It seems a shame that NASA is about to close its doors after lo these many years. It saddens me in a way most people probably wouldn’t understand, unless they knew more about me than most people do. They would unless, in fact, they knew as much about me as my older siblings, and especially my brother Mike, does.
I am sure it is like this with any family with multiple children. There are family stories and then there are FAMILY stories, and then there are favorite family stories. It seems each sibling probably has a favorite family story about each of their brothers and sisters, and normally that would only be a good thing to talk about among the rest of the family. But this story, and how it involves me, is so directly tied to NASA and the history of the United State’s space race that it might be worth telling despite the personal nature of the event in question.
Oh, did I tell you it was a funny story? No? Okay, it’s a funny story. At least, it’s funny from my brother’s perspective, although I have to admit that it does have a humorous end to it even for me.
To hear my brother tell it, it starts well after the fact and runs something like this. “What I saw initially was this whole group of kids in one big crowd, like a scrum or rally or some huge event. As I got closer, I realized that David was the center of this huge crowd and he appeared to be holding a desktop with all of his books on it, and smiling as big a smile as you can imagine.”
It gets worse from that point on, but is best if I describe the situation, as I am the one who was closest to the reality. Sorry Mike, you just weren’t really there.
The whole thing started out when our Third Grade class at Waltoffer Elementary School on Long Island was watching history unfold. We had watched history unfold many times in our classroom, like when the Pope came to New York and when Kennedy was shot. But this was different. This was the most exciting thing that was happening back then, and we were all glued to the black and white screen, trying to get just the right angle to see the Apollo rocket with its capsule perched way up on top.
Then as now apparently, there were delays. I don’t know how long a delay we had that day, but it was quite a while. And being the kind of industrious lad I was, I started to get a bit bored. Turns out, I had the exact tool in my pocket to relieve my boredom. A pen. But more than a pen, it was a pen with a pocket clip. And, somehow, I knew if I broke the stem off just right, I would have sort of a miniature adze.
Now with adze in hand, I could start my life as an artist by carving a bas relief depiction of said space craft into the wooden desk at which I sat. For a third grader, I thought the rocket looked pretty good. I can’t say that my teacher felt the same way. After much haranguing and the obligatory trip to the school principal, Mr. Verdi, the administration en toto decided such a great and wondrous piece of art work needed to shown to may parents.
To tell the truth, I don’t really know which part of the ensuing events were worse: carrying the desk top with all my books the mile or so I had to walk home, or trying to explain to my father why I was carrying my desktop home with all my books. I thought, at first, the idea of having a lot of studying to do might fly, but I was in third grade and he already had a lot of experience with things like my report cards. So I nixed that idea, and decided brute honesty was the only way to go. That, and the fact that my brother wasn’t about to let me off the hook for this one.
Surprisingly to me, my father and I discussed the situation without resorting to beatings or fisticuffs, and we decided that I would refinish the desk top. Over the next few weeks or so, I would sand down the desk and then re-lacquer the surface. My dad, who always seemed to know exactly the right thing to do, would come down to our workshop every night after he got home from work to see how I was faring in this project.
In order to remove any remnant of the rocket ship, I had some sanding to do. Working my way through a myriad of sand paper grit and using a fire brick to ensure the desk face was level and smooth, I eventually finished the project. The desktop looked great.
Finally, the day came and I carried the desktop back to school. For the remainder of the year, I sat in what had to be the nicest looking desk in the entire school. It shined and put all the other desks to shame.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate my father’s ways of “getting back” at people one way or another. The stories are too numerous to number. There was the hair cutting incident my brother was involved with (he had long hair at the time, a big no-no in the early ‘60s), the picture drawing incident in which, again my brother, turned in a picture for a 1000-word essay assignment and claimed that the picture was worth 10,000 words, and way too many incidents more for this column.
Suffice to say, there were unconsequences from the work I did on my desktop that year. Living on Long Island, there weren’t a lot of places to play. Not a lot of lots, not a lot of parks, and our back yard really wasn’t big enough for any kind of large scale play. So we kids would often traipse to the elementary school to play on the swings, slides, seesaws, ball fields, or whatever. During that summer, I noticed that the janitors appeared to be carrying all the desks outside the building, class by class.
For second, I wondered what they were doing. But then, I noticed that they were using a belt sander to sand down the desktops. It started to look a lot like my own little project from earlier that year, but on a much grander scale. Now, I can’t tell you that they were refinishing those desks because one desk in the school looked better than all the others, but it’s awfully suspicious that they would choose that summer to do something I had never seen them do before. And, I can’t tell you that my father had that in mind when he sent me to the basement to begin working on the desktop. But I can tell you that things like that happened pretty often when my father was involved. And so it goes with childhood memories. What might have been all bad memories instead has that slight upturn in the end. It’s sort of like having your toast hit the floor Butterside up.
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