Strange Angel (8 page)

For the shy and retiring Goddard, this was too much. He became more secretive and hostile to enquiries. His rockery work progressed, but he would not share his hard-won secrets even with his admirers. In 1930, at the age of forty-eight, he suffered the added humiliation of being forced to move his home from Massachusetts, to Roswell, New Mexico, after the sound of one of his rocket experiments was reported to the police as a plane crash. Like a prophet he retreated into the wilderness. His life became a cautionary tale of the scorn the study of rocketry could command.

Along with Hermann Oberth of Romania, who wrote
The Rocket into Interplanetary Space
in 1923, Tsiolkovsky and Goddard gave mathematical form to space flight for the very first time, though none of them knew of each other's work. Tsiolkovsky dealt with the fundamental laws of motion in space, Goddard made calculations on the amount of solid propellant needed to power a rocket, while Oberth suggested liquid fuels as a means of propulsion and considered the hitherto unexamined problems of space suits, space walks, and the minutiae of embarking on long distance interplanetary journeys. They would be the forefathers of the field that would become known as
astronautics
—the science and technology of space flight—a term, needless to say, that was invented by a science fiction writer in 1927.

The work of these three pioneers was the theoretical catalyst for the rocket societies that had begun to flourish worldwide in the late 1920s and 1930s, generating tiny pockets of feverish enthusiasts enraptured by this strange science in Argentina, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and Japan. While these societies were considered little more than a joke by the popular media and beneath contempt by the academic community, they paid close attention to each other and to what the other members of their far-flung community were achieving.

On the evening of April 4, 1930, one such group of eleven space-minded men and one woman met for the first time in a small brownstone building in New York City. They ambitiously called themselves the American Interplanetary Society (AIS) and unashamedly stated their ambitions to promote “interest in and experimentation toward interplanetary expeditions and travel.” They would become one of the few guiding lights in these dark days of rocketry research, making contact with other international rocket groups and expanding into a society of great renown by the 1960s. Their beginnings, however, were modest at best. The group had come together largely because nine of them were science fiction writers, editors, or rewrite men for Hugo Gernsback's latest science fiction magazine,
Science Wonder Stories.
They included the bearish Edward G. Pendray, a
New York Herald Tribune
reporter who wrote for Gernsback under a pseudonym; his wife Leatrice, a nationally syndicated woman's page columnist; Warren Fitzgerald, head of The Scienceers, a multiracial science fiction fan club based in Harlem; and Dr. William Lemkin, a chemist and the only Ph.D. among the group. Gernsback himself joined the society but did not attend meetings, preferring to skim through the minutes in order to garner story ideas for the next edition of his magazine.

The society had an infectious optimism and naïveté. “It was our expectation,” remembered Pendray, “that engineers and scientists would spring to our service if we but called their attention to the possibilities of rockets in an appropriate manner.” They could not have been more wrong. They sought members through advertisements in the pulps and through their own mimeographed “Bulletin of the American Interplanetary Society,” and attracted young enthusiasts like Parsons and Forman, who joined immediately. But they lacked funds and scientific literature, and no matter how hard they tried, they could not interest the wider world in their quest. Most dishearteningly of all, Robert Goddard flatly refused to help them. Goddard had recently gained financial backing for his clandestine rocket from the aeronautically-obsessed Guggenheim family, and such patronage he did not want to be disturbed. So it was that the one man who had more insight into the possibilities of space travel than anyone else would not share details of his work with those who most wanted to make it happen.

In Germany, the nascent rocketeers were having more luck. The Society for Space Ship Travel, or Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR), was founded in 1927, and was slightly more professional than the AIS, if equally idealistic. The society had been started by an odd assortment of engineers and clergymen interested in space flight, but their early slogans such as, “Help create the spaceship!” quickly drew a membership, particularly among the underemployed engineering community still reeling from the devastating economic aftershocks of the First World War. Most significantly of all, the VfR enticed Professor Hermann Oberth to become its president.

