Remembering Rocket Boys: A Conversation with Homer Hickam
By Sarah Gheyas
What does it take to achieve our childhood dreams? What do our ambitions teach us about ourselves? Since its publication in 1998, Homer Hickam’s coming-of-age memoir Rocket Boys, about the rocket aspirations of a young boy from a coal mining town in West Virginia, has been offering insights and inspiration to young and old alike.
Prior to becoming a writer, Hickam was a NASA engineer and served in the Vietnam War. Rocket Boys has been translated into eight languages and was adapted into the film, October Sky, with Jake Gyllenhaal playing Hickam. He currently lives in Alabama with his wife and a handful of fostered cats.
I reached out to Hickam, whose travails of growing up in a community masked with apathy mirrored my challenges, for his thoughts on Rocket Boys’ legacy and the intimate stories behind the written pages: what was included, what was left out, and why.
Rocket Boys was predominantly about pursuing space flight dreams, yet it was also about the lives of folks in a dying West Virginian coal mining town. What were the key threads you set out to explore in Rocket Boys?
There’s coal town life, strife between parents, young love, boyhood friendship, dedicated teachers, intrusion of the outside world into an insular life, and the tension between fathers and sons. It’s that last one that was most important to me, a fact I didn’t realize until I was well into telling the story. The father-son relationship is always tricky but especially so in those times, when fathers were expected to be more distant, to focus on the job and provide for the family while mothers did the nurturing. This often created a divide when the sons ached for attention from the man in the house and never got it.
Fathers like mine who came out of the Depression and World War II were often distant to their sons because that’s what they experienced. I’ve heard from so many men of my era that cheer me because I had a father who finally gave in, if only a little.
Growing up, what was the role of the space race for you and your community?
During the late 1950s, the Sputnik space race impacted almost every small town in the United States, most of them previously focused on local and family life, and not so much on what was happening world-wide. Suddenly, the local school academics were made more rigorous, young people were being told that we had to be smarter, and people were talking about something that could be seen in our skies that had been launched half a world away. It completely changed our perspectives on the future.
Quentin, the “invisible” kid in school, was the scientific mastermind behind launching the rocket that got you out of Coalwood. Tell us about his impact on you.
I was very fond of Quentin. He intrigued me from the start and my mother loved him, of course. He was, however, easy to ridicule, which boys like to do. His vocabulary was extensive.
I lost track of Quentin after I went off to college. He went to Marshall University on the only scholarship any of us got. Quentin insisted the University give him one and they did! It was only when I started writing the memoir that I tracked him down and was surprised to find him in Texas playing the part of a Texas oil man. He had acquired a deep Texas accent, chewed tobacco, and put on a lot of weight but he was still Quentin. When we got together for honors and such, I and the other boys just had to shake our heads and watch him play the part which we knew was him just acting, much like the British aristocrat he tried to be in high school. Yet, he made a lot of money in oil.
For my sake and for the memoir’s sake, thank goodness there really was a Quentin! He was the perfect foil as well as the ingredient needed to put some scientific rigor into our efforts.
The memoir details how you and your rocket boy classmates formed a group called the Big Creek Missile Agency (BCMA) to build and launch a rocket. Tell us about the rocket boys and how you all came to form the BCMA.
As mentioned, Quentin was the perfect foil as well as what was needed to bring a seriousness and purpose into our work. Another friend, Roy Lee was the outlier, the troublemaker. They are the yin and the yang of the group and kept a nice tension within it that was both funny in the telling as well as enlightening for me, showing how people with different personalities can work together. Our other friend, Sherman, who suffered from polio, was an interesting character but he was brought in only occasionally to extend the theme of courage; O’Dell was more difficult to work with as he was all over the place, bouncing off the walls, and I used him sparingly for that reason.
You write about your brother Jim, who sounded as harsh as your dad. What do you attribute your challenging family dynamic to?
