Rocket Boys - Couverture souple

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.

When we ambushed some older boys--my brother, Jim, among them--who were  playing cowboys up in the mountains, a great mock battle ensued until  Tony, up in a tree for a better line of sight, stepped on a rotted branch  and fell and broke his arm. I organized the construction of a litter out  of branches, and we bore the great warrior home. The company doctor, "Doc"  Lassiter, drove to Tony's house in his ancient Packard and came inside.  When he caught sight of us still in our feathers and war paint, Doc said  he was the "heap big medicine man." Doc set Tony's arm and put it in a  cast. I remember still what I wrote on it: Tony--next time pick a  better tree. Tony's Italian immigrant father was killed in the mine  that same year. He and his mother left and we never heard from them again.  This did not seem unusual to me: A Coalwood family required a father, one  who worked for the company. The company and Coalwood were one and the  same.

I learned most of what I knew about Coalwood history and my parents'  early years at the kitchen table after the supper dishes were cleared.  That was when Mom had herself a cup of coffee and Dad a glass of milk, and  if they weren't arguing about one thing or the other, they would talk  about the town and the people in it, what was going on at the mine, what  had been said at the last Women's Club meeting, and, sometimes, little  stories about how things used to be. Brother Jim usually got bored and  asked to be excused, but I always stayed, fascinated by their tales.

Mr. George L. Carter, the founder of Coalwood, came in on the back of a  mule in 1887, finding nothing but wilderness and, after he dug a little,  one of the richest seams of bituminous coal in the world. Seeking his  fortune, Mr. Carter bought the land from its absentee owners and began  construction of a mine. He also built houses, school buildings, churches,  a company store, a bakery, and an icehouse. He hired a doctor and a  dentist and provided their services to his miners and their families for  free. As the years passed and his coal company prospered, Mr. Carter had  concrete sidewalks poured, the streets paved, and the town fenced to keep  cows from roaming the streets. Mr. Carter wanted his miners to have a  decent place to live. But in return, he asked for a decent day's work.  Coalwood was, after all, a place for work above all else: hard, bruising,  filthy, and sometimes deadly work.

When Mr. Carter's son came home from World War I, he brought with him his  army commander, a Stanford University graduate of great engineering and  social brilliance named William Laird, who everyone in town called, with  the greatest respect and deference, the Captain. The Captain, a big  expansive man who stood nearly six and a half feet tall, saw Coalwood as a  laboratory for his ideas, a place where the company could bring peace,  prosperity, and tranquillity to its citizens. From the moment Mr. Carter  hired him and placed him in charge of operations, the Captain began to  implement the latest in mining technology. Shafts were sunk for  ventilation, and as soon as it was practical, the mules used to haul out  the coal from the mine were replaced by electric motors. Later, the  Captain stopped all the hand digging and brought in giant machines, called  continuous miners, to tear the coal from its seams. The Captain expanded  Mr. Carter's building program, providing every Coalwood miner a house with  indoor plumbing, a Warm Morning stove in the living room, and a coal box  the company kept full. For the town's water supply, he tapped into a  pristine ancient lake that lay a thousand feet below. He built parks on  both ends of the town and funded the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Brownies,  Cub Scouts, and the Women's Club. He stocked the Coalwood school library  and built a school playground and a football field. Because the mountains  interfered with reception, in 1954 he erected an antenna on a high ridge  and provided one of the first cable television systems in the United  States as a free service.

Although it wasn't perfect, and there was always tension between the  miners and the company, mostly about pay, Coalwood was, for a time, spared  much of the violence, poverty, and pain of the other towns in southern  West Virginia. I remember sitting on the stairs in the dark listening to  my father's father--my Poppy--talk to Dad in our living room about "bloody  Mingo," a county just up the road from us. Poppy had worked there for a  time until a war broke out between union miners and company "detectives."  Dozens of people were killed and hundreds were wounded in pitched battles  with machine guns, pistols, and rifles. To get away from the violence,  Poppy moved his family first to Harlan County, Kentucky, and then, when  battles erupted there, to McDowell County, where he went to work in the  Gary mine. It was an improvement, but Gary was still a place of strikes  and lockouts and the occasional bloody head.

In 1934, when he was twenty-two years old, my father applied for work as  a common miner with Mr. Carter's company. He came because he had heard  that ...

The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir that inspired the film October Sky, Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir—a powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the dawn of the 1960s, of a mother's love and a father's fears, of a group of young men who dreamed of launching rockets into outer space . . . and who made those dreams come true.

With the grace of a natural storyteller, NASA engineer Homer Hickam paints a warm, vivid portrait of the harsh West Virginia mining town of his youth, evoking a time of innocence and promise, when anything was possible, even in a company town that swallowed its men alive. A story of romance and loss, of growing up and getting out, Homer Hickam's lush, lyrical memoir is a chronicle of triumph—at once exquisitely written and marvelously entertaining.

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One of the most beloved bestsellers in recent years, Rocket Boys is a uniquely American memoir. A powerful, luminous story of coming of age at the end of the 1950s, it is the story of a mother's love and a father's fears, of growing up and getting out. With the grace of a natural storyteller, Homer Hickam looks back after a distinguished NASA career to tell his own true story of growing up in a dying coal town and of how, against the odds, he made his dreams of launching rockets into outer space come true.

A story of romance and loss and a keen portrait of life at an extraordinary point in American history, Rocket Boys is a chronicle of triumph.