If one man could be said to have rivaled Goddard for his rocketry skills it was Oberth. Fascinated equally by reincarnation and rocketry, in 1923 he created a stir with the publication of his doctoral thesis
Die Rakete zu den Planetenrämen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space),
which demonstrated through elaborate mathematical proofs that rockets could be built to transport man far beyond the reach of Earth's gravitational pull. By the time the AIS formed, the VfR already had a
Raketenflug-platz
(a rocket test site) in an abandoned army garrison, and their experiments were well underway. With such future greats as the seventeen-year-old Wernher von Braun (who would eventually develop rockets for America's manned lunar program) among their ranks, the VfR was the preeminent rocket society of the age.

Nevertheless, the enthusiasms of its young members, many of whom were still in their teens, often overpowered good science. Like Parsons and Forman, most of them wanted to see their rockets fly. Launchings would take place before designs had been properly calculated, often resulting in chaos. In a 1931 letter to the AIS's Pendray, Willy Ley, one of the club's founders and later one of America's best-known spokesmen for space exploration, told of how the VfR had “destructed a house of police” with a rocket that had gone astray and landed on the roof of the local police station. It prompted a temporary ban on all experiments.

Curious to learn more about the German experiments that he read of in the AIS's bulletin, Parsons wrote directly to Wernher von Braun, telling him of his own primitive experiments and asking for more information on building rockets. Ed Forman's third wife Jeanne remembered how both Parsons and Forman had called Braun by telephone, presumably at Parsons' grandfather's expense: “Both of the boys had talked to von Braun many times by telephone, way before he ever came to the U.S. ... They were crazy about von Braun and he was crazy about them, because they were out horsing around with the same stuff.”

The members of the rocket societies on both sides of the Atlantic were intent on extracting information about experiments and advances through letters and telephone calls. With such a small number of people seriously interested in the science, every bit of knowledge needed to be shared. Braun, who was only two years older than Parsons and a science fiction fan as well, did his best to reply to Parson's entreaties, and he also asked questions of his own. Parsons, however, increasingly found himself frustrated by the data he received back; indeed, Forman suspected that he and Parsons were being asked to reveal a little too much of their own experiments. They severed their correspondence. Even at this nascent stage, it was possible to feel proprietorial over their work.

 

The events of 1929 gave the world even more reason to disdain wistful thoughts of travel to the moon. How could one think of rockets when the
Graf Zeppelin,
a 776-foot-long passenger dirigible, stopped in the city on the final leg of its journey to circumnavigate the globe in twenty-one days? One hundred fifty thousand people flocked to watch it land, and a giant banquet was held in its honor. Attendees included a host of film celebrities such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, as well as the state governor, the mayor and the media mogul William Randolph Hearst. It was the “single most glittering event to date” in Los Angeles' history. The enthusiasm and optimism of the 1920s were at their peak.

In Pasadena, Walter Whiteside was planning his own starring moment. He wished to sell his beautiful house on Orange Grove complete with all its furnishings in order to build a new one, on the precipitous western side of the Arroyo Seco. Its construction funded by the success of his real estate investments, this new house would be Walter Whiteside's Xanadu. It would look back the half mile to the meandering Colorado Street Bridge that spanned the Arroyo and led to the city's steeples and trees beyond. Parsons' grandfather would lord it over not just the Valley Hunt Club, but the entire city of Pasadena.

The family traditionally vacationed on Santa Catalina island, twenty miles off the coast of Long Beach, which William Wrigley, a fellow Pasadena resident, had transformed into a resort. In the summer of 1929, however, the family embarked en masse for a long trip around Europe while construction proceeded on the new home. It would be the only time that Parsons traveled abroad in his life. While his grandparents searched for ornaments to fill their new mansion and Ruth Parsons availed herself of the latest Paris fashions that made her “the best dressed woman” in Pasadena, the adolescent Parsons would stand for hours at the backstage doors of the theaters in Montmartre and hope to catch himself a showgirl. His growing charisma and considerable allowance compensated for his slight grasp of foreign languages. The family returned to the sight of the house at 285 North San Rafael Avenue, sitting triumphantly on the gorge's edge. They quickly stocked it full of new European treasures.

