During my last semester of college in the fall of 2000, I had the pleasure of meeting Homer Hickam, NASA engineer and author of a number of books, most famously a highly successful 1998 memoir, Rocket Boys. This volume would be turned into a feature film, October Sky, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, Laura Dern, and a number of durable character actors. As of 2024, it’ll be thirty-five years since the public first saw this quiet movie about a time that seemed far away but not too far away even in 1999.
Rocket Boys is one of a series of memoirs by Homer Hickam, Jr., the younger son of Homer, Sr., a mine foreman and Elsie, a homemaker and amateur painter, and along with Homer’s older brother, Jim, the family lives in the mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia. Hickam originally told about his teenage years in an article for Smithsonian Magazine and then expanded it into a book.
Coalwood was a very isolated company town up in the mountains and Homer is in high school at the time the memoir takes place. His life is very typical of kids of that era, although, as he says, his life revolved around the mine shifts. A lot of the kids in the town see themselves as destined to work in the mine because their families before them worked in the mine, although some of the boys make it out on football scholarships. Homer and his friends, Quentin, O’Dell, Sherman, and Roy Lee aren’t exactly athletic, but they still manage to have fun.
When Sputnik is launched in 1957, however, everything changed. Suddenly Homer and his friends see a life outside of Coalwood and mining; namely, they wanted to learn how to shoot off rockets. While they officially called themselves the Big Creek Missile Agency, they were fondly dubbed the Rocket Boys.
Miss Riley, the boys’ science teacher at Big Creek High School in the nearby town of War suddenly found herself with enthusiastic students soaking up her lessons, and her classes became more and more creative.
The boys’ early efforts were inauspicious. For his first launch, Homer emptied the contents of skyrockets into a Thermos and after making the vessel look at least rocketlike, ended up blowing up his mom’s fence.
Naturally, the boys improved, albeit with help from various people around town. Miss Riley also tried to give as much guidance as she could, and when she exhausted the school’s limited resources, presented Homer with a copy of Principles of Guided Missle Design. Homer’s dad wasn’t too thrilled about Homer’s new pursuit, although he let the boys have some building materials from the company supply closet for the boys to build a launchpad and blockhouse at a slag dump they’ve dubbed Cape Coalwood.
It all leads up to the National Science Fair in Indianapolis, where, (spoiler alert) Homer wins the grand prize on behalf of the Rocket Boys and Coalwood, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Rocket Boys is literary comfort food. It not only feels like being transported back to that time, but like hanging out with the people in the book, and I got such a kick out of the humor and all the idioms, such as when Elsie says, “More than Carter’s has pills.” (My parents say the same thing.) And it’s home-y to read about Homer and his friends playing cards and eating cookies on a snow day.
Of course when the movie was made there were changes, but it could have been very different than what we saw. Early script drafts had the Rocket Boys cussing like Los Angeles teenagers, and Mr. Hickam has said time and again that the Rocket Boys never stole anything and his parents would have never let him drop out of school. Homer’s dad is called “John” in the film, probably to avoid confusion. Mr. Hickam disliked that change, as his dad was Homer while he was always called “Sonny” growing up. Sherman O’Dell is a combination of O’Dell Carroll and Sherman Siers, the latter of whom was a polio survivor and died at twenty-six of a heart attack. Billy Rose, the fifth Rocket Boy, was left out of the movie entirely. And Valentine Carmina, who is portrayed in the book as, well, liking the boys, is more of a quiet, plain girl who wins Homer’s heart in a very innocent romance.
Conflicts were added to the film in the forms of a miner’s union strike and the Rocket Boys being accused of starting a forest fire. While the latter really happened, the boys were cleared quickly. And the film plays up Homer’s rocky relationship with his dad and the understanding they need to come to.
It’s fortunate that Mr. Hickam was not only able to work closely with the filmmakers on October Sky, but a classmate and friend of his, Emily Sue Buckberry, worked as a dialogue consultant on the movie. If the behind-the-scenes footage is any indication, everyone had a grand time. Well, mostly. Filming is hard work, after all (Read an interview with Natalie Canderday, who played Elsie, here).
Viewers feel the same way, as October Sky is one of those rare films that both critics and audiences enjoy, with an ninety-one percent critics’ score and an eighty-eight audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert had nothing but praise, adding, “This movie has deep values.”
Plenty, of course, has changed since Homer and his friends won the National Science Fair. Miss Riley died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1969. Cape Coalwood still exists, although the site is becoming overgrown. Big Creek High School closed in 2010 and was demolished in 2015. The Rocket Boys are still with us, although Quentin and Sherman have passed on.
To say Mr. Hickam’s story has had staying power is putting it mildly. Theater West Virginia just wrapped a successful run of Rocket Boys: The Musical. October Sky Fests have been held every year for years, although they’re in Tennessee instead of West Virginia. Coalwood, which is no longer a company town but which is home to nine hunded people, proudly declares itself “The Home of the Rocket Boys.”
Why do people find the story so compelling? Not only are the characters real, but it’s exciting to see young people do more than they think they can and a community come together to help them get there. It’s a bracing thing.
Speaking of bracing, I’ll never forget meeting Homer Hickam. I remember being incredibly nervous because I have so much admiration for him and appreciate his writings so much, but when it was my turn to have my book signed, we started chatting and I was instantly comfortable. He was very pleased to hear I was majoring in English, and when I told him I wanted to be a writer, he advised I write magazine articles first. While I don’t remember all the reasons he gave me for it twenty years on, it still makes sense, and I’m incredibly grateful that Mr. Hickam took the time to encourage me.
It’s funny how things work out. I have to wonder if Mr. Hickam would say if he could read this blog, but if he ever does, I’d like to tell him, “Thank you, sir, for so, so much.”
Another review is coming up tomorrow. As usual, thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you mañana…
October Sky is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon. The original novel, Rocket Boys, is also available.
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