Feeling Nostalgic

The other day we had a little fly by here at the farm. The airstrip is pretty soft and is closed of course. Our friend made a really nice pass in a beautiful Malibu. Wife took some video which I havn't had a chance to preview. But if we get any footage at all, I'd like to put it up on YouTube. So I was surfing YouTube as I often do, for some back music to go with the vid. I was thinking about the instrumental, "Apache". It was by the Ventures, so I thought. The real story of Apache is too much to tell here. But one of the covers was by "the Shadows". Another long story. But this one Shadows vid was unbelievably cool. It was one of those British TV shows like "top of the pops" or something. The 4 guys were dressed in tuxedos. The 3 guitars were matching fenders. They were not even plugged in as the hit single played. The guys did a very stiff dance move in unison. It was pre Beatles. It is one of the coolest music vids I have ever seen. It's a poor quality as far as focus or grain and it is a copy of a copy of an old videotape. But if you want to see it, go to YouTube and search n98009, which is me. Then it's on my favorites. Or just search "The Shadows". It's so retro, I swear it looks like a new idea........ then I stumbled across another instrumental: "Telstar". Named after a satellite. Whenever I hear this song I just get this flood of memories. I'm a baby boomer. I was in Jr. High, maybe 7th or 8th grade. Telstar was an early satellite. Sputnik was in '57, and explorer 1 in '58 . Telstar was launched atop a Delta Rocket on July 10th 1962, my 13th birthday. When there was a launch from Cape Canaveral sometimes a TV would be put in our classroom so we could watch it at school. We were allowed to actually bring our radios if we had them to school to monitor the progress of the spacecraft. This was a big deal. World War II was only 17 years back and TV was very young. And battery powered portable radio very new too. During that era I had two radios that I remember. The first was a crystal set which was in the shape of a rocket. It would only pick up one or two broadcasts. The second was a transistor set that my dad had loaned me. It was of a type that boomers all remember. It had a 9 volt battery and a plastic case that could be broken down in half. Inside was the new technology of transistors mixed with the older but miniaturized diodes, capacitors, etc. that were soldered together in a little board. Every year that little radio's design got better and better. Soon the little board was littler and would be stacked with another board without the case getting any bigger. Then the soldered wires in the board started becoming strips of metal. Then certain common circuits had the strips of metal and could be manufactured independently for different radios and devices. Electrics had become electronics. Pretty soon they were stamping out the circuits with no solder and no wires. Just this flat circuit board of metal in a pattern. Etch the circuit into a board and pour in the conductor and there was the "printed circuit". The grandfather of the "chip" and Silicon Valley. My old transistor worked, but not well and it was fragile. While Telstar was orbiting and it's song was on the charts, I would go to my friends house in the neighborhood. He built a "Heathkit" HiFI, with the exciting "Stereo" feature. I would lie on the floor of his basement and listen to "Telstar" with the incredible Heathkit cranked up loud thru it's homemade woofers and tweeters. So many of my friends in Jr. High had dad's who worked at NASA. We lived near the Greenbelt Goddard Spaceflight Center outside of DC. Many of those dads were "Rocket Scientists". Before the term was a cliche. We all knew who Robert Goddard was. The rocket pioneer. And we knew about Werner Von Braun. I was in the "Civil Air Patrol" and our old World War II aviation books were updated to the sixties. When I completed the program, like becoming an "Eagle Scout", I had completed the final area of study known as "The Dawning Space Age". Our meetings were held at the "Robert Goddard Jr. High". My brother bought a "Heathkit" short wave kit. I worked on it with him. We borrowed a soldering iron. We wired up the board and connected the primitive speaker and D cell batteries and before we knew it we were picking up radio Moscow. We thought it was unbelievable. I told my neighbor about it and he laughed. Over at his house where the basement stereo was he showed me his brother's workbench where he was building a "Color TV" Heathkit. He then showed me a crystal set his brother had built from scratch as a physics project. He was picking up radio Moscow on a razor blade! A few weeks later at that same workbench I built my first model rocket. A rocketeer friend of mine sold me two standard small "Estes" rocket engines for $2. This was no small investment for me. So I took my new rocket engine and some other stuff to my buddy's brother's workbench. I had a new bookcover for school that was like shiny paper. I wrapped that carefully around the tubular little cardboard solid fuel engine. As I wrapped I lightly coated it with glue and created my rocket body. We had paint and balsa from model car work and control line model airplane stuff. I designed and made templates for the fins on paper and then made the fins out of balsa. Made a nose cone out of balsa. The nose cone had a recovery streamer. My entry level rocket was too crude for a parachute. My buddy had a battery powered launcher/igniter. It lit off and flew and I was in the space age. When tenth grade came I was in high school. I started thinking about girls. I started to play guitar and listen to folk singers who were left over from beatniks. I wanted to drive cars and "solo" in an airplane. I forgot about Heathkits and transistors and rocketry. I came of age. And now I realize how wonderfully innocent I was in the "dawning space age". LloydLouITTY ::::+::::