for budding
rocket scientists. We took several of these pots and used them as raw
materials for our new rocket engine. The idea for the engine was to have
one pot with a hole drilled in the bottom on top as a fuel tank and a
smaller pot on the bottom turned upside down with a hole in it’s
bottom, now its top to have the gasoline drip through to continue the
explosion to propel us rocket men to space. We figured we would get at
least to the moon the first time. I
think we all had reservations as the building processes continued, and
by the time the rocket was ready we all had doubts that it would really
work. None of use wanted to be the one who through the wet blanket on
the project, so we all pretended that we had no doubts. The real test
was of course getting in the thing and lighting the fuse and blasting
off. We really didn’t think of the real problems that an adult would
think of like, you could get killed or hurt real bad doing this, it was
just too much fun to think of any problems. We had a rocket man meeting
the night before the scheduled blast off and decided that as it was
going to be done in Fred’s back yard and using mostly his dad’s
wood, he was to be the caption and set in the top seat. I was the
oldest, and generally the leader of all projects, but I did not argue
with Fred and decided that I as the oldest would set in the co-pilots
box just below Fred and that meant of course that my little brother
Denny would be the engineer and set in the last seat. The real fact of
the matter was that non of us wanted to set close to the engine and
Denny being the smallest had no choice but to set in the box next to all
the fire. Somehow he always got the most dangerous place on all our
projects. Maybe that is why as a man he took the biggest risks and made
and lost more money then the other two of us combined.
The
next morning we all got ready and put on our space suits. They were made
out of football helmets and vests made from painted burlap sacks. We
made flying boots out of cardboard over our rubber boots. We transported
the rocket engine from behind the garage where we had kept it and place
it at the end of the rocket. All was ready. We made the fuse and took
our places in the rocket. Denny was given the match and told to light
it. Fred and I set looking forward waiting for the blast we expected
would send us to the moon. Denny was more than a little apprehensive
about lighting the fuse as the gasoline was very close to his fanny and
he was more then a little afraid that it would blow him up along with
the rocket. He finally lit the fuse with a lot of prodding form the
other two of us and then it happened. Nothing. That is what happened. No
fire , no explosion, no blast off no nothing. To this day I have no idea
why we were not hurt or killed doing this, what today seems like, stupid
thing. By all reasoning, we should have had an explosion that would have
certainly started my brother and probably the rest of us on fire. We
could have never gotten out of those arched over pieces of plywood in
time to save ourselves form getting hurt. The fuse was lit and raw
gasoline was pouring out of the top pan into the bottom pan. The fuse
went under the bottom pan and should have ignited the gas that was
building there, but it didn’t. Someone was watching over us again that
day. Our
parents were very careful with us kids. They would have killed us
themselves had they known. They did not see or realize we had built an
engine for the rocket. Had they known I am sure that would have been the
end of our little rocket project then and there. We, buy the grace of
God, lived to do other stupid things on our way to becoming men. I can
only thank God for letting us all live unharmed to go own to the many
adventures we were to have growing up together.
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