Strange Angel (12 page)

With Malina acting as the group's intermediary with Caltech, the proposal was put to Clark Millikan, Robert Millikan's son, in charge of the wind tunnel and a professor in the aeronautics department. Millikan had a fearsome reputation. Imperious in the classroom, he taught his students while smoking a cigarette through a long holder and was renowned for giving tests that were so difficult 95 percent of his pupils could never finish them. Students speculated that his draconian attitude stemmed from resentment of forever living in his father's long shadow. Seeking permission to change his thesis to the study of rocket flight and propulsion, Malina showed Millikan the proposal that he and Parsons had worked on and fought over. Millikan turned down the idea immediately. Rocketry was not practical, Millikan told him. In fact, it was a harebrained idea, fit only for Hollywood films and thrill seekers. He suggested that Malina finish his degree and get a job at one of the aeronautical companies that were located in the area. A job in the industry was the expected goal of aeronautics graduates after all. Rockets should be left to the comic books. Clark Millikan's rebuff was a blow to Parsons and Malina, but not an entirely unexpected one. They knew whom to try next—the one mind at Caltech who made a living out of radical thinking, and who just happened to be the director of GALCIT itself.

Robert Millikan had tempted Theodore von Kármán, the most gifted aerodynamicist of the era and head of the aerodynamics institute at the Technical University of Aachen, Germany, to immigrate to the United States and become GALCIT's first director in 1930. Kármán had been a child prodigy in his native Hungary, able to multiply six digit numbers in his head at the age of six. Now fifty-four years old, he was still short in stature and spoke with a strong Hungarian accent, and was much revered throughout the scientific world. His dark, untamed eyebrows hooded a piercing, curious gaze, and he was immediately recognizable hurrying across the Caltech campus, beret on head, cigar in hand, an irrepressible, at times mischievous, presence. He had a reputation as a ladies' man and could often be found romancing his students' wives at college functions. He was also famed throughout the student body for his bursts of absentmindedness. On one occasion he was in the midst of giving a lecture to his class at Caltech when, halfway through it, he realized that he had been talking solely in German. None of his American students had uttered a word in protest, so Kármán ended his sentence and, without missing a beat, continued the lecture in English as if nothing had happened.

He lived with his sister, Pipö, in a house bedecked with hundreds of artifacts collected from their travels across the globe. At times they seemed to inhabit a dream world as Parsons had as a child. When Kármán and his sister entertained guests, they would often adorn themselves in Japanese kimonos for the engagement. He was a flirt, a respected advisor, and, to his pupils, a revered father figure. Upon arriving at Caltech, Kármán had established a charismatic style of teaching. He formed tight bonds with his students that went far beyond the classroom, bonds that incorporated friendship, mutual respect, and genuine adoration by the pupils. He stressed a more creative approach to learning. For example, he would ask how an electron would “feel” in its environment. For Kármán the imagination was all important in tackling any problem.

The most vivid example of his unorthodox scientific mind-set and his frustration with those who lacked vision came when he was called to help explain the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. The $6 million steel suspension bridge, 6,000 feet long and described on its completion in 1940 as the greatest single-span bridge in the world, had broken up in a light gale shortly after completion. It had been filmed bucking, bending, and twisting as if it were made of rubber, before collapsing into Puget Sound. The bridge's engineers had been mystified by the disaster, obsessing over the weight and pressure, the “static forces,” acting on the bridge. Kármán, as an aerodynamicist, saw the disaster differently. The problem wasn't the weight on the bridge so much as the aerodynamic forces, the forces of air in motion, working on its frame. He theorized that the bridge had acted like a poorly designed airplane wing and had responded to the lifting forces of the wind flowing across it. Under certain conditions the bridge's design promoted turbulent airflow—which later became known as Kármán vortices—causing the bridge to oscillate with the rhythm of the wind flow. Once this oscillation began, the bridge bucked and swayed; the wind did not even have to be strong to literally bend steel. The bridge's engineers scoffed when Kármán suggested putting a scale model of the bridge in the wind tunnel at GALCIT. But he went ahead with the test and provided positive proof of his theory. The so-called experts' stubborn self-assurance crumbled, and Kármán introduced a whole new way of designing stable structures.

