Hickam, 56, has helped train astronauts and design the Spacelab during his 17-year career as an aerospace engineer for NASA, but nothing was more fun than those first few rockets in Coalwood. As related in his 1998 bestselling autobiography, Rocket Boys, and now in the movie October Sky, Hickam learned rocketry despite low math scores and the objections of his decidedly down-to-earth father, who feared his spacey kid was throwing away a future in mining. He was right about that. Now retired from NASA, enjoying a second marriage and a second career as a novelist, Hickam has long since forgiven his father, who died in 1989 of black lung disease. Now the coal miner's son is basking in the glow of the movie. "This has been just a hoot," he says. "I'm sure one day I'm going to wake up and find out this is just a dream."
Dreaming, in fact, is how it all began. His mother, Elsie, who encouraged him, had only one piece of advice: "Just don't blow yourself up." Instead he blew up her garden fence. "The neighbors used to say I was going to be the first woman in space," says Elsie, now 86 and living in Myrtle Beach, S.C., "because he was going to blow me up there." But with the help of a teacher and the men who made machine parts for the miners, Homer and five friends taught themselves to build small rockets that would soar five miles above the coal mines and take first prize in the 1960 National Science Fair. "I just love the idea of a person with dreams who refuses to take no for an answer," says October Sky's producer, Charles Gordon.
Still, Homer Sr.—who once worked seven years without a day off—told his boy, nicknamed Sonny, to forget about the sky. "You're my boy," the elder Hickam said. "I was born to lead men in the profession of mining coal. Maybe you were too." Hickam says his dad loved him but didn't understand that the near-sighted, scrawny boy had talents different from those of his football-playing older brother Jim (now 57 and a high school teacher and football coach in Roanoke, Va.). Once, Homer Sr. "was bragging on Jim," Hickam laughs, "and Mom asked him, 'Could you please brag on Sonny once in a while?' Dad just looked at her and said, 'About what?' "
The coal-dust life ended after the science fair project propelled him into Virginia Tech. Today, Hickam, who was an Army lieutenant in Vietnam from 1967 to '68, lives in Huntsville, Ala., near the Marshall Space Flight Center, with wife Linda Terry, 45, a jewelry designer and photographer he married last year. Avid scuba divers, they met 14 years ago at a local dive shop. (Hickam's first marriage, of nine years, ended in 1986.) Hickam has no children, but he and Linda share their rustic two-bedroom house with four cats. Rocket Boys, which followed an article Hickam wrote for the Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine, was originally set to begin with a detailed description of rocket science instead of his Coalwood youth, but Terry talked him out of that. "He can be a big kid," she says, "and as stupid as the rest of us."
A big kid who has outgrown his father's rejection. "I'm not one to bear a cross," says Hickam, who explains that when his father accepted his invitation to light the fuse on the last of his schoolboy missiles in Coalwood, "I waited with hope that my father might turn and put his arm around me." Instead the older man suffered a fit of coughing from the disease that would kill him. "And it was I," says Homer Jr., "who reached out to hold him."
Kyle Smith
Grace Lim in Huntsville
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- Grace Lim.
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