Tales From The Travels

I loved fireworks as a kid. Still do. Fourth of July has always been a great time of year for me. My son and I will go to the firecraker stand and buy a big pile of them every year. Then, we’ll go out somewhere safe and have ag great time setting them off. Safety lessons are part of the experience, though.

One year I wanted to buy some fireworks, but pop said I couldn’t. Being the willful kind of kid that I was, I disobeyed him. I walked the couple of miles to the fireworks stand and bought a bag of firecrackers. I was very careful with them when I got home so that I wouldn’t do anything to get caught. I pulled out this one firecracker that had this fuse that was unusually long. Really long. I thought this one firecracker would be safe to throw. I lit the fuse, pulled my hand back to throw it and it almost immediately blew up in my hand. The explosion was big enough that it blew the skin off my right thumb. It wasn’t bleeding very much, but a big circle of skin was all gone and it hurt. I went home and told an older sister what happened and she took me in to wash it off. I was there at the sink while she was washing the wound with soap and I started to feel a little light headed.

I dreamed about these two birds that were fighting. The birds were completely white with the exception of this one red feather on one bird. Everything else was completely black. This one feather came loose during the fight and slowly floated to the ground. Just as it touched the ground I woke up.

My sister was standing over me and I was laying on the floor. She was very upset, almost in tears, but I didn’t know why. She wanted to know if I was ok and I asked her what happened. She told me to stay right where I was and went to make a phone call. I was feeling ok, but I wasn’t inclined to argue with her. I just laid there like she told me to. When she got back she asked me if I needed anything. I asked for something to eat and she made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Along the way, I found out that I had gone into convulsions while she was washing my thumb. I had beaten my head on the sink and fallen down on the floor, convulsing and seizing. Then I had suddenly stopped and that’s when I woke up. She was just a teenage girl, but she really kept her composure under fire.

The phone call she made was to our mother, who told my sister to call an ambulance. The good humor man can’t call every kid in the neighborhood the way a siren will. Everyone showed up almost as soon at the ambulance did. They loaded me up on the gurney and took me out to the ambulance, even though I was feeling ok by then. Lawson and a friend got to ride in the ambulance with me to the hospital. The doctor there said that it was a reaction from the shock combined with the soap and gunpowder getting in my wound. They bandaged it up and sent me home.

I was terrified that pop was going to just kill me. I was certain there would be just eight kids in the family after this. But, he was very calm. He just said, ‘Didn’t I say you couldn’t have any firecrakers?’ ‘Yes’ was the only answer I could give. Then, he told me I couldn’t go swimming again until my thumb was completely healed. That was the worst thing he could’ve done to me. I would’ve preferred he beat me! But, there was no way I was going to disobey him a second time. For the next month I dutifully sat at the side of the pool while my friends went swimming, waiting for my thumb to heal. As fate would have it, by the time I was healed and cleared to go swimming again, my friends were all tired of swimming and didn’t want to do it anymore. The whole experience was a tough, hard lesson, but a good one.

Fireworks, though, still had another lesson in store for me. The following summer, with my father’s permission this time, I bought some firecrackers and was going around setting them off. This time I was being very careful. I never had a single one in my hand when I lit it. I would place them different places and blow things up. There wasn’t a dog pile or ant hill in the neighborhood that I didn’t blow a hole in! I thought that a firecracker in the metal trash can would make a great noise, so I put one on a board (To this day I still won’t hold one in my hand), lit it and let it fall into the trash can. Nothing happened. I edged up and looked in. There it was, quietly sitting on the bottom of the trash can and I let it stay there. I went around the neighborhood terrorizing dog piles and having a good time for the next hour before I worked my way back home. I looked in the trash can and that firecracker was still sitting there, the last one left. I thought that an hour was good enough and reached in to get it. As I stuck my head in the trash can and reached for it the fuse suddenly started sparkling. I yanked my head back as quickly as I could but it still made my ears ring. The best I can figure is that it had a little coal on it still and when I stuck my head in I caused the air to blow on it and set it off.

Lesson learned: firecrackers are nefarious things! I certainly haven’t given them up and my son and I have a good time with them every year, but I always approach them with the thought that they are intelligent, evil, and trying to hurt me!

One chilly Fall night, our father got us all up and took us outside before dawn. We sat out in the yard, wrapped up in blankets, and watched the most spectacular meteor shower you can imagine. The sky was filled with bright fireballs of all colors. Not just one or two, but many every second. It was grand. Later, I learned this was a very famous meteor shower, the great Leonid storm of November, 1966.

