Strange Angel (13 page)

Within a day of arriving he longed to be back with Helen, writing her, “Your ring on my finger is like the Touch of your hand—and I know your heart and thoughts are with me.” Two days later he was lamenting his fate, “Isn't it sickening to love each other as much as we do and then be parted? I miss everything about you—the sound of your voice—your lips—your little ways.”

Parsons rhapsodized on both their love and his own scientific longings, conjoining the two into a grand romantic quest. “If the night is clear when you get this letter,” he wrote, “go out and look at the pole star—the pointer in the handle of the dipper. Let us make that our star. It is the star of the abiding—abiding as our love is steadfast—pointing us the path to the skies. Nights may be long and skies cloudy but shining above all clouds and parting our star remains, shining clear and bright above, undimmed by time or any other of the little things of earth. Let it symbolize our love—'Ad Astra Per Aspera'—the stars are our goal and nothing in the outside of the galaxy will keep us from it.”

The longer he was away from Helen, the more lyrical and ecstatic his letters became, filled with allusions to his favorite mythologies and myths, to Valhalla, “the star palace,” and El Dorado, “our city of gold.” The Avalon of Arthurian mythology soon grew indistinguishable from the Avalon of Santa Catalina, under whose stars they had also walked. Unable to afford long distance phone calls, Helen and Parsons even tried to communicate telepathically with one another, “tuning in,” as Parsons called it, at nine o'clock each night. “I think I made it,” Parsons wrote to Helen after one occasion; “I was so near to you—I could hear your voice—it wasn't clear ... I saw us in Avalon—walking down that street from the house hand in hand ... Perhaps it's some trick of loneliness and imagination—but somehow I doubt that.” He signed his letters “Jack,” with the
J
drawn as a flying rocket and beneath it the motto, Semper Fidelis—”Always Faithful.”

The wedding took place on April 26, 1935, at the Little Church of the Flowers in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Los Angeles. The two families—one numerous and riven by abuse, the other tiny and claustrophobically close—saw Jack and Helen pledge their marriage vows. But even on an occasion as important this, Parsons was in something of a reverie. At the end of the ceremony, to Helen's dismay, he forgot to kiss her. “I turned my face to him and nothing happened.” The couple took a brief honeymoon at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where they spent the night dancing in the ballroom. Parsons was only twenty years old; Helen was twenty-four.

 

Back in Pasadena the couple moved into a new house together on Terrace Drive. In order to pay for their house and remain close to his new wife, Parsons began working at the Halifax Powder Company, a manufacturer of explosives, flares, fireworks, and small munitions in Saugus, a town thirty miles northwest of Pasadena in the hills above the San Fernando Valley. But almost all of the money he earned from this job was being pumped into the Rocket Research Group. “I knew his first wife rather well,” recalled Parsons' friend Robert Rypinski, who used to visit the couple regularly, “and she used to cry on my shoulder because the only thing Jack would save money for was to go out and shoot rockets. And they lived in rather meager quarters and he wouldn't spend any money on clothes for her, decent cars or anything. He just wanted to work on rockets.”

His manner of dealing with explosives also caused her consternation. On one occasion Helen joined Parsons and Forman on one of their recreational skyrocket launching trips in the desert. Sitting in the back seat of the car, she lifted up a rug covering the floor to find it had been hiding sticks and sticks of dynamite, no doubt taken from Halifax by Parsons. Nervously leaning forward to the front seat where Parsons and Forman were sitting, she asked whether the explosives were safe. As the truck bumped heavily along the desert road, Parsons turned to her with an amused grin and told her not to worry: “The detonator's in the front seat.” In their new house, Parsons insisted on constructing a home laboratory on the porch so that he could work on his chemicals and explosives at any time of the day or night. “You should have seen the state of his [home] laboratories,” remembered Helen. “They were dangerous places.” On one occasion Parsons' grandmother was rushed to the hospital at the very moment that Parsons was heating a large vat of explosive on an incinerator he had constructed in their backyard.

