My Dad the Rocket Scientist Part One

My dad was a rocket scientist. Really. An actual rocket scientist. One of the first 500 at Aerojet General’s Sacramento headquarters.

He even had his own TV show—“Adventures In Rocketry”—which ran on KVIE, the local educational channel. He talked a lot about Newton’s Third Law of Motion (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) and found clever ways to demonstrate it, such as a frog (a real frog!) jumping off a floating piece of wood in a tub of water. The frog goes one way and the piece of wood goes the other way. That’s how a rocket works. Cool!

But the big hit, the one that made him famous, was the Little Red Wagon.

Aerojet General liked the positive publicity he brought the company with his school talks and TV show, so there were no complaints when the guys in the shop came up with a brilliant demonstration piece. The concept was elegant and simple: they strapped two big fire extinguishers on either side of a child’s red wagon, a Radio Flyer as I recall, with the nozzle of one pointing back and the other pointing forward. Squeeze the handle of one to make the wagon go forward and the other to stop it.

And boy howdy, did that Little Red Wagon scoot!

He would come blasting into his TV show and come to an abrupt stop with a big whoosh of whatever comes out of a fire extinguisher. It was an instant hit and he put on demonstrations at schools around Sacramento. At eight or nine, I would sometimes sit in front and steer. Scary and fun. A true crowd pleaser.

But Dad wanted more. He began to dream of cross-country speaking tours featuring the amazing rocket wagon and stirring talks about rocketry. He was ready for the Big Time—possibly even a national television show!

Step one: a rocket wagon upgrade. I don’t know if it was Dad’s idea or the executives at Aerojet, but the wagon was abandoned and replaced with a streamlined little jet car that looked like a snazzed-up soapbox derby entry. The fire extinguishers were hidden in the body. They tested it in the parking lot. It zoomed around just fine.

Step two: a demonstration before a national audience. Every year there was a convention for touring speakers in Washington D.C. This, my dad decided, was to be his debut—a grand spectacle before appreciative peers and potential customers. He and I drove all the way across the continent in an old VW minibus, the jet car crammed in the back, for the storied convention. We camped along the way, visited Dad’s family in Missouri, and had a good ol’ time.

The night of his presentation in D.C. came and he sat in his little jet car in the cramped wings of a relatively small stage, a tight clump of ten or twenty other speakers crammed in behind him. I recall a tweedy fellow in horn rimmed glasses right behind Dad, nervously hugging a thick sheaf of notes while fiddling with flip cards on an easel. The air felt electric.

Dad squeezed the handle to open the fire extinguisher valves. He was sure that he was going to blow everyone away. And he did. Just not the way he intended.

The guys in the shop, in their engineering wisdom, had replaced the pipes coming from the fire extinguishers with narrower ones, causing the propellent—following the laws of physics—to shoot out at a much higher velocity, thereby giving the vehicle more thrust. Which had worked perfectly in the wide open the parking lot.

The enclosed backstage of a small theatre was an entirely different matter. The enormous gust from the back of the jet car blew the papers out of the tweedy man’s hands, sent his easel and flip cards flying, did a full Marylin Monroe on the lady behind him, and made a godawful noise.

Dad’s little twenty foot roll up to the podium came to a stop in dead silence. Clouds of propellent hung heavy in the air. There was no applause.

Dad was rattled and didn’t give a very good speech. If he was a comedian might have been able to pass off the disaster with a joke about the dangers of rockets, but let’s face it, Dad was just a rocket scientist and a simple farm boy from Missouri at heart. Also, the tweedy man’s notes kept fluttering down from the rafters like feathers after a pillow fight. It was, as stand-up comics say, a tough room to work.

Needless to say, Dad landed no speaking tour contracts, and the drive back to Sacramento was not as much fun as the drive east.

The local TV show was over by that time and the rocket wagon never came back. There may be no gods in science, but hubris will find a way bite you nonetheless. Thus chastened, Dad returned to what he was truly best at—designing rockets. More on that in the next story.