cc: file, Grandma Hafen via Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, Claude and Katherine Warner, Lloyd and Luana Warner. Diane Cluff, Andrea Shirts, and Heather and Nate Pace
"Friday night Paul, Rob, and I went to see the new movie `October Sky.' I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. We met at Wendy's and ate together, then went over to the Tinseltown on WestBelt. Rob gives me a really bad time about keeping popcorn bags from previous movies, and, since they encourage free refills, getting a refill. Maybe it's the rebel hippie in me protesting against unfair popcorn prices, or maybe Rob is right to give me a bad time. I expect several of you will have something to say about this opening salvo of words.
October Sky is about the 60's. It starts with Sputnik. I remember how scared we all were when sputnik first went up, and how we would go out to watch for it, just like in the movie. In the mountains air of Utah you can actually see satellites. The two National Science Foundation sponsored Summer Science Institutes I went to, New Mexico State JESSI (summer 1967) and Oregon State (summer 1968), were both funded as a direct result of Sputnik.
Whether it was the October sky, or some other time of the year, we were aware in Cedar City there were satellites watching us. I watched every one of the early space launches. The astronauts in Houston, Texas were my heroes, and the heros of my best friends and fellow dance band members Raymond Gardner, Randy Shirts, Dale Hatch, and Charles Garfield.
I remember one fall day when Charles Garfield and I were checking out the, let's say, October sky. Naturally it was a Thursday, when Dad was on his weekly trip delivering meat in Hurricane, St. George, and points in between. Mom was in Seattle at an insurance school for her work with Dixie Leavitt, and there was another lady staying at the house with Sara and I. Charlie had come up to help me feed the cattle, and afterwards we were experimenting with how far you can throw baling wire, the wire used to hold a bale of hay together. Untangled in an oval, baling wire could be thrown the length of a football field. Looking up at the sky, we noticed the power line going through Dad's farm, and decided to see if we could get one of the baling wires to land on the power line. We did not think of the consequences, nor did we expect anything to happen. We did get a wire to land across the power lines, and the electric arc almost reached the ground. That was the night I learned that the power to Enoch and the entire Cedar Valley goes through Dad's farm. A neighbor saw the arc and the power company was down at the Packing Plant shortly afterwards to check things out. We confessed and apologized, and they didn't do anything to us. When I got back to the house, the lady who was staying with us said she must have caused the power to go out when she plugged in the iron. I told her I didn't think that was what caused the power outage, and realized nonverbally how egocentric our fears are. When they blew up the white picket fence with their first rocket in the movie, I relived in my mind this evening of my youth with Charlie.
I've told you kids, these next stories, and have not written them down before. Remember how I told you one year at the annual 4th of July party at Ray Gardner's house we decided to make a multi-stage rocket. We had become pretty good at taking an open tin can, making an opening just large enough to stick a firecracker in the base, and putting the open side in a larger tin can with an inch of water in it. Then when the firecracker was set off, the energy of the explosion was all captured inside the can, and it would fly 20 or 30 feet up in the air. We decided to make a three stage rocket, and to seal the boundary between successively smaller cans with clay. We had three firecrackers sticking out of their little holes on three successively smaller cans stacked to make our rocket. We caught a cricket and taped him to the top of the top module as our astronaut. We announced to our parents and their friends that we were going to set off a can rocket, and they all turned to watch us. Then Ray and I lit our matches, and as planned lit the bottom, the middle, and then the top can firecrackers. The first stage of the rocket went off beautifully, and the rocket was mabe 20 feet in the air when the weight of the clay started rotating the remaining stages so the top last two stages were pointed right back at us. It was one of those moments one never forget, which seemed to last an eternity, watching an invention turn around and point right back down your throat, and recognizing you were going to get in real trouble if you came out of the experience alive. When the second and third stages went off, very close together, it sent the three cans heading straight for us. It was just like the early rocket experiments in the movie October Sky. Our cricket was squished to death by the force of the explosions, and our parents were so glad we weren't hurt we didn't get in too much trouble. After all we were just practicing what we learned at school.
