Rocket Boys: Chapters 1-2 Until

Rocket Boys: Chapters 1-2 Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents..." (1) So begins the words of Homer Hickman's book Rocket Boys. Although the homespun hometown of the narrator may prove unfamiliar to the contemporary reader, the sense of a conflicted young person, at odds with the morality of his town is not.

The war that rages in Coalwood, West Virginia is not the Cold War, although that provides the historical background to much of the first chapters of the book. Instead, it is the war as to the future of intelligent students like Homer. Virtually all of the economic and social activities of the town revolve around the coal mining industry, hence its name. But other people of the town, like Homer's mother, want a different life for the next generation. The conflict about the future also rages in Homer's divided home.

Like many children, Homer feels torn apart when the people he loves most in the world, his mother and father, constantly fight about what will happen to Homer. Homer's father is the mine superintendent. Homer calls his parent's relationship a relationship one of "bloodless combat" (1) This sensation is familiar to any child growing up in a home where the parents are continually fighting, even though divorce was not common during Homer's boyhood days.

From the window of my bedroom," Homer says he can watch the black steel tower, as this becomes his image of the entire world, while he is growing up, until his intellectual strivings take him in other directions, towards a fascination with rockets and the world beyond the mines. While his father looks into the earth, Homer looks to the sky Rocket Boys: Chapters 3-4 When Sputnik was launched, Homer's world changed. He gave careful attention to all of the radio announcements going on about the Russian Sputnik.

For Homer, the radio was the voice of the outside world, and all information, long before television ever existed. Homer's Republican father was furious. He was a zealous anti-communist, and this meant that the Russians were 'ahead' in their fight for freedom. Just as people huddled around their televisions during 9/11, Homer kept abreast of Sputnik, wondering if the world was going to end. Even the newscasters were afraid, wondering if an atomic bomb was on board, the Russian spacecraft.

But Homer's mother took a different view and saw that the world was taking a new turn, perhaps for the better, as the U.S. government encouraged children to advance in science. Homer's mother encouraged her son to build the rocket of his dreams, and was unafraid of the town's public opinion and her husband. "Take care if this one doesn't embarrass me all over Coalwood," said Homer, Senior (41). Homer's mother simply laughs "Heaven forbid!" she says. She aspires for her son to live a different life than his father (41).

So it.