Homer Hickam
Author
1943-02-19
Homer Hickam is an American author and former NASA engineer, best known for his memoir Rocket Boys, which inspired the film October Sky. He is also a Vietnam War veteran and has written multiple memoir and fiction works.
Books by Homer Hickam
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Rocket Boys
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Quotes by Homer Hickam
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The way I see it, if everybody ran from bad things instead of trying to stop them, bad things would be all there is.
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The way I see it, if everybody ran from bad things instead of trying to stop them, bad things would be all there is.
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My father lost an eye to a snapped cable while trying to rescue trapped miners, though he kept on working for fifteen years afterward.
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Throughout my childhood, when I raised my blanket in the morning, I saw a black, sparkling powder float off it. My socks were always black with coal dirt when I took off my shoes at night.
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All my life, everything important that had ever happened had always happened somewhere else. But Sputnik was right there in front of my eyes in my backyard... I felt that if I stretched out enough, I could touch it.
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I ate supper after Dad saw the evening shift down the shaft, and I went to sleep to the ringing of a hammer on steel and the dry hiss of an arc welder at the little tipple machine shop during the hoot-owl shift.
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After marketing surveys by Universal Studios indicated that 'Rocket Boys' as a movie title would not attract the female over-age-thirty demographic, the film was retitled and released as 'October Sky.'
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The time frame is summer 1961, a year after the gold medal in the National Science Fair. I always saw my 'Coalwood' books as a trilogy. This book finishes the story of my life in Coalwood. I think it's the best of the three.
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'Rocket Boys,' for one reason or the other, just happened to strike a chord across country and across world, maybe because it's set in a little coal-mining town. That's why NASA likes it - most of the engineers come from towns very similar.
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A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.
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Of all the federal agencies created by Congress, one of the true success stories is the 'Mine Safety and Health Administration', which grew out of a bipartisan effort in 1977.
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If politicians want to save money, that's fine. They can look for all the wasteful spending they want, but not where the lives of miners are involved.
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I've seen the government up close and personal, and for the most part, it's inefficient and hidebound, and it stifles creativity in any industry it clutches within its well-meaning but slimy tentacles.
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Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'
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When I was a West Virginia lad of 17, I met a Massachusetts lad of 42 by the name of John F. Kennedy. At the time, I was in a bright orange suit that I had just purchased to wear to the 1960 National Science Fair, where I hoped my home-built rockets would win a medal. Kennedy was in West Virginia trying to win the state's presidential primary.
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