Let me tell you about my experience with rockets.
When I was in 1st grade I joined this group called the Royal Rangers – the church equivalent of Boy Scouts. We spent many weekends camping in the rain, drinking Tang and having pancake eating contests (during which I distinctly remember a guy by the name of John Reihl eating 37 pancakes – the passing of 27 years MAY have caused that number to inflate, but not by more than 10%).
Anyway, as I look back on my days in the RR, there are a few activities that stick out in my mind: the Pinewood Derby Car races (where you could easily tell the dads were more involved than the boys due to the Lamborghini-like designs and wheel alterations and weight changes made after the weigh-in); memorizing the various creeds (which I can still spit out by heart); and the rockets.
Yes, the rockets.
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I never actually built a rocket – it was an activity solely for the over-12 year old age bracket. But those things were awesome. They put these toilet-paper roll-like tubes together, pasted some fins on the outside, stuck some explosives up the tail end, sat the rocket on this wiry launch pad. Step back. Press the ignition button.
A whistling whoosh, and the rocket flew up in the air, too high to see. A chute popped out and us younger kids would chase it across the fields, trying to catch it before it smashed into the field and broke.
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Sometimes we stuck a little army man in the rocket, attached to the parachute. Occasionally he returned to earth unscathed. More often than not he arrived a melted lump of plastic, 3rd-degree plastic burns. We buried those guys in a small army graveyard beside the church (ironically, most of the attendants of that particular church had grown up anabaptist, and pacifist – I’m not sure about their stance on having a military graveyard on church property).
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Since I wasn’t old enough to launch a rocket, sometimes I would ball an army man up in a parachute and try to toss him high in the air, but I just couldn’t throw him high enough to get the chute to open up. Sometimes, you just need a rocket.
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