Rocket Boys by Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
368 pages
Started: 24 November 2010
Finished: 1 December 2010
This book has been sitting on my shelf for years and I’m so glad I finally grabbed it and read it. It is a wonderful story of life in the 1950s coal country. It is a story of growing up and family and how hard it can be to express love and fear. And it is a story of the power of dreams.
Coalwood, West Virginia, is a coal mining town. Everyone and everything in the town is part of the mine. For the boys you either play football well enough for a college scholarship or you become a miner and take your life in your hands every day. Homer has never really been drawn to the mine, to the delight of his mom and the anguish of his dad. When the United States enters the space race and Sputnik flies over head, he finds what pulls him – space. Together with several friends he begins to build rockets, trying to get them to go as high as they can. His mother’s only word on them is that they don’t blow themselves up. They do manage to blow up her garden fence and her water heater though. His dad never outright supports the rockets, but any supplies they need just happen to appear for them.
The rockets pull the whole town together. And the boys, whose only previous option had been to be miners, all go to college on the dreams of their rockets.
The book inspired a movie, October Sky. And the two are fairly close. But the book is so much richer and you get a better sense of the characters and their relationships in the book (which isn’t a huge surprise). It was a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.
Rating: 10
AmandaStretch
mom
Giggles
Brett L. Dennis
When I read your review, the words ‘Coalwood, West Virginia’ jumped out at me. My earliest memory is sitting on the back steps of our house in Coalwood where we lived with my grandparents. My Dad was in the army…WWII was happening. I was waiting for my grandpa to come home from work. He was black all over from the coal dust except for the eyes which were a circle of white from where he wore goggles. He reached in his pocked and pulled out a tiny, tiny kitten that he found by the railroad tracks on his way home. That was about 8 or 10 years earlier than the book you read.
You did not mention that the story of the boys and rockets is TRUE. They became world leaders in the field of rockets and famous. People too often view the coal fields as poor and uneducated. The places mentioned in the story and movie…Welch, Bluefield, etc. were my home and that is where the missionaries came to my home when I was 7 years old. My family was among the first members and the beginning of the Welch LDS church. It was just a ‘twig’. Not even a Branch. Today it is Ward. So happy to be a part of it.
People look at the ‘company houses’ and make judgements. My grandpa made good money and we had anything we wanted. A big fancy house was not important. I made a visit to that area recently. It was so sad to see that it is now truly a destressed area due to the economy, floods, etc. It isn’t the same place where I grew up.
Thanks for stopping by. I did classify the book as non-fiction and as a biography.
Have you read the book? It would probably really interesting since you are from there. I spent a few months in Pikeville, Kentucky. It certainly is beautiful country out there in the hills.