Strange Angel (7 page)

His mother's pampering had made him a slightly plump child, and his solitary upbringing had led to his rejection by most other children. At Washington Junior High School, he was considered “effeminate” and was teased for having the politeness and manners of a rich “mummy's boy.” The gaudy colors of his science fiction magazines also signaled him out for abuse; the playground was not the safest place to admit an interest in science. But he might have been spared the scorn of his peers had he not arrived so conspicuously on the first day of the school term in his grandfather's limousine. Immaculately turned out in a grey wool blazer, knitted brown tie, and leather shoes, he spoke with an affected English accent, no doubt picked up from the servants in his home. He stuck out like a sore thumb amidst the rough and tumble of school life. He became known as a “sissy” and was relentlessly taunted for his fancy clothes, while his long hair was grabbed and tugged by the school bullies. “Unfortunate experiences with other children,” as he later referred to these incidents, led him to shy away from the crowd and devote himself to his books.

Edward Forman was almost two years older than Parsons and also suffered from dyslexia, but there the similarity ended. Forman was tall and good-looking, street-smart and affable, and he had a distinct streak of rebelliousness running through him. In Parsons' first year at the school, Forman was designated a monitor with the thankless task of summoning the pupils in from recess. One day a scuffle broke out on the playground. The students quickly formed a circle, shouting and yelling. Through the dust being kicked up, Forman could see someone getting a serious beating. He raced into the middle of the circle, pulled the bully off his victim, and with one well-aimed punch broke the assailant's nose. The fight was over. The crowd dispersed. Forman looked down on the ground where the bloodied and dirty figure of Jack Parsons, his books splayed out around him, was sprawled. He helped him up. So began the closest friendship of Jack Parsons' life.

Unlike Parsons, Forman was not from a wealthy home. Only a few years before his family had been farmers in Missouri. They had moved to Pasadena in search of a better life, but upon their arrival they had found no houses for rent and the grand resort hotels far too expensive. Along with his parents and three older brothers, Ed was forced to camp in the Arroyo Seco until a residence could be found. Forman's father found work as an electrical engineer and a house was eventually obtained. Even so, the family had to take in a boarder to help make ends meet. Forman “saw this rich boy whose grandfather gave him a twenty dollar bill every day,” remembered Helen Parsons, Jack's first wife. At a time when the average wage was fifty-six cents an hour, the beneficence of Walter Whiteside hung like a “kick me” sign from Parsons' back. “Ed took Jack under his wing because he saw the help that he needed,” said Helen Parsons. Later in his life Parsons would call his friendship with Forman “essential in developing” his “male center.”

Parsons appreciated the advice and the protection Forman gave him, while for his part Forman not only enjoyed helping spend Jack's pocket money but also listening to the eloquent and well-read Parsons holding forth on any number of strange and mysterious topics. With the eagerness of a lonely boy, Parsons would have told Forman of the magical worlds of Parsifal and Sir Gawain, of eastern religions and outer space. Forman was no stranger to this last subject. He was already an avid reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs' series of books on Mars, in which the hero, John Carter, falls asleep in a cave in the Arizona desert and through an unexplained mystical process finds himself waking on the red planet. It was not long before the two boys were spending their spare time reading and earnestly discussing science fiction together.

It was at this time in his life that Parsons would later claim to have had his first mystical experience: He attempted to invoke the devil in his bedroom. He would describe the experience later as his “magical fiasco,” which put him off further occult study until he was older, but he also intimated that he had succeeded and scared himself witless. If he had mentioned the story of the devil to Forman, one can only imagine how it might have intrigued the older boy. “I think Ed just worshipped Jack,” remembered Jeanne Ottinger, Forman's stepdaughter. “Ed was bright, very bright, but he just didn't have the formal education that Jack did. He learned a lot from Jack and I think Jack and he were exactly the same kind of adventurous person.”