Years later, I heard there was going to be meteor shower and I waited for it with great anticipation. I was greatly disappointed when there were only a few meteors per hour. I thought they were all like the one we had seen. In fact, it is very rare. Only a few in all of recorded history have been like that one in 1966. Big ones like the one in 1966 are known as storms, the lighter ones are known as showers.

Meteors (falling stars) occur when a small particle of dust in space (a meteoroid) enters the atmosphere and burns up. Particles in space are moving at very high velocities (tens of thousands of miles per hour) relative to the Earth that the friction with the very thin atmosphere hundreds of miles up is enough to vaporize them. All of that energy in the particle gets transferred to the air and makes it glow. What you see with your eye is the tube of hot, glowing gas (plasma). Some particles are larger than flecks of dust and will make more spectacular displays. Very rarely, a piece the size of a rock will enter the atmosphere and form a fireball. If it explodes, its known as a bolide. Only the very rarest of meteors survives to reach the ground. And, contrary to the movies, they are not red hot when they reach the ground. The long trip through atmosphere can take several minutes and will cool them off, even make them cold. Once the reach the ground they are known as meteorites.

It wasn’t until within the last couple of hundred years that people began to realize what meteors and meteorites were. It was a very controversial proposal to suggest that they were rocks falling out of the sky. A little hold over from those days is the word ‘meteorology’ for the weather. It was believed that meteors were responsible for the weather.

One of the strange reports about meteors is that sometimes you can hear them. Scientists have scoffed at these reports. The meteors are hundreds of miles up in the atmosphere, so even if there was a sound, it would be time-delayed by minutes. Also, if there was a sound, hundreds or thousands of people would be able to hear it, not just individuals. However, there have been enough reports of this that they are now being taken more seriously. It’s believed now that maybe the meteor is creating some kind of radio signal that can be picked up by something close to the observer. In 1989 we were at the ranch of some friends, watching the Perseids. Everyone was looking one direction and I turned to look in the other direction just in time to see a spectacular fireball and I could hear a hissing sound as I watched. It lasted only about two seconds and I was the only one that saw it, but I could clearly hear a hissing sound as I watched.

No one has ever been killed by a meteorite. But, on November 30, 1954 Mrs. Hewlett Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama became the only documented case of someone being struck by a meteorite. It went through her roof and bounced up, striking her in the thigh and leaving a huge bruise. I saw a report in 2004 where a British woman claimed a small meteorite struck her in the arm. This occurred during the peak of the Perseids meteor shower. There are also reports on the Web of people being struck, even killed, but there is no documentation to support these claims. Interestingly, Wethersfield, CT had two separate houses hit by meteorites, one in 1971 and the other in 1982, giving Wethersfield a dubious distinction. The strikes did damage to the houses, but somehow, no one was injured. In at least one of them, the family was home and said the meteor came through the ceiling and bounced around the room where they were sitting before coming to rest under a table.

The greatest recorded meteor event occurred in Tunguska, Russia. Known as the Tunguska Event, it occurred about 7 AM on the morning of June 30, 1908 when an asteroid entered the atmosphere and exploded, leveling forests for hundreds of square miles. The region was so sparsely populated that there were no fatalities, but the shock wave traveled around the world and dust in the upper atmosphere lit up the night skies over Europe. This event has been the source of many pseudoscience claims, but investigators were able to recover particles of the asteroid trapped in the sap of the fallen trees to show that it really was an asteroid.

Events like the Tunguska event, but smaller, happen maybe a couple of times per week. Most of them are over the ocean or occur during the day, so they aren’t witnessed. But, every now and then one is witnessed somewhere. So, keep your eyes open this weekend.

I discovered pirates one day when I was about 10, or so. That was a great day for me. I loved the stories of the pirates and their adventures and treasures and, just like most boys, read all sorts of stories about them. One of these pirates, Jean Lafitte, was a famous pirate that spent some of his time in the Galveston area, where we lived at the time, so he became my favorite. One day, I was reading a book about the most likely locations to find pirate treasure and one of these locations was where the Kemah draw bridge was. I have no idea why they said this was a likely spot for pirate treasure, but I didn’t care. I really got worked up over this because the draw bridge was just a couple of miles away from where we lived.

One fine summer day, equipped with a pack lunch and shovel I set off with visions of gold treasure in my head. I got to the draw bridge area and started digging. I had no rhyme or reason for where I selected spots to dig, I just went under the bridge and started digging holes. Of course, I only had to dig a foot or two before I hit the water table. I dug holes all over the place but only found the water table. I was heading home all disappointed when I ran across some friends and we played in the marshes the rest of the afternoon. I had just about forgotten about the treasure hunting by the time I got home, all tired, scratched up and covered in mud. Didn’t find any gold, but still had a great day.

