Space Race

In October, 1957, the U.S.S.R. embarrassed the United States by being the first to put an unmanned satellite into orbit around the earth, the Sputnik 1. Although the United States had announced its intention to do the same, they were inhibited by Eisenhower’s fear of being thought a warmonger in the tricky post-war atmosphere, as an orbiting satellite might be considered a violation of another nation’s airspace. During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 several launches established the principal that a nation’s airspace did not extend past the Karman line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Eisenhower had also prevented the satellite teams from using military missiles as launchers. After World War II, the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. competed to recruit the German engineers who had developed the V2 rocket. Werner von Braun and his team, recruited by the United States, had sent up rockets capable of launching a satellite. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet’s chief engineer who had been brought back from imprisonment in Siberia, was competing with von Braun. For its civilian satellite programs, however, the U.S. was using Vanguard research-only rockets.

After the success of Sputnik, Eisenhower pushed the Vanguard project to an earlier launch. The spectacular failure of this launch on December 6, 1957 in front of a broadcast television audience, was what finally transferred command of the U.S. launching program to von Braun’s Redstone rocket team. Explorer 1 was successfully launched on January 31, 1958.

Explorer 1

The space race precipitated unprecedented spending on education, which we noticed in our science and math classes and our high school library. We followed all of the space missions avidly. I remember the euphoria of Alan Shepard’s manned space flight in May, 1961, even though it was a month later than the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight. I wrote a letter to Alan Shepard and received a handwritten note in response.

John F. Kennedy proposed, in a speech to the United Nations in September 1963, that the United States and the U.S.S.R. cooperate in an effort to put a man on the moon. Khrushchev and Kennedy had achieved a kind of rapport over the years of working together, and it was thought Khrushchev would accept the proposal. When Kennedy was assassinated in November, however, Khrushchev’s trust did not extend to the Johnson administration and the idea was dropped.

The space race is considered to have ended with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975, a cooperative human space flight mission which came to symbolize détente. In studying the space race years later, when the participants have no need to keep secrets, the human faces and decisions emerge.

Against Cynicism

It isn’t hard to know why we’ve become cynical about people in public life, contemptuous of their motivations and altruism. We’ve seen so much lying, so much selfish posturing, and recent laws have contributed to the fact that only a few of us are getting much richer, while most of us falling behind. During last week’s silliness among presidential candidates, Don said: “America is becoming a joke!”

I’ve been studying the Eisenhower years, and this has not always been the case. The mood was quite different at the time. World War II had leveled the playing field for women and non-whites, but in the Fifties we were busy getting women back into bouffant skirts and aprons and re-erecting class and race barriers wherever possible. Eisenhower was a moderate, however, who supported the social reforms begun during Roosevelt’s New Deal, and sent troops to assist in desegregating schools. He tried to reduce military spending, while at the same time not giving ground to Soviet expansionism.

I’ve also been reading Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” which is really a study in fighting the cynicism within himself, while negotiating the heritage of his African father and his white American mother. We all know where his honesty and courage have gotten him, and how he still needs it every day!

Don and I are culture workers, and we have our own fights. Don tries to get Hollywood filmmakers to see the folly of upping the number of frames per second in movies, just because technology allows it, or filming everything in 3-D, just because they can. He would like to see a return to character-based movies. At this moment, he and his producing partner, Anna, are valiantly trying to inject some professionalism into a motley film crew making a movie which gets better at Don’s insistence. Engagement is a way of fighting cynicism.

I’m writing a series of novels which, in the current conditions, stands no chance of getting published. Without a targeted audience (Young Adult? I don’t think so) or a niche market (cooking, anyone?) or celebrity (and who, exactly, did you say you were?), or a clear genre (romance, perhaps?), it is hard to get anyone to look at what you are doing. This is partly because book publishing is being rocked by forces it barely understands. Although people are reading, free web content is probably more likely than books purchased at a bookstore. None of it stops me. By the time I’m finished, perhaps things will have settled down!

Ways of fighting cynicism:

1)      Engagement. Work with every opportunity that does come your way to up the ante. Avoid the tendency to laugh things off, paying attention only to what is funny. Humor is the refuge of the disengaged.

2)      Talk to real people. Most of us can’t avoid it in our working and consuming lives. We learn more than we expect to. No one is exactly as you hoped, and many are better.

3)      Look to history. Things have not always been this way!

4)      When all else fails, retreat to the garden, to the quiet bravery of trees and plants, which never quit looking for water and sunshine, determined to fulfill their destinies in supporting us.

The Eisenhower Years

I recently realized that the first book in my series, "The Pastor's Kids," is almost exactly co-existent with the years that Eisenhower was president. Though kids that grew up in cities may have felt the pressures of the Cold War during those years, in North Dakota, on the wheat-growing flood plain of the Red River, it didn't feel real. Those were stable years. We were still helping a few Displaced Persons from World War II, but our main thoughts were about school, church, friends and ourselves.

Though our life would look a little bleak to a kid from today, we had the richness of the seasons and plenty of playmates. And the world did trickle in to our little town. Crates of peaches and cherries, Sears catalogs, many glossy magazines and books found their way to us. We sometimes went to the neighbors to watch television, but in 1956, Dad and Mother rented one to watch the elections, and couldn't part with it when they were over.

The kids in the photo above (which I found somewhere on the internet), are actually quite close to my characters. Paul, on the left, a few years younger than Marty, the next, and Line (short for Caroline) in the middle are the three protagonists, the kids through whose eyes we see the world. Their Dad calls them "Sparky and the gang," as Line, always bright-faced and out in front, calls the shots for the other two and they can hardly be separated.

The next kid, Kristen, should be a little bit younger in relations to the others, but she is a stolid little kid, like the one in the picture. The last one, Ellie, should be older and blonder. Ellie was the first child, born in 1941 and of a different cast of mind than the younger kids. Their parents were scrambling when she was born. Their Dad was still at the seminary and their Mother worked at an orphanage, the three of them only getting together on Sundays.

The conflicts in the book are thus the age-old sibling rivalries, as well as the inner conflicts of kids who want to be richer, or more heroic, or just more ordinary than they actually are. Paul contracts polio, and his struggles with it, and with his desire to be a naturalist, are a constant theme. For him the grail is truth, painful though it might be.

Line is struck most by the general unfairness of the world. Kids on farms seem poorer than the town kids, illness strikes her beloved brother, and she has a hard time reasoning out how the loving hands of God can hold her, when she and others have so many troubles. For her sister Marty, the beautiful is the good. Her main problem is that it is elusive. A thing may shine with light one day and not the next. It may grow in importance for you, but then you become so used to it you can't even see it.

It remains to be seen whether I can make anything interesting, or even readable, out of my characters and their conflicts, but I am certainly going to try!