Above all it was Parsons' interest in rocketry that captivated Forman, and between Parsons' pocket money and Forman's engineer father, the two would have plenty of materials to work with. “It was our desire and intent,” remembered Ed Forman, “to develop the ability to rocket to the moon.” The pair adopted the phrase
Ad Astra per Aspera
—through rough ways to the stars—as their motto. They swiftly became inseparable as they drove each other on to create more complex and explosive skyrockets, the balsa wood tubes growing larger, more aerodynamic, sprouting fins and nose cones just like the rockets they had seen pictured in the pulps. They seem to have made efforts to replace firework powder with an explosive even stronger, for by the time the two moved to Pasadena's John Muir High School in 1929, they had gained a reputation for mischief. “They were a couple of powder monkeys,” remembered Marjorie Zisch, a fellow pupil at John Muir. “They would go out into the desert and make rockets and do all sorts of explosive stuff.” With the exception of Forman, Parsons still had few friends, and he made little effort to fit in. While John Muir prided itself on its football, basketball, baseball, and track teams (the great baseball player, Jackie Robinson, was only a few years behind Parsons at the school), he preferred fencing and archery—solitary sports surrounded by an air of old-world romance.

At some point during his teenage years, however, his increasing fondness for explosions and his poor school grades began to worry his mother. Whether Ruth Parsons thought that her boy needed to be toughened up, or whether she hoped to tame his increasingly volatile enthusiasms, she decided that Brown Military Academy for Boys, 130 miles to the south in San Diego, would be the best place for him. She could not have been more wrong. For a boy who naturally shied away from groups and regimentation, the forty-acre academy known as “the West Point of the West” was unfortunate in every respect. He was dismayed to find the school rife with bullies, and his protector Forman was far away in Pasadena. If the academy taught him anything, it was that the practical application of explosives could cause a rapid reaction. “He blew up the toilets in the whole goddamn place,” remembered Jeanne Forman, Ed Forman's future wife, and was promptly sent home again. Helen Parsons recalled, “They were trying to make a man out of him and they got a donkey.”

Back in Pasadena, he renewed both his friendship with Forman and his rocketry experiments. At school the other pupils did not make fun of him anymore. He had gained the confidence that only being expelled from a military academy can give one. What's more, he was rapidly becoming a good-looking boy, with his long black hair greased straight back and “glowing, piercing” eyes.

 

Parsons' and Forman's minds may have been fizzing with the idea of rockets, but the world itself was quite indifferent to thoughts of travel to the moon. Instead, the airplane and its supporting science of aeronautics ruled both the skies and dreams. In the 1920s the burgeoning new business of aviation had chosen Southern California as its center. Attracted by the promise of 350 clear flying days a year and the ability to park planes outside, pioneer aviators such as Glenn Martin, Donald W. Douglas, John Northrup, and Allan and Malcolm Loughead (later Lockheed) set up shop around Los Angeles. They were young men in their early thirties who happily worked together building planes in disused movie lots with the backing of wealthy aviation enthusiasts. They initially sold their aircraft to the navy or to the postal service, which needed mail carriers. However, by the late 1920s the development of passenger lines offering flights from Los Angeles to San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City had increased demand rapidly. More and more aircraft were being built, and Los Angeles had become the undisputed capital of the aviation industry in America.

Adding a further thrill to this budding industry was the glamour that surrounded flight. When in 1927 Charles Lindbergh succeeded in the first solo, nonstop airplane flight across the Atlantic, he made aviation the adventure of the day. In Los Angeles the appeal of the airplane had been amply demonstrated by the millionaire playboy, Howard Hughes, who had begun filming his First World War aerial masterpiece
Hell's Angels
in the skies above. Having amassed the largest private air force in the world, he was now filming aerial dogfights along the coast, wowing the populace and firmly establishing the airplane as the preeminent awe-inspiring technology of the day.

