The 50th anniversary of the moon landing has me thinking of Johnny Dusik. Like NASA, Johnny wasn’t satisfied with just sending a ship into space and floating it back to Earth.
Johnny had bigger dreams.
Johnny was the boy genius of our neighborhood. At an age when the rest of us couldn’t remember the dinner hour, Johnny understood circuitry and computers and how to build things that blinked and buzzed.
Johnny was our rocketeer.
Rockets and outer space saturated the lives of boys in the late 1960s, the so-called “Space Age.” We watched “Lost in Space” and “Star Trek” on TV. A wooden fort in our suburban backyard became the “Space Platform,” surrounded by a grassy galaxy. Even the Frisbee, a quintessential Baby Boomer toy, was marketed as a “flying saucer.”
Our parents, the same ages as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, bought us all manner of rockets, ones that blasted off on the power of pressurized air and water and others outfitted with flaming engines. The latter, made by the Estes model rocket company, turned every kid into Wernher Von Braun.
About the size of a paper towel roll, Estes model rockets literally launched into space, or into as much space as a 10-year-old can comprehend, propelled by black-powder engines. Patterned after what NASA was sending up at the time, an Estes rocket would jet hundreds of feet into the air before an enclosed plastic parachute would open, returning the spacecraft to Earth undamaged.
Best of all, “liftoff” involved lighting a fuse and running away because sometimes, just like at NASA, engineering went awry and a pointy-nosed rocket with flames shooting out its bottom came sideways at some 8-year-old busy picking his nose.
Despite the rise of liability law, Estes is still selling rockets, even a Saturn V model one hundredth the scale of the one that took Apollo 11 to the moon. But they don’t have the Johnny Dusik model. Not even Johnny has that one.
In our neighborhood, the protocol for blasting off Estes rockets went something like this. As a kid finished building his rocket, maybe painting it or applying decals, news of the impending launch spread so our gang of kids could go up to the cemetery at the end of our street – the biggest open area for miles – to watch it blast off.
The thin rocket would almost disappear in the sky before its parachute opened and we would run to catch the descending spaceship wherever the wind might steer it.
Estes had invented the ultimate boy toy, combining the thrill of an unpredictable explosion, a convincing launch into the wide blue yonder, and a foot race to witness “splashdown” of the successful craft. The company even made a model with a clear tube body section so young rocket scientists could fire their pet gerbils into the heavens with a harrowing view of the entire experience.
But even Estes had its limits. It made only certain-sized rockets, carrying only so many engines, that reached only certain altitudes. Johnny Dusik wanted more horsepower.
So he built his own rocket, one big enough to carry an absurd number of engines, maybe 12. Like Von Braun, who proposed building a rocket as tall as the Empire State Building to take us directly to the moon instead of sling-shotting around the Earth to boost momentum, for Johnny there was no such thing as too much rocket.
On launch day every kid in the neighborhood showed up at the cemetery to see off the leviathan. Johnny was taking no chances of a launch pad disaster, either. Instead of a fuse attached to what could have been a giant explosion, he’d rigged up an electronic ignition to blast off his craft at a safe distance.
After years of launches, we had all seen duds, rockets that for whatever reason, didn’t fly right or at all. As Johnny’s rocket was homemade, doubters questioned whether the Dusik rocket would work.
Johnny proved otherwise.
He tripped the ignition and his rocket took off like, well, a rocket, zooming into the sky. We watched and waited below for a glimpse of a tiny dot that would be its billowed parachute. Then we waited some more. And then slowly we came to realize we would never again see Johnny’s rocket, that it was off to Siberia or China or to some unknown location in the stratosphere.
It had, as the aerospace poets say, slipped the surly bonds of Earth, or at least the bonds of the cemetery. It was terrific and terrible and unimaginable. Where did it go? Where could it be?
Maybe after Johnny’s rocket, puberty hit and we all discovered marijuana and Playboy magazine and we lost interest in model space ships. Or maybe the disappearance of the great space ship destroyed the morale of the Roberts Road space program, like the Challenger explosion put a big dent in the shuttle program.
It’s hard to say. It’s been a long time now, but as much as I can remember, Johnny’s rocket was the last one launched in the neighborhood.