Ultimately, it went back to my parents’ central conflict. Mom hated the coalfields. Dad loved them. Dad loved his first son, but was ambivalent about the second (me). What that was all about is still something of a mystery to me but I think it was because of something that happened between my parents that they never revealed. As for Jim, he is a unique individual who I came to appreciate in later life.
I didn’t understand Jim at all as a child. Mostly, I was jealous of his athletic ability and popularity. He was like Dad in his love of history, and although outwardly self-confident is actually somewhat shy around strangers. Jim not only became a football coach and the mentor to many young men but also a history teacher. He likes my books.
Did you hate the coalfields too, like your mom did?
No, I enjoyed my life there: my friends, the freedom of going into the mountains and playing, and my schools and teachers. But that was because our parents worked hard to insulate us as much as they could from the brutality of the work in the mines and also what they had gone through in the Depression. My mother harbored for all her life her resentment and bitterness of the death of her little brother because the coal company didn’t provide a doctor for the families of its miners. She hated the regimentation she saw of the people under the thumb of the companies and their careless attitude toward mine safety. Coalwood was a bit of an oasis in that respect as the mine owners were comparatively progressive toward the care of their workers—free medical and inexpensive dental for all, for instance, company stores that were honest, and good housing—but she couldn’t get out of her heart what she had witnessed in the towns where she grew up.
What were your literary inspirations?
On my own, I read all of the Black Stallion/Red Stallion novels just because I loved their tales of adventure and because they stressed being kind to animals. I also read anything I could find by Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, and absolutely loved the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries. My mom kept handing me novels by John Steinbeck but the only one I really liked as a child was Cannery Row. My teachers felt I should be more heavily disposed toward writers that tended to overwrite in that they used the English language in flowing but somewhat dense, repetitive manner or went off in tangents. Although Oliver Twist was palatable enough, I thought I’d never get through A Tale of Two Cities when I was in the 4th grade. And Pilgrim’s Progress was impenetrable in the 3rd grade. I did like Little Women, though, which I think we read in the 2nd grade. In 5th grade, I read Jack London’s Call of the Wild. These novels taught me to notice that modern writers, such as Steinbeck, streamlined both character development and dialog. I came to understand that the era in which one finds oneself often dictates the style of writing.
The book’s opening lines “I didn’t know…” was a powerful hook, one that you used in a later novel, Carrying Albert Home. Many self-reflective moments begin with such “I didn’t know” moments.
The opening lines of the memoir took me a long time to find. I tried all kinds of openings but that one finally worked. On the opening lines to Albert, of course I did that deliberately. I wanted to make a connection between Rocket Boys and the novel. You are one of the few folks who noticed or, at least, pointed it out!
What would you say to young people who are in the process of realizing their own aspirations?
When I talk to young folks, I remind them that dreams aren’t enough. They have to act on them, do whatever it takes to make them come true which, unfortunately, means a lot of hard work and failures along the way. I’m convinced, however, that success will ultimately come to those who persevere. It isn’t the most brilliant of us who succeed. Far from it. It’s the ones with some smarts and grit: They look like anybody and everybody. Often, I think we are surprised who has these traits. It usually requires some crisis or perhaps a suddenly realized passion for them to be revealed.
Time for the short question round!
Equations or words? Words. I love diagramming sentences.
Your chemistry teacher Miss Riley, or your rocket scientist idol, Wernher Von Braun?! Oh, Miss Riley. I had a huge crush on her.
Coalwood or the Virgin Islands? Hmmm… tough one. Coalwood of the 1950s, I think.
NASA or scuba diving? Another tough one. I love both. I guess NASA. The people I worked with were fascinating and it gave me a good ending for Rocket Boys. Imagine if I had just become only a scuba instructor! For that matter, if I had even gone to work for a company like Boeing and not NASA. And the odds were much against me ever working for the space agency after I got into my late 30s, but yet it happened. Kismet!
Your literary superpower? That I know what people are really interested in is other people.
About the author
Sarah Gheyas is an alumna of the MFA nonfiction program at Columbia University.