The government and the academic world followed suit. As universities built science departments, the propeller-driven airplane was seen as the harbinger of the new technological age, receiving ample support. However, there were no compelling economic, military, or scientific reasons to study the rocket, which at the time was used solely to propel lifelines aboard ships and occasionally whaling harpoons. Thus, anyone who saw possibilities in the use of rockets had to work alone, driven solely by personal passion.

Unsurprisingly, those that did study these strange and impractical engines were not cut from the usual scientific cloth. In 1881, a twenty-seven-year-old Russian explosives technician named Nikolai Kibalchich sketched and described a flight vehicle propelled by a solid-fuel rocket. The rocketeer envisioned a moveable rocket engine attached to a platform, which would allow the craft to be steered by adjusting the direction of thrust of the engine. “I think that in practice, such a task is achievable ... and can be accomplished with modern technology,” he wrote. His farsightedness was made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was being held prisoner in the Petrapavloskaya Fortress in St. Petersburg, awaiting execution for creating the bombs that had been used in the assassination of Emperor Alexander II. “I believe in the reality of my idea,” Kibalchich wrote, “and this belief supports me in my terrible situation.”

It was not until 1903, however, that the greatest step towards treating rocketry as a science was taken. Another Russian, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an impoverished, deaf schoolteacher, inspired by the stories of Jules Verne, published his classic treatise
The Probing of Space by Means of Jet Devices.
Developed through a series of experiments made in his home laboratory, his theoretical groundwork dealt for the first time with such complex problems as escape velocities from the earth's gravitational field and the relationship between the mass of the rocket and its propellant. Although this impressed a small clique of physicists in St. Petersburg, his work would remain little known outside his native country until the 1930s.

America had its own rocketry pioneer, Robert Goddard. Born in 1882 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Goddard was the son of a bookkeeper and a disinherited merchant's daughter. He was nurtured in his youth on the stories of H. G. Wells, in particular his novel of a Martian invasion of earth,
The War of the Worlds.
The tale of Martians traveling over 140,000,000 miles through outer space impressed him immensely, as did Wells' “compelling realism” in the telling of the story. Then, on October 19, 1899, while climbing a cherry tree at his Massachusetts home, he experienced a scientific awakening on a par with a religious epiphany: “As I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the
possibility
of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet.” In front of him seemed to materialize a mechanical device, as solid as the tree he sat in, that whirled round and round until it began to lift, twirling and spinning above the city of Worcester and out into space. “I was a different boy, when I descended the tree from when I ascended,” he wrote; “existence at last seemed very purposive.” Since that tumultuous day he had gone on to devote the rest of his life to what he saw as “the most fascinating problem in existence,” rockets and space travel, or, as he grew to call it, “high altitude research.”

Operating largely by himself while teaching physics at Clark University, he experimented extensively with his own black powder devices, before publishing in 1919 the founding text of modern rocketry,
A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.
Among much dry description of his earthbound experiments, he hypothesized that a rocket could be used to attain sufficient velocity to escape from the earth's atmosphere. Its success could be demonstrated by crashing the rocket onto the moon with a payload of flash powder which would signal its arrival to watching astronomers.

Goddard wrote his text to gain funding for more experiments from the Smithsonian Institution, and he included the moon rocket hypothesis purely as an illustration of his more abstruse calculations. However, when it fell into the hands of the newspapers, it created a sensation.
AIM TO REACH MOON WITH NEW ROCKET
, read a headline from the
New York Times,
MODERN JULES VERNE INVENTS ROCKET TO REACH MOON,
read the
Boston American.
For a brief moment the rocket took over the nation's fancy. Goddard began to be called the “moon-rocket man.” Novelty songs such as “Oh, They're Going to Shoot a Rocket to the Moon, Love!” were written about him. He was mocked and attacked in science journals for his idea. The
New York Times,
in a woefully misinformed editorial, chastised the professor for not knowing the “relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” (The writer of this editorial failed to understand the critical third law of motion, the one even the twelve-year-old Parsons had grasped: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The fact that the reaction takes place in a vacuum is irrelevant.)