“In desperation,” Malina, Parsons, and Forman went to the iconoclastic Kármán to see if he could save their seemingly doomed project. In his autobiography, Kármán remembered being “immediately captivated by the earnestness and the enthusiasm of these young men.” Their unusual backgrounds made them all the more fascinating. Parsons may have been a largely self-taught chemist, but Kármán immediately recognized his “considerable innate ability.” He saw Parsons as a romantic, a dreamer, “searching for some private gate to happiness,” but he felt that in a nascent science an unorthodox mind-set was a valuable commodity to have—just as Malina, while realizing that Parsons “was not mathematically talented,” had seen Parsons' “freewheeling brain” as “extremely valuable” to these early stages of development. Parsons displayed exactly the kind of attitude Kármán was famed for endorsing.

Impressed by the boldness of the three young men and amused that Clark Millikan's rejection had not affected their ardor, he mulled their suggestion over for a couple of days before summoning them back to his office. He told them that he could not give them any funds: The depression was cutting into even the institute's vast endowments. However, he would allow them to work under GALCIT's auspices. What's more, they could use the laboratory's equipment after hours, despite the fact that Parsons and Forman had no connection whatsoever with Caltech.

The group was overjoyed. Their rocket project had gained the support of one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. Now named “The GALCIT Rocket Research Group,” they would exist unofficially for the next four years, without an appointed leader or bureaucratic structure. They would rely on trial and error, good luck, and, above all, imagination. By the time their experiments were finished, the study of rockets and space travel would be transformed from a foolish pursuit into a genuine science. For Parsons the project was the culmination of a dream from his childhood—to belong to a group of men who were doing something noble and wonderful, an Arthurian band of adventurers making a quest into space.

 

Rocketry had not been the only thing on Parsons' mind. As well as gaining backing for his rocketry experiments, the previous years had also seen Parsons finding a wife. Following his eye-opening European trip several years earlier, girls had become a serious priority—albeit one not quite as serious as rocketry. With the rakish Forman he had been wandering the social circles of Pasadena, in particular the dances put on by the various churches in town. In the winter of 1933, the two attended a Christmas dance held at the First Baptist Church. There were prizes for the best dancers, and with the depression still biting, the dance provided some welcome gaiety amidst the rigors of the workweek. As they walked through the church door, Parsons was stopped in his tracks by the sight of a young woman in a pink dress studded with rhinestones being spun down the floor of the hall by her dancing partner. Transfixed by this twirling girl, Parsons insisted that he and Forman introduce themselves. Her name was Helen Northrup; she was twenty-two years old, four years Parsons' senior. Tall—she stood five feet, nine inches—and thin, she had dark brown hair and “Irish blue eyes.”

She was immediately enamored of the boys' talk of rockets and their hopes of traveling to the moon. Nevertheless, Helen was not one to be bowled over by Parsons' charms; indeed, recognizing Parsons' attraction to her, she turned her attentions to Forman instead. “Jack saw me to the door that night,” remembered Helen, “and I refused to give him any information—my telephone number, or address ... I was a teaser if you will.” Undeterred, the following day Parsons tracked her down to her house in Pasadena and, along with Forman, was eventually invited in for a game of cards. Helen was intelligent and well-read, and she shared with Parsons a great love of classical music, particularly Stravinsky. The formal visits continued, and Parsons' puppy dog persistence eventually won her over.

Helen's life had been a difficult one. She had grown up in Chicago, along with her two younger sisters. They were the daughters of Thomas Cowley, an Englishman working for the Standard Oil Company, and Olga Nelson, the daughter of Swedish émigrés whose father, as family lore recalled, had once been an adviser to the Russian tsar. During a bitterly cold winter in the early 1920s, Helen's father had contracted pneumonia and died. His death left Olga to care for the three young girls. While working as a desk clerk at a hotel she met Burton Northrup, a traveling salesman. Olga, needing both financial and emotional support, soon married him. But Helen's new stepfather had anything but her best interests in mind. He sexually abused her and her sisters, obsessing over them and refusing to allow them boyfriends or even to speak to boys.

