The Little Blue Book That Changed My Life
September 2006 :
I became interested in things scientific when I was about eight or nine years old. I read just about everything I could find dealing with science but especially things having to do with space travel. Coronet, Colliers, Mechanix Illustrated, and absolutely anything with Chesley Bonestells stuff in it was my forte. It’s a real shame I didn’t keep the stuff I collected when I was a kid, but so is life. I loved science but was terrible at math so it looked like my interest in science was going to be short lived, that is until October 1957 when the USSR launched Sputnik.
When Sputnik was launched I was taking business math just so I could graduate from high school with minimum hopes of going to college. I was reading a little blue book by Arthur C. Clarke titled Interplanetary Flight. I did alright until I got to the mathematical appendices. I couldn’t understand them, not even close. So I took the book to my math teacher and asked him about understanding these appendices in order to try to understand what the USSR had just done. He said I had to learn high level (2d year) algebra, trigonometry, and calculus before I could understand the book. He gave me a chance to learn these things by letting me sit in the back of his class and work through the 2d year algebra book and trigonometry book with after class help from him. He said all I had to do was get passing grades on his tests and get through the algebra book and he would give me an A in his class and recommend me a place at West Virginia State College. I went through both the algebra book and a trigonometry book before graduating from high school the following spring. I never looked back.
My interest in space led me to finish very close to the top of my college class with high averages in math and physics my dual majors. From there I went into the Army because I had a commitment from ROTC, which had paid for most of my education. The Army sent me to missile science school and I became a real rocket scientist but only used the knowledge to command a medium range ballistic missile unit. But even with all this background I never really was able to translate my desires to be involved with space until I retired from the working world.
On many vacations over the past 45 years or so I have tried to visit some astronomical site including MacDonald Observatory in Texas and Kilauea in Hawaii as well as many others. But I never really had the time during my working career to become involved with astronomy per se until I retired.
As a retirement present my wife and daughter bought me an eight inch Celestron. My wife and I had decided to move to RI, into a township that doesn’t have streetlights beyond the township seat. This move was so we could be close to our grandchildren. My daughter told me that there was an observatory on Peeptoad Road and since I was so interested I should contact them. One day just before we moved into our house in Glocester we were driving by the observatory and saw a car there, so we stopped. My first contact with a RI astronomer was Ted Ferneza.
I must admit that my real interest in keeping with my education is astrophysics and astrodynamics, which I continue to expand. In order to understand more of this subject and astronomy I have spent considerable time teaching myself spherical trigonometry and all could about the in and outs of using telescopes. My home is littered with books by Hawking, Sagan, and many others who have dealt with both astronomy and astrophysics.
And as they say the rest is history, but the history just recounted would not have happened had it not been for that little blue book, which I still have.
