We can’t go to the moon!

When I was 12 and in the 6^th grade, I was fascinated by an article in the March 22, 1952 Collier’s magazine. It detailed the building of a rocket designed by Wernher von Braun that would carry men to the moon. It was so neat (a term of my generations that has lost its meaning to the present generation). It seemed so real and detailed that it would only be a few months before the government would announce the launch date. I couldn’t wait to get a little older so that I could be one of the people traveling to the moon.

I had always had a bent toward science and the mechanics of how things went together. One of my favorite magazines was Popular Mechanics. There were so many projects that I could build, or thought I could build. One of my hobbies was model planes made of balsa wood and tissue paper. I was forever modifying these with lights and switches to glow in my room at night. In later years, high school, a friend and I tried to build a real rocket engine out of galvanized pipe with one end modified as a fuel mixing chamber for liquid oxygen and kerosene. Fortunately, it never got to the testing stage.

At a result of this article and by predisposition toward the science of doing, I was forever drawing my ideas of this rocket and how I thought it should come about. For weeks it was an obsession. An obsession I took with me to school. One day during a time I was probably suppose to be listening to my teacher talk about President Eisenhower, how to recombine during a division problem, how to diagram an adverbial phrase, or some other nonsense, I was laboring on a drawing of the details of the second stage fuel systems. Apparently the teacher (I can’t remember her name but she did have a hawk like face), noticed I wasn’t following her dissertation. This was probably not hard because as I remember the drawing took up my whole desk. Ms Hawk Face came over to my desk and demanded to know what I was doing. Naively, I explained with a little pride my drawing as the second state of a moon rocket. Ms Hawk Face then announced to the class how foolish I was, and how I should root my self in reality. “Man will never go to the moon!”

Return to Passing History.