From a mining standpoint, Cedar City is located uniquely in the world. It is five miles up the canyon to some fairly extensive coal seams. It is maybe ten miles out across the valley to some fairly extensive iron ore deposits. The early pioneers discovered this, and Cedar City and Iron Town were established to create wagon wheel rims, wagon axels, horseshoes, nails, and other essentials. When I was going to school, part of the curriculum was to teach us about this legacy. Thus we had field trips to the coal mine, and got to go way back into the mine with miner's hats and lights on, just like in the movie October Sky. On the field trips the miners showed us how they took ammonium-nitrate, the same stuff Dad spread on the farm each year for fertilizer, and packed it in holes they drilled, and then blew open a new section of the coal mine. Then the teachers would take us out to Iron Mountain, and we would all be behind big rocks when they would blow up the entire side of a mountain. Some of us didn't get behind the rocks, because it was so much fun to watch the entire side of a mountain explode and fall down in smoke and dust. The tour leaders carefully explained to us that the explosion was made with ammonium-nitrate, just like was used by our Dads to fertilize the farms in Cedar Valley. And of course, we would go home and watch the astronauts go into space on a rocket with a fireball base. I think it was natural for us to be curious.
So one day, Ray visited me out at the farm. It was probably on a Thursday. Thursday's were the only day Dad wasn't around to make sure I was doing what needed to be done. And Thursdays I was in charge. I needed to make sure the cattle were fed, not on the Minersville road, fences were fixed, and the irrigation water changed. I remember it always seemed to snow the hardest, to have the most fences break, and the most problems with other chores on Thursdays. Anyway, Ray visited one day, and we got talking about the coal mines and the iron mines and I mentioned Dad had just got a big load of ammonium-nitrate in to fertilize the farm with. Thinking it would be fun to set off an explosion, we proceeded to find an empty container (an old glass 2 pint bottle), to go down to the Lower Plant and fill it with ammonium-nitrate, and bring it back up by Grandma Nelson's nail and chicken feed shed. We hadn't really listened to our teachers (or they didn't stress everything we needed to know), and yet we figured we needed something to start the ammonium-nitrate on fire. So we soaked the contents of the container with diesel fuel. Then we didn't want to be close enough to it to just throw a match in it, so we went to the Packing Plant and got 20 feet of the twine used to tie roasts up with. It doesn't burn very good, and so we soaked it in diesel fuel. Ray took off, I lit it, and we both ran for cover. The diesel evaporated and so the fuse burned slower and slower and went out about 15 feet from the `bomb.' So this time I cupped my hands, put the fuse in it, Ray poured diesel in my hand and we let the fuse out very fast. Ray took off, I lite the fuse, and because there had been no time for any evaporation, the entire fuse instantly lit up. I was running so hard, I was able to clear the six foot tall fence into the feedlot. I don't remember if this was a July or October sky. I do remember feeling relieved as I looked back through the fence slots and saw the diesel just burning off, and for the first time realizing I did not have any exploded shards of glass sticking in my back. I have since learned that pioneers often end up with arrows in their back. Ray and I put out the fire, and didn't try that particular experiment again.
Then there was the time I went up town to visit Ray and found out he was up the street at David Farnsworth's house. This is just down the street from where Aunt Sara and Uncle Des live. Ray and Dave were down in the basement with a chemistry set. They had mixed up the components for gunpower, had made a cannon out of a piece of wood they turned on a lathe, and as I walked down the stairs I heard this BANG-ping-ping- ping-ping-ping-ping. The quarter inch ball bearing they shot off, had gone so fast it had bounced around the basement against all of the heating ducts. David's Mom told them to take their stuff outside. So we went down to Ray's house, which is right across the street from the 2nd Ward Church. They packed the cannon full of all of the gunpowder they had made, and lit the fuse of broken match sticks. There was a BANG------------------------------------------------------------ping, as the marble hit the church window across the street. It didn't break (for which we were very thankful), and when we looked down at the cannon it was split right down the middle. I am not sharing these stories because I want you kids nor your kids to repeat my mistakes. I am sharing the stories of the October sky of my youth to give you a laugh, to help you learn so you don't have to repeat my mistakes, and to help you each get to know me a little bit better.
