Lovell failed to find this target, he'd have to ditch his plane and parachute into the bone-chilling waters of the Pacific.
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The year was 1955, and Jim Lovell was making his first nighttime landing on an aircraft carrier over foreign waters.
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As a child Lovell had been captivated by space and rockets. He would read the comic books of his time, showing Superman and Captain Marvel doing fantastic deeds, and he would draw his own imagined rockets and planes. He was mesmerized by Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Jules Verne. And he would listen enthralled as his uncle, a navy pilot who had fought in World War I, told him stories of dogfights over the fields of France.
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Fascinated with astronomy and space, young Lovell studied the stars and constellations. He read how astronomers had only recently discovered that the universe was much vaster than they had thought, comprised of endless numbers of grand galaxies.
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Like Frank Borman, Jim Lovell's family was poor and struggling. His father, James Lovell, Sr., had been a coal furnace salesman in Philadelphia. When his father was killed in a car accident, Blanch Lovell suddenly became a poor widow with a twelve-year-old son and no means of support. She moved to Milwaukee to work as a secretary for her brother, who sold and marketed the same furnaces there. She and Jim settled into a tiny one-room apartment. The kitchen was in a closet, the beds folded up against the walls, and the bathroom was down the hall and shared by all the tenants.
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Though they didn't have much, Blanch Lovell made sure that Jim had everything necessary to become whatever he wanted to be. By the time Lovell was seventeen, he had graduated from comics and books and was building his own model airplanes, flying them in an empty lot across the street from his apartment house. He and some high school friends even tried to build a homemade rocket. They had started out trying to construct a liquid-fueled engine, then switched to a dry-fueled solid rocket because it was easier and cheaper. They purchased gunpowder, packed it inside a cardboard tube so that it would burn instead of explode. For a fuse they used a soda straw filled with gunpowder and inserted into the rocket's tail end.
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On launch day his mother watched from their apartment window, feeling both feat and pride. She could see her son and his friends in the lot
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