Pictured at right is me with three of my model rockets: The Estes Starship Vega (center), the Patriot (right), and a rocket of my own design on the left -- I never gave names to any rockets of my own design, they didn't last long enough for sentimentality! The photo date is probably late August of '71 (picture developed in Nov), and I had just turned ten. This is the only photo I have of any of my rockets from that time. Mom was not (and is not) a photographer. :)

The long story

The year was 1971, and I was just short of my tenth birthday. We had just moved to a new town, and I was friendless and bored. While browsing at a local drug store with my mother, I found something I had never seen before: a three pack of model "rocket" engines. The cost was $1.19, and I had a dollar. I begged mom for the difference, and the engines were mine. Mom was always good about stuff like that, in spite of having very little money!

The next iteration was rocket powered bottle rockets. After a few shots, I had a dozen neighbor kids hanging around the house at all times. Even though I had been in the neighborhood less than a week, my house was rocket central, and I had a crew. By the end of the first week, and after about a dozen engines, we had our first successful straight rocket flight. It went about thirty feet in the air, crashed into the ground, and then blew fire out the top (there was no capsule, just an open end of the paper tube). This was the first time it had occurred to us the possibility of a parachute ejection charge built into the engine.

To make a long story even longer, by the end of that first month, we had rockets flying many hundreds of feet into the air, floating down for soft landings into the hands of any number of neighborhood kids. Every launch had at least twenty spectators, and usually more. The biggest challenge was the capsule--what to use? We tried everything, even small light bulbs (they worked really well, but usually broke upon landing). Eventually, we settled on the standard hand-made paper cone. The photo above shows my homemade model with paper nose cone.

Funny thing happened. After all our work re-inventing the wheel, the local drug store having sold maybe a hundred packages of rocket engines, decided to open a whole isle of rocketry related items, including kits! My first kit was the "Quasar". It was beautiful, everything I needed was in the box! It flew within an hour of purchase, and was lost within two! Every dime I earned from my yard care kid business went into rockets. I bought every kit the drugstore sold at one time or another, and I designed and built dozens of my own models. None were sacred, all were flown until they were lost or destroyed. It was one of the best summers of my life.

I still build and fly rockets occasionally, and more often than that, I try to get my kids interested in the hobby. Now and then, they will build and fly something with me, but never without me putting the idea in the air. They just never seem to catch the bug. I don't get it!! Oh well, computer games rule, I guess. :(