Handing a large spatula to Helen, Parsons told her to keep stirring and under no circumstance to stop until he had returned from the hospital. With that he left a petrified Helen to stir the foul-smelling chemicals until his return some hours later with the news that his grandmother would be all right. Life with Parsons, remembered Helen, was “happy but haphazard.”

Even Frank Malina felt rather uncomfortable when he saw Parsons' setup. Large barrels of gunpowder, open to the elements, could be found on the porch, not to mention a significant accumulation of tetranitromethane—a highly unstable organic compound, briefly considered by Parsons as a rocket fuel—in the kitchen. Despite the hazards, Malina visited often, as did Ed Forman. The men often talked about the rocket project, but their conversation ranged far and wide. They argued about politics late into the night, about the Spanish Civil War and the alarming rise of Fascism in Europe. The storm clouds of war were gathering, and both Parsons and Malina knew with the certainty of youth that change was needed. The enthusiastic socialist sentiments that they shared were now common not just throughout America's intellectual circles but throughout the social sphere, thanks to the successes of President Roosevelt's New Deal reforms. However, the particular strain of left-wing thought that characterized the rocket group can be seen in one of Malina's letters home to Texas from 1936:

 

Events in Europe are certainly heading to another war. There seems to be only one hope; overthrowing of the capitalistic system in all countries and an economic union of nations. The American Legion, Hoover and his cohorts and other patriotic organizations now extolling “Americanism” seem to show that in the US people are beginning to doubt the reasonableness of the capitalistic system.

 

As the evenings stretched into nights, Parsons would begin to read aloud from his favorite poets. “He probably thought I was a bit of a square, in that I have never been very sensitive to poetry,” remembered Malina, “and he would show me exotic poems, and I would look at them, but they didn't make any sense to me.” Indeed, Helen recalled Malina as, “studious, very studious. Ed, Jack and I would try to loosen him up a bit.” Forman would never quite jell with Malina in the way that Parsons did, and later in his life he would become convinced that Malina looked down upon him because of his lack of a university education. But Malina never suggested that this was the case. For now, however, the group was pulled together by a mix of bonhomie and rocketry. Many drinks would be consumed on these evenings, the famed “Parsons Poison Punch” or maybe some of the absinthe Parsons had been concocting in his home laboratory. The three men and Helen also tried marijuana in yet another groundbreaking experiment for the GALCIT Rocket Research Group.

Malina would often play piano duets with Helen, or the group would play records deafeningly loud on the much-used phonograph. They bought cheap tickets for classical concerts—the civic auditorium in Pasadena put on performances of
II Tra-vatore
and
Madame Butterfly
—and during the breaks in the performance, they would work their way to the empty seats in the front and watch the remainder of the concert in style. Over the next few years Malina and the Parsons would also take trips to the beach and into the mountains together. Writing to his parents, Malina declared, “I have found in Parsons and his wife a pair of good intelligent friends.”

Throughout these early years of marriage, Helen and Jack enjoyed moments of great affection together. When the cats wailed at night, the couple would climb out of bed and go and stand outside, naked in the moonlight, to listen to them. Inside the house they also kept canaries and adopted any stray animal that happened upon them. During a storm in the area, one of the trees in their garden fell down. When Parsons dragged it into the house to use for firewood, he inadvertently brought along a small owl that had been nesting in it. The owl soon became domesticated and took to perching on the mantle, further expanding the menagerie.

Parsons' generosity to his human houseguests was also well known. Too good-natured to ever get angry with anyone, he often left it to Helen to read the riot act. An example in point was Tom Rose, a vastly experienced explosives expert who had worked at the Hercules Powder Company for years and had taught Parsons many of the tricks of the trade. When he asked if he could stay at the house for a few days, Parsons and Helen gladly let him. As the weeks passed and Rose showed no sign of moving, Helen grew increasingly frustrated. But Parsons could not bring himself to tell Rose to leave. His profound inability to say no to people would be a habit others would unscrupulously exploit later in his life.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling
meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps
somebody's castle-roof perforated.