This being Easter Sunday, I’ve been thinking a little about my Catholic upbringing. My parents were quite devout when I was young, although they both left the church by the time I was a teenager. But, as a young boy I had to endure all of the rituals, which included no meat on Fridays and mass on Sundays. 

Mass was really agonizing for a kid my age and energy. We had to go without eating because you weren’t allowed to eat before communion, so I was always hungry during mass and would have more thoughts about breakfast than God. Once I was old enough to go to communion I would sometimes go just to get that little piece of bread.  And, we had to dress up in our ‘Sunday go to meeting’ clothes, which was a suit and a clip-on tie for me. Since mass was early, we had to go to bed early Saturday night and get up early Sunday morning, no sleeping in. We would get dressed and all pile into the car and then head out to mass. When I was younger, there were still seven or eight kids living at home and we would be jammed in like sardines. No one wore seatbelts back then, but it didn’t matter. The way we were squeezed in, there was no danger of anyone flying anywhere if we had ever had an accident.

There were no Catholic churches nearby, so it was a bit of a drive. There were a couple in Clear Lake close to NASA. But, the one we normally went to was in La Porte and was this large, stone cathedral type. The churches, especially the one in La Porte, always smelled of incense and there was always this big display of candles burning. This is one of the church’s ways of earning money. These are votive candles that people light when they say a private prayer. They then make a suitable donation for the privilege. This was all something of a wonder to me and very mysterious, which I guess pretty much describes the workings of the church.

Back in those days mass was held in Latin. We would have these programs to go with the mass and there were always these ritualistic prayers and pronouncements, with the congregation making the appropriate responses at the appropriate times. I understood none of this. The priest would then give a sermon, along with communion, before we finished up with some more ritualistic pronouncements and appropriate responses. At the end, the priest would say, “Mass is over. Thanks be to God.” The congregation would respond, “Thanks be to God,” and we were done. One week I was really suffering and just dying to get out of there. It seemed like the mass was going on forever and I was so glad to hear the priest say that mass was over that I said, “Thanks be to God,” except that my inflection was different and not exactly reverent. One of my older sisters was next to me and curtly called my name. The people around us all turned and looked at me. Several were laughing. I didn’t mean for it to sound like that, it just came out.

Such were my experiences with the church.

We lived in Seabrook, Texas between the fall of 1965 and the summer of 1969. Seabrook was a small town east of Houston, right on Galveston Bay and we lived a short walk from the bay. This was paradise for me for a number of reasons. One of the reasons was the fact that the Johnson Space Center was just down the street and this was a period of change in the area. The Apollo program was in full swing and things were busy and exciting.

We use to go by JSC on our way to church. My older brothers and sisters went to Clear Creek High School, near the center. And, my mother worked there during the Moon landings. It was this big presence in our lives and it was exciting to be so close to it.

I went to school with the kids of a number of astronauts. None of them were my friends, but it was neat when one of their dads went into space and we would watch it on TV. It was no longer a case of just a space mission, it had become much more personal.

One of the kids I knew was Tom Conrad, the son of Pete Conrad who walked on the Moon in Apollo 12. His best friend was Steve White, so of the first American to walk in space, Ed White. I didn’t get along with either of them. His dad died in the Apollo 1 fire and I really felt for him. It was bad enough to lose your dad, but he had to do it in front of the national media. My sister Pamela was friends with the daughter of Gus Grissom, who also died in that fire, and knew him. She told me about how she had once had a beer with him. There were a couple of others in my school and I remember one of the daughters bringing in astronaut food for a class project in fourth or fifth grade. That was the first time I had ever seen it and was really amazed.

My last year in Seabrook, the 1968-69 school year, I had a kid named Rick Armstrong as my assigned desk mate in social studies. We sat next to each other and worked together all year long on our projects. He was a really nice kid and we got along well, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was my friend. After the school year was over and the Moon landing was getting close I heard that the first man on the Moon would be a guy named Neil Armstrong. ‘Hmm’, I thought, ‘I know a kid named Armstrong.’ Later, I was looking at a Life magazine that had big pictures of each of the astronauts with their families. I was looking at the picture and got all excited when I saw Rick! I had sat next to Neil Armstrong’s son all year and didn’t even know his dad was an astronaut. Talking about being oblivious!