Open Forum: Homer Hickam and his rockets | CPT PPP Coverage

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If you’re bored, you can always type “application to live in West Virginia” into your search engine. It is vulgar, insulting and hilarious. I can laugh about it because I grew up in Morgantown. But we don’t all have IQs the same number as a room temperature. Some of us have done pretty smart things, like building rockets.

The 1999 film “October Sky” is taken from the book “The Rocket Boys” by Homer Hickam (how’s that for a backwoods name?). The scene is Coalwood, W.Va., a tiny mining town where almost everything is owned by the company. Homer’s father is a superintendent in the mine and wants badly for Homer to follow in his footsteps. But one night in the 10th month Homer steps off his porch and sees the Russian satellite Sputnik floating among the stars. He is transfixed. He doesn’t yet know it, but he will never have a career in the mines.

He and several like-minded high school friends begin designing and building rockets. They experiment with velocity calculations, housing and propellants. His high school teacher, Miss Riley, detects a spark of scholastic ability in him. With a gift peculiar to teachers, she affirms and encourages it (“I got my eye on you, boy”).

Despite a series of misadventures — and damage to personal property — they launch a total of 35 rockets. The last one goes six miles up, far above “those West Virginia hills” Homer goes to the National Science Fair in Indianapolis, where he wins a gold medal. He also just misses meeting his idol, Werner Von Braun, a true rocket scientist and a German import.

The film could be dismissed as cheesy fiction except that it is based mostly on facts. Miss Riley, who helped Homer so much, died young of cancer (lymphoma). His father succumbed to black lung, a common killer of coal miners. The vein of coal dried up, the production company left the area, and the town all but folded.

But Homer went on to Virginia Tech (all the Rocket Boys went to college), then into the Army, then to NASA. As an aerospace engineer he has trained many astronauts, including the first Japanese to travel to the International Space Station. In his spare time he has written best-selling nonfiction.

No, please don’t cue “Almost Heaven.” That gets played enough. Instead, please pull up “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” from Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” and play that. Much more high-energy.

Judith Melton is a resident of Berryville.