 

—H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU

 

In April 1936, as Parsons and his colleagues celebrated their acceptance into the Caltech fold, a two-hundred-inch reflector disk arrived at the Pasadena train station on its way to a new observatory at Mount Palomar, fifty miles to the south. Costing $300,000 and weighing nearly twenty tons, it was wrapped in felt, cushioned with sponge rubber, and packaged in a steel-plated crate. Crowds gathered in the street to wonder at this testament to engineering and to guess at what it might reveal. For this glass eye, twice as powerful as Hale's telescope on Mount Wilson, promised to bring into view 1,000 million galaxies, each containing some 100,000 million planetary systems.

The more worlds that were found, the more intently the rocket societies operating across the globe sought to reach them. In Nazi Germany, however, the most successful and voluble group of amateur rocketeers, the VfR, had suddenly fallen silent. Letters written to them were not answered, and nothing was heard of their recent developments. Indeed, the word
rocket
was banned from German newspapers in 1934. The Versailles Treaty, which severely restricted Germany's armaments in the wake of the First World War, had conspicuously left out any mention of rockets. The members of the VfR were now being pressured into working for the military on a secret rocket project. Some did not need much persuading: “It seemed that the funds and facilities of the Army were the only practicable approach to space travel,” wrote Wernher von Braun. This was reasoning that any rocketeer bitten by the space bug and starved of funding might well understand, particularly as the VfR was far ahead of any other group in terms of rocket progress. Unfortunately, the German army did not share in such intergalactic enthusiasms. “The value of the sixth decimal place in the calculation of a trajectory to Venus,” recalled one army officer, “interested us as little as the problem of heating and air regeneration in the pressurized cabin of a Mars ship.” The army wanted rockets able to carry explosives not astronauts.

Writing to his counterpart in the American Rocket Society, R E. Cleator, the founder of the British Interplanetary Society, expected the worst: “Apparently there is some trouble brewing in Germany—trouble about which Herr Ley [Willy Ley] dare not write ... It seems to me that rocket research in Germany is becoming a closed book—until the fighting begins.” No one in the United States seemed to pay the VfR's fate much notice. Rocketry was still a taboo subject in government as in the universities. Perhaps if Robert Goddard had not been exiled in New Mexico, he might have reminded the powers-that-be of a prediction of his: “I would not be surprised if it were only a matter of time before the [rocket] research would become something in the nature of a race.” The rocket was going back to war.

 

Once Kármán had given the GALCIT rocketeers his blessing, their infinite dreams were swiftly diffused by a flood of particulars. What rocket to build? What fuel to use? How best to measure the rocket's performance? They eventually decided to build a rocket motor to be propelled by the highly volatile combination of gaseous oxygen and methyl alcohol (methanol), a mixture first suggested by Eugen Sänger. At the end of the school day, as the Caltech students walked back across campus to their boarding houses, Parsons, Forman, and Malina could be seen heading against the tide to the now empty machine shop to begin shaping their rocket motor.

It was a time of penny-pinching and pilfering. With no official funding they had to pay for every bit of material they needed out of their own pockets. They scoured junkyards for tube ends and pressure gauges and stripped old ovens bare for dials and piping. Whole weekends were spent driving around Los Angeles and Long Beach looking for high-pressure tanks and meters. Often they would have no luck at all, and their spirits would sink. “Two instruments we need cost $60 a piece and we are trying to find them second hand,” wrote Malina to his parents. “I am convinced it is a hopeless task.” Preparations were hampered by their other work. Parsons and Forman were still working at the Halifax Powder company during the week and meeting with Malina in the evenings or on weekends. As well as working all day in the wind tunnel, Malina, a skillful artist, was illustrating one of Kärman's textbooks.

As Parsons taught Malina about the practical elements of firing a rocket, Malina was schooling Parsons in scientific procedure—taking notes, drawing tables, writing detailed chemical analyses of the different fuels involved. The two continued to struggle; Parsons did not take well to the usual scientific deductive process, preferring instead to use his intuition. “We were constantly putting his nose down to the paper to make him show us what were the alternatives,” remembered Malina.