Maybe model rockets aren’t very sexy but as a boy I wasn’t very athletic so it was that or stamp collecting. At least I could fly rockets. The Estes Big Bertha was an intermediate model and easy to assemble. It had a 500 feet ceiling and stood a proud but slightly obnoxious two feet tall.
Engines classes were from A to E, A being enough to launch a toilet paper tube and E being powerful enough to launch the Empire State Building. Big Bertha required a B-4 engine and could be pushed to a C6 if you wanted to really light it up.
My father knew I wasn’t joining little league so he got me the rocket from the local hobby store. It took me two weeks of summer afternoons to build and paint. I spent hours aligning stabilizer fins so it would fly straight.
I sprayed the rocket a mean flat black and painted white pinstripes with a white plastic nose cone. No less than seven coats of clear gloss were applied to make sure I blinded any pilots at that 500 foot ceiling. Big Bertha was a silly name so I named it after my grandmother. I hand-painted big white letters along the body like “U.S.A.” emblazoned along the length of NASA’s best.
She was christened: Ball Breaker One. (true story)
Note: My grandmother wasn’t thrilled and required that I rotate the name out of all pictures. Except this one…
The only known image with the logo visible plus sister.
I was very careful with my model rockets. There was a process to launch and recovery and I followed it to the letter. My father laughed because nothing had any value to him. I wanted the official Range Box which included a launch tower with a blast plate and steel guidance rod and a launch controller with lights and buttons. All very NASA-like. Wires run into the engine, the launch button which is connected to a battery and the heat from the electricity ignites the engine. But no.
The model rocketeer’s range box
Instead, I got a pie plate, unraveled coat hanger and two wires with bare ends taped to a battery.
One night my father piled all the local kids (and me) into the car and drove to a park at dusk to launch Ball Breaker One. I stuck a little plastic astronaut in for authenticity, As I set up Ball Breaker One and readied the B4 engine, my father took the rocket and stuffed it with a D-5 engine, which could move a battleship. My idiot friends cheered and my heart sank. He mounted the rocket, unrolled the wires and before I could protest he connected the ends.
Anatomy of model rockets
There was no slow, realistic launch but there was a lot of fire. Lots of fire and the shrill sound of a child’s hard work going up in literal flames. The rocket ripped through the fabric of space/time toward the thudding pop of the sound barrier. Roaring into the sky, it burst into flames and shot sideways into the woods. You could have seen the fire ball from space. If not from the rocket then from the resultant forest fire.
There came the sounds of cracking branches, rageful deforestation and entire colonies of wildlife going extinct. The vacuum created by the take off pulled at us and we had to hold each other for support. We stood motionless while the rocket tore up what was once the pride of the New York City parks department.
Then there was silence, the flicker of distant flame and a trail of destruction wrought by a cardboard tube with enough power to move a battleship. We stood blackened by powder and patting flames off each other.
My father stood in the middle holding a battery and a six inch length of charred wire in his blackened hands. Two white eyeballs blinked several times in the darkness. His hair was smoldering and his coat was on fire. He shattered the silence.
“Wooooooooooaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!! Did you see that? MAN, DID YOU SEE THAT????”
Did we see it? Everybody on the Eastern Seaboard saw it.
Following the trail of destruction, we found bits of burnt cardboard, melted plastic parachute in the trees and a wooden tail fin embedded in the ground. I found the crater with the charred remains of the body, “…reaker On…” still visible, however charred. The body tube was broken over a stone and the nosecone was a gurgling mass of twisted wreckage.
The group stood at the crater’s edge silent but my father stood there laughing like an idiot. Meanwhile, I was on my knees in the hot black earth collecting the pieces of yet another shattered childhood dream. I found the little plastic astronaut curled up under a leaf in the fetal position. His uniform was tattered, burnt and smoldering. His arms were wrapped around his knees and he was rocking back and forth.
He turned to me and, like Bill Paxton in Aliens, said, “So, hey man, what was that, huh? I mean what was that about? I can’t take this. I hate kids, man, hate ‘em. I quit, man. I’m hanging out with your sister’s Barbies from now on, man. Nobody gets lit on fire and shot out of the sky in Barbie-land, man. You hang out with girls and drive little pink corvettes. So I’m out!”
The little charred astronaut limped/stormed off toward the car.
As I gathered the rest I wanted to cry. I was furious but could do nothing. My father was having a great time at my expense, as usual. I never found out why he took such pleasure in humiliating me or wrecking my stuff.
Parental Note: Want to raise an underachiever? When they make something, break it and when they protest, laugh and call them an idiot. It works like a charm. Model rockets are a great place to start but anything will work.
I fell into the car next to the retired astronaut who turned to me and said, “So hey man, there’s room for one more in the pink corvette…”
This is Vern Estes with his invention, Big Bertha pictured with his wife, Gerta.
Insert your own dirty jokes here you pervs.
Tom Serafini is a writer, illustrator, motivator of dreamers from Brooklyn, New York. His first illustrated picture book, Ollie Bug and the Icky Sticky Thing From Space, will be funded through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign coming soon.
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