Looking Back Is Something I Look Forward To

I grew up in North Alabama during the 50's. Things were pretty simple back then, it was a good time to be a kid. I guess that kids are usually looking forward, and that may have been particularly exaggerated for kids growing up in Huntsville, Alabama. It was an exciting time. Everything was about rockets and satellites so it seemed natural to be looking toward where we thought we were going, not toward where we had been.

And it was exciting! I can remember sitting in school and hearing the sound of rocket engines as they were tested out at Redstone Arsenal.  They would fasten the engines to a test stand and fire them off. The sound could be heard for miles and miles. I got to meet people like Wernher von Braun whose daughter kept her horse at Mr. Jack Darnell's stable where I spent a lot of time.

In 1957, my 10th grade year, the Russians put Sputnik into orbit. In the evenings we would go outside and stare into the sky looking for it. That triggered a "space race" and my hometown was where it mostly happened.  Redstone Arsenal, which sat on land that my Grandfather Ivy once owned. It was the center of the American space effort. One Saturday, as a member of the high school band, I got a phone call to rush downtown for an impromptu parade. We had just put the first American satellite up and the parade was to celebrate. I jumped into my uniform and rushed downtown. The entire town turned out for the celebration.

My step dad, Dahl, worked at Redstone. Mom and he often had friends over for picnics in our backyard. I can remember Dahl and his best friend, Gene Zerlaut, sitting at the picnic table and talking about what color the next satellite should be. Gene wanted to paint it with black and white polkadots! At the time, I thought that was a funny thing to do. Gene explained to me that choosing the color scheme was not a trivial thing. The satellite, without the benefit of Earth's atmosphere for moderation, the satellite's color scheme would determine how much heat the satellite would soak up from the Sun's rays. The white polka dots would reflect heat and the black polka dots would adsorb heat. So ratio of black polka dots to white polka dots was an important engineering decision.  I don't know if they ever put a polka dot satellite up, but if they did, I was an observer to the the engineering process.

It was an exciting time. We were all caught up in creating a future that seemed to have unlimited possibilities. And yet, now that the future is here, I have a yearning to go back and experience some of the past that I skipped when I was a kid. This blog is a place to reminisce.  Now that I am an old man, looking back is something I look forward to.