How I became an Amateur Astronomer

Here are a few vivid memories of events from my childhood and youth which guided me along the path of amateur astronomy. I have related to you several times how my father, Walter, and my Uncle Paul were the two people who laid the groundwork for my astronomical interest by their innovative determination to build a 7" f/10 reflector from scratch on their Kansas farm in 1931. This was eight years before I was born. That story can rest, but the fate of the telescope itself should be told.

In 1940 the builders’ paths parted as Uncle Paul moved to California and my Dad took his family to Nebraska, where I grew into self-consciousness. The telescope was too massive for a long trip and which one should have it? The solution was to donate it to a high school in nearby Burton KS, where its makers hoped it would live a long and useful life and serve the community as a valued educational tool. But it was not to be. World War 2 was raging and in the wake of Pearl Harbor came public appeals for scrap metal to support the massive military buildup. The patriotic fervor of the Burton school board overcame their scientific loyalties and the scope was donated to the war effort as junk metal.

When my Dad learned of this outrage he was as mad as a pacifist Mennonite minister might justly be. He made a hurried trip back to Kansas to try to salvage his masterpiece. He was just in time to save the tube assembly from the metal crusher, but not the mount. And so it came to be that my first impression of a telescope was a big, long metal tube to be carried to the back yard and leaned against a chair or fence post. For some reason Dad never remounted the scope. He did lift me up to the eyepiece for my first look at the moon and the planets. It made a lasting impression. That tube assembly was never remounted until my brother Charlie undertook the project in a welding class in college in 1956.

Dad was always keen on keeping us aware of the sky. I can recall being roused from sleep and lifted out of bed to go outside to see a meteor shower or the sky glowing red and green with the Northern Lights. When I was five or six Dad announced one evening that he would wake us before dawn the next morning to see a comet. And so he did. He drove my sister Evelyn and me in the old Hudson to the eastern edge of town to see a small, but very bright comet. I cannot say which one it was, but it was similar in aspect to Comet Bennet in 1970.

I recall a frightening experience in my seventh or eighth year. We neighborhood boys were playing outside after dark one summer evening when the ground beneath us was suddenly lit up with a greenish glow brighter than the full moon. We looked up to see the glowing trail of a giant fireball. When I stopped running I was safely under the covers of my bed. I had much to ponder under the covers, for I had been suffering all that day from a guilty conscience from helping myself to some pears from a neighbor’s tree. Until I finally summoned up the courage to confide in my mother a week later, I was sure that I had just barely escaped divine retribution for my thievery.

A happier recollection will resonate with many of you. As a teen I went to our church camp in the sparsely inhabited wilderness of western Kansas. We were all supposed to sleep in our cabins under the watchful eye of our supervisor. But Laurence and I were able to sneak out and spend two or three nights in our sleeping bags under a moonless Milky Way. The brilliance of all those knots of light, which I later learned to attach “M” names to, made a deep and lasting impression. The sky was so vivid that it became for me a thing of mystic awe and wonder. My mind still flies back to those silent nights, those holy nights, when it was not difficult to believe that a divine presence was pressing down from heaven above.

A milestone I shall not forget was when, at about age ten, I was able to carry the steel telescope tube outside on my own. On a cold winter night in 1950 I was able to find the right tube-to-chair angle to target Saturn on my own for the first time. I could not keep this to myself, but had to drag my older sister and brother out to see too. They were mildly impressed by the view. But I was doubly proud - not only of the object of our wonder, but by the fact that I was now an independent observer of the night sky.

My first astronomy book, which I nearly memorized, was Kelvin McKready’s A Beginner’s Star-Book, Knickerbocker Press, 1912. Thanks to this publication my list of known constellations and familiar heavenly objects began to lengthen. I could find M31, the Great “Nebula” in Andromeda, as it was called then. M33, too, was a naked-eye object. Those were the days when Percival Lowell’s drawings were Gospel and the opera glass was a serious observing instrument. Brass refractors were the elite instrument of choice and McKready’s photos convinced me that I certainly must have one.

The early 1950s were also the glory days of the Unitron Company on Milk Street in Boston. I set my heart on a 2.4" equatorial refractor priced at $240. Dad let me hire out to a farmer who would give me $200 for 60 days of summer work. I extracted promises from my four siblings to contribute $10 each and Dad agreed to pay the freight charges. Three weeks later the world as I knew it ended and a new one began - a world in which I had a telescope with a proper mounting! This small, but fine instrument served me for many decades until aperture fever began to afflict me in the 1970s. It was the momentous decade when my astronomical youth came to an end, for it was then that I built the 10" reflector, learned about the workings of the AAVSO, and joined an exciting new astronomy club in Rhode Island.