ROCKET BOYS

'''Rocket Boys''' is the first memoir in a series of three, by Homer Hickam, Jr. It is a story of growing up in a mining town, and a boy's pursuit of amateur rocketry. It won the W.D. Weatherford Award in 1998, the year of its release.^[1]
Rocket Boys was made into a film in 1999, titled ''October Sky''. The book was then re-published as ''October Sky'' shortly afterwards.

Contents

Plot summary

Characters

References

Plot summary

Homer "Sonny" Hickam lives in a small coal mining town in West Virginia named Coalwood. Sonny, after seeing the Soviet Union launch Sputnik, knows that he wants to help the American team of rocket engineers, the ABMA, when he graduates from high school and college. However, people in Coalwood normally graduated from high school and then went directly into the mines for the rest of their lives. Sonny's older brother, named Jim Hickam, is excellent at football and expects to go to college on a football scholarship. Sonny, however, is terrible at sports and has no special skill that will get him "out of Coalwood". Sonny fears that he will have to work in the mines after high school.
After seeing the failures of the American space program, Sonny decides that he wants to "help out the ABMA" by building his own rockets. His first attempt at rocketry consisted of a flashlight tube and model airplane body as a casing, fueled by flash powder from old cherry bombs. It exploded violently, destroying his mother's fence. After that, Sonny enlisted the help of other boys in the area to help him build his rockets. These people were Quentin, Roy Lee, O'Dell, and Sherman. Their first real rocket, powered by black powder, was named Auk 1, an auk is a flightless bird. It flew six feet up before the solder melted and the nozzle, a washer, separated from the casement. After that, the group of boys started calling themselves "Rocket Boys" and called the place they were launching their rockets from "Cape Coalwood", in honor of Cape Canaveral.
The Rocket Boys enjoyed mixed success during their rocket launching campaign, employing several fuel mixtures including rocket candy and a mixture called "zincoshine". They fired a total of 34 rockets (Auks I - XXXI, with 4 different Auk XXIIs), with a maximum height of over six miles.

Characters

★ 'Homer "Sonny" Hickam, Jr.' is the main protagonist and narrator of the story. He is 14 years old at the beginning at the story. He is the unspoken leader of the Rocket Boys, and gets discouraged somewhat easily. He has an older brother named Jim and parents named Elsie and Homer Sr. Is given hard time around the town because he is pursuing a different dream.

★ 'Quentin Wilson' is an intelligent member of the Rocket Boys and the person who does most of the math and analysis required in rocket building. He is very methodical and systematic, solving problems with a step-by-step approach.

★ 'Roy Lee Cooke' is a member of the Rocket Boys who isn't as intelligent as some of the other Rocket Boys, but he has a car and he knows many things about subjects that the others may not be as well educated on (dating, places to get moonshine, etc.).

★ 'Sherman Siers' is a member of the Rocket Boys who has a weak leg due to polio. For the first few rockets, he insists on lighting the fuse, even though he can not run as fast as the other boys. He is quiet and intelligent, and he quietly helps out the Rocket Boys. His crippled leg never sets him back. He died at age 26 from a heart attack.

★ 'O'Dell' is small and excitable, the most emotional member of the group. His father drove the town garbage truck, allowing O'Dell access to many useful items, frequently scrounged to further the groups efforts. He is always scheming ways of making money, from the failed iron scrap attempt--which took an entire summer, yielded a net loss of one dollar, not counting the destruction of borrowed equipment, and almost killed Homer--to the profitable harvesting of ginseng.

★ 'Willie "Billy" Rose' is a member of the Rocket Boys who joins the group about a year after it is founded. He has excellent eyesight and can find rockets very well.

★ 'Miss Riley' is a chemistry teacher at Big Creek High School. She gives Sonny a book called "Principles of Guided Missile Design" that is extremely useful to the Rocket Boys in the future. She also orchestrates the Rocket Boy's entry into the National Science Fair. She is diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma shortly before Sonny leaves for the science fair. Later, she dies of her disease.

★ 'Homer Hickam, Sr.' is a hard-headed mine foreman in Coalwood and Sonny's father. He takes his job very seriously, going out of his way to help miners in distress. He is almost always at odds with the union leader, John Dubonnet. Homer Sr. seems to not care about Sonny's affairs as much as he does Jim's; Sonny points this out in the book much to Homer Sr.'s chagrin.

★ 'Elsie Hickam' is Sonny's mother. She is supportive of Sonny's rocket building, but often finds herself at odds with her husband, Homer Sr. about the rocket building. She often tells Sonny to "not blow himself up."

★ 'Jim Hickam' is Sonny's older brother. Sonny and Jim sometimes do not get along well, and have frequent arguments that sometimes end in fights. Jim is the star football player at Big Creek High School.

★ 'Dorothy Plunk' is Homer's love interest throughout the novel until she started dating Jim. Dorothy Plunk was actually a pseudonym for the actual girl Homer pursued. Homer and Dorothy reunited at their high school reunion in 1985.

References

1. Weatherford Award