So these days are pretty dull compared to taking several years worth of October sky explosive experimentation and collating them into 7 paragraphs. Tuesday was the first Geophysical Society of Houston luncheon I have been to for several months. I need to take the time to go to these meetings more often. I have a lot of friends there, and I guess I have been hiding myself because of my insecurities and failures. We had a planning meeting for the GCSEG Symposium I mentioned last week. Wednesday my friend Townsend Dunn and I had lunch. It is so exciting to talk to him and to see his enthusiasm, even as he goes through his own trials in his own unique valley of the shadow of death. His faith is strong and like most of us he will come through stonger for the trials. Wednesday evening I went to a talk by Amos Nur at the University of Houston on gas hydrites. This is a big topic, and I will save it for the theme of a Thoughtlet to be written in the future. As a teaser, there is several orders of magnitude more energy (methane) in gas hydrites than has been or will be discovered in all of the oil and gas fields in the world. Before the lecture I made arrangements with the UH Hilton Hotel to host the first day of the GCSEG Symposium on the 15th of April. After the lecture I talked to several of my friends, telling my old boss at the Seismic Acoustics Laboratory, Fred Hilterman, about Andrea and I being engaged. Then I went to an SMU Alumni party in River Oaks. Snob city. I mostly watched and ate a litte. Met a guy who has a $100,000 Martin guitar, and he gave me the numbers so I could find out what mine is worth. Paul called and it's a 1965 model and it is only worth a $850. I also met my first Texas socialite. Her Daddy went to SMU, and his Daddy went to SMU, and her husband went to SMU, and his Daddy went to SMU. He is a banker and very nice. She is also nice, and really hungry for social acknowledgement. I never knew before how prestigious SMU is in some very well placed circles. Guess it wasn't a bad place to get an MBA. I also realized why I have never been very interested in this kind of event. Thursday I had lunch with Randy Etherington. He is a High Priest in Memorial Ward, and one of the best structural geologists in the world. His wife divorced him several years ago, and his second wife is named Andrea. We worked together at the Bureau of Economic Geology, and developed a close friendship and trust.
Friday was mostly spent working on the GCSEG, and all of the other paperwork and e-mail associated with a new business. I worked until it was time to go to buy tickets and then meet Paul and Rob at Wendy's for dinner. Then after seeing the movie October Sky, I went back to the office and finished up 21 letters, 10 e-mails, and sent them all off by about midnight. At 6:30 Saturday morning I picked up Rob, and we went over to the Bush Park to meet others going to Philmont. We hiked, I had a backpack with a big rock in it on, up to where we could see Maudeen Marks' ranch, and then back to the cars. Most of the last hour I was on a cell phone conference call with Roice Krueger and Steve Joseph at different numbers in Utah, Roger Anderson and Albert Boulanger in New York City, and two colleagues in Houston at different numbers. We chained 3-way calls, and Rob, it was neat to see how impressed you were that I learned how to do this from watching you and your friends. The rest of Saturday, Paul and Alma and I trimmed the 5 big trees in the front yard. I took a picture of all of the branches we cut. I was wiped out by the time we finished. Paul had several friends from the Singles Branch over for a spaghetti dinner. They fed me too. I talked to Andrea about the week and plans for Disneyland and beyond, went to the grocery store and crashed. For those out of town, Melanie came down to see her friend Marie and to cheer her up (Marie's Grandfather died and her sister Becky's first child was born with a serious and correctable birth defect). Melanie, thanks for coming over to lunch today. A meeting about Rob and my upcoming trip to Philmont, and writing this out have pretty much wound up this week. As I reflect on the week, the movie, and the many memories which have come to mind, I hope each of you find a star in the February sky or even in the October sky to hang your dreams and your ambitions on."