Rocket Boys

            In the days of Hal Roach's "Our Gang" shorts ("The Little Rascals" for the TV generation), Spanky and his pals used their own ingenuity to build things they couldn't buy. For Homer H. Hickam Jr., growing up in a small West Virginia coal town, the early days of the space race inspired him and his friends to build rockets. Rocket Boys: A Memoir is the boyhood story of a NASA engineer that did more than read about the future, he set out to achieve it.
             In Coalwood, the elder Hickam was the foreman of one of the better company mining towns in a state famous for its rich coal deposits. Hickam, nicknamed "Sonny," recounts how his father spent most of his time at the mine, his mother's resigned attitude, and the stagnant cycle of the lives of the miners and their families. Sonny was a typical teenager of the era, interested in having a good time and just beginning to notice girls.
             On October 5, 1957, an event happened that changed Sonny's life forever; the Russian satellite Sputnik circled the planet and marked the start of the space race. Rather than rail against the threat of Communism like his father and other adults, Sonny was inspired by the feat, and saw it as a way out of Coalwood. He decided to learn how to build rockets so he could join NASA's Dr. Wernher von Braun in launching America into space.
             Teaming up with a few school chums, Sonny forms the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA) with the encouragement of his mother. To everyone else in Coalwood and their high school, often with some derision, they become "the rocket boys." Together, they start to learn calculus, physics and engineering in order to build rockets. .
             At first, the football team and the girls laugh at them, but the events set about by the space race inspire the school to increase its academic workload and decrease emphasis on sports. Suddenly, the rocket boys find themselves the center of attention. And when labor troubles and accidents at the mine threaten to tear the town apart, the dogged determination of the boys to build their rockets despite all odds and setbacks serves to give the beleaguered residents of Coalwood something to rally around.