But even the luxuriant verdure of Pasadena could not entirely protect its wealthier residents from the Wall Street crash that occurred in the autumn of 1929. Southern California suffered the highest bankruptcy rate in the country, and although Walter Whiteside did his best to keep up his standard of living, within two years his fortunes had ebbed away. The limousine which dropped Jack off at school each day disappeared, and Ruth Parsons began to work as a shop assistant back in hated Los Angeles. Even the view from the house had been spoiled. In the four years after the crash, seventy-nine despairing investors plunged to their death from the graceful curves of the Colorado Street Bridge. It swiftly became known as Suicide Bridge.

The crash also triggered a decline in Walter's health. Having attained his Xanadu, he ruled it for less than two years before death claimed him in July 1931. It was a great blow to the young Parsons. His grandfather had been the closest thing he had to a father. Writing about this influence later, he explained that his grandfather had been essential in preventing “too complete an identification” with his mother. Now he was to be the sole man in the house.

Whether because his writing disability required special attention or because of disciplinary problems similar to those that had caused his removal from military school, Parsons left John Muir High School in 1931, as did Ed Forman. Forman dropped out of school completely, beginning a round of odd jobs as a carpenter, chauffeur, and postman. But the last of the Whiteside fortune went towards sending Parsons to the University School, a private all-boys establishment in Pasadena. While the school occupied a large, white colonial mansion, it was perennially bankrupt. It had enrolled only thirty pupils when Parsons arrived and these consisted mostly of the sons of wealthy families who had been expelled from other schools. An old wino was allowed to live on the school grounds in a shack where he obsessively took apart and rebuilt an old motor. The school's headmaster and proprietor was Russell Richardson, a passionate liberal who regularly attended meetings of the American Federation of Labor as well as the visiting British philosopher Bertrand Russell's lectures on such subjects as “Is Monogamy Doomed?” Richardson was a keen proselytizer for new educational methods. Speaking to the
Los Angeles Times
in 1929, Richardson praised the rebellious mind-sets of his pupils: “These young people have an immense energy that will do great things if properly directed ... Their attitude of not accepting everything in the classrooms with blind faith, their questioning of all values, means a closer contact with the currents of life than could possibly have been true of a previous day.” For Richardson, “the personality of the teacher counts for more than the methods he uses” and “the best kind of development is self-development.” Richardson's teaching was not conventional, but it suited the young Parsons perfectly. At the University School he flourished. He won an award for literary excellence and became one of the editors of the school newspaper,
El Universi-tario.
His greatest interest was in chemistry, particularly when he saw how knowledge of chemicals could help him concoct more powerful fuel for his rockets. For this subject he was in good hands: Many of the school's teachers came from the adjacent California Institute of Technology.

His time there was marred by only one unfortunate incident. The school's assistant headmaster and chief disciplinarian was a former military man, Captain John Miles. His ability to keep the more unruly pupils on the straight and narrow through his army braggadocio was much relied upon by Headmaster Richardson, and many of the pupils, including Parsons, had a great deal respect for him. He was also vain and boorish, with a volatile temper. When Richardson attempted to replace him with another, less expensive army man, Miles was furious, as were many of the students. Parsons' position as the school's literary editor made him a natural choice to be the de facto spokesman for the complaints of the pupils. In his strangely clipped writing, he wrote a petition for the other pupils to sign:

 

We the following students of the University School, wish to express our appreciation to Captain Miles for his help and cooperation during the past two years. We extend to him the sincere wish that he always receive the same square deal that we have received from him.