Alan had several empty petroleum barrels in his yard. We rolled six of them together and placed boards over them. On top of these we placed sheets of plywood. The launch pad was ready, but it was late and I had to go home. That night I dreamed about soon flying in my rocket ship.
The next day in second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Rowland, asked if any of us had something interesting to report. I stood up and said: “Alan and I are building a rocket ship called the Nine-Ah-One. It is powered by a steam engine and our first flight will be up to about two thousand feet. We will land in the Great Salt Lake.”
Mrs. Rowland was a bit surprised. She said, “Well, Billy and Alan, that sure is interesting. When are you going?”
“Well, we are not finished yet. But when we get done with this rocket, we will blast off at midnight. I think before we go we will need to stop at Dee’s and get some hamburgers so we will have plenty to eat while on our trip.”
When Mrs. Rowland asked us why we were doing this I replied, ‘‘So we can get our pictures in the paper.”
At recess, I tried to recruit some additional crew members. One boy protested, “But Billy, what happens if we get up to space and all the clocks start to go haywire?”
‘There’s no problem, Stephen, we won’t have any clocks.”
“I still don’t want to go. I’m worried something will go haywire.”
Well, there was nothing to go haywire at all. The only thing that went wrong with the project was that it never got past the launching pad stage. Alan and I had a falling out, like we usually did. I don’t remember what it was, but he probably wanted to work the controls. I was banned from his back yard for several days. By the time we were friends again, I went to his back yard and the launch pad for the 9a-1 rocket ship had been taken apart. At that moment I made the crucial decision to ‘‘scrub the mission.”
Coming tomorrow: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
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