When Helen was twelve years old, the family relocated to Pasadena. The destination had been chosen, remembered Helen, through Olga's use of a Ouija board. So the three daughters, their abusive stepfather, and defeated mother made the long drive west. Upon arriving in Pasadena, the Northrup family grew again when Olga gave birth to two more girls, Sara—known as Betty—and Nancy.

In 1928 Helen's stepfather was convicted of financial fraud and imprisoned for a brief period. A shy and sickly Helen was forced to drop out of high school to support her family. She found employment in Pasadena working as a window dresser for a local dressmaker in town. A talented designer herself, she enjoyed the work, but upon the return of her stepfather she was forced to become a secretary in his debt collection firm. Helen was still forbidden to date boys, although she had her fair share of admirers. Her extracurricular activities were limited to Sunday school and the activities of the Baptist church.

However, Helen's stepfather encouraged her courtship with Jack. Parsons seemed a wealthy, cultured boy, an ideal match for an eldest daughter who was by now of marrying age. Helen was happy, too. Here was a man she was allowed to see, one who was refined, sophisticated, and handsome: “Jack was a well-traveled man worldwide so of course he had a bit of class ... He always dressed [well], even when he tested rockets.” Indeed Parsons' dress code was remarked upon by everyone. Even in a time when formal dress was common, Parsons' devotion to his suits was unusual. Another friend from the time remembered how Parsons always “wore a regular suit with a vest,” and recalled, “I don't think I ever saw him without the vest.” In Parsons' mind the suits may well have acted as mementoes of his younger, wealthier days.

Ruth Parsons, Jack's mother with whom he was still living, approved of the match as well, supplying Helen with clothes from her delectable Parisian collections. Helen was quiet and attentive, supportive and organized, and she seemed interested in everything Jack was doing. A typical Sunday morning would see Parsons drive over to Helen's, wait for her to finish the household chores her stepfather made her do, and then spend seven or eight hours with her, often in the company of Ed Forman. The two also spent time alone together, driving up to the nearby San Gabriel Dam and looking down along its canyon, or going into the mountains above Burbank Airport and watching the planes glide in. They traveled outside Pasadena together, to the town of Avalon on Santa Catalina island, and they took astronomy classes together, possibly at the Mount Wilson Observatory. It was while gazing at the stars that Parsons admitted to her, as he later wrote, “I first learned how much I loved you.”

Occasionally, however, Parsons' enthusiasm for his rockets suggested an infuriatingly solipsistic character. On one evening when Jack had promised to take Helen on a date, Forman came along, and the men quickly became so engrossed in their talk of new rocket designs that Helen was hardly noticed. “I was completely ignored,” she recalled, “so I walked home. Hours later [they said to one another] ‘Oh, where's Helen?'” The practical and social necessities of life could often seem very distant to Parsons, especially when he was occupied with rocketry. “Jack was already erratic,” Helen would later recall of this time. “His mind wasn't on the ‘now'.”

By July 1934 the ninteeen-year-old Parsons had proposed marriage. The three-carat diamond engagement ring that adorned Helen's finger was that which Parsons' absent father had given to his mother. Along with the ring, Parsons also gave his wife a slightly less romantic gift—a .25-caliber pistol. Helen later recalled: “He had given me a nice diamond that he thought should be protected. I think I would have been more scared using it than losing my ring.” The couple, who still lived with their families, planned to marry within a year. However, money was needed if they were to have their own home, and no sooner had they become engaged than Parsons went to work at the Hercules explosives plant in northern California. Separated by five hundred miles, Parsons wrote a letter a day to his bride-to-be in Pasadena. He would tell her everything about his day. For example, he had torn down the naked pinups on the walls of his dorm room and replaced them with a single picture of Helen. Also, he was trying to “keep up appearances” and grow a moustache for her but was failing to do either.