Falling to Earth Read Online Free PDF

watched over me like a second father and guardian angel. He pushed me both academically and personally.
    Holman really pushed hard for me to get into college. To my delight he found me a full scholarship to Princeton to study philosophy and politics. The scholarship was a huge amount of money in the 1950s. Overjoyed, I eagerly made plans to attend. Then, two months later, came a devastating blow. Holman called me into his office and told me the university had reviewed my records once again and noticed that I had not taken any Latin in high school. Apparently that little detail was enough for them to pull the scholarship. I felt hugely let down and deeply concerned that my plans to leave town were over before they had even begun. Perhaps I was destined to work on a farm for the rest of my life.



CHAPTER 2
SOLDIER
    I should have known better. Earl Holman did not give up on me. He scrambled around until he found me a scholarship that paid my tuition for the liberal arts school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The college, only thirty miles from home, was an affordable first step. I started the courses there with excitement and hitchhiked home every weekend to wash my clothes.
    The university was a wonderful place and convinced me more than ever that the last place I wanted to go back to was that farm. I would have done anything at that time to stay away from it. I could happily have stayed at that university taking general classes, and then moved into the music school there. The scholarship was only for a year, however, and time would run out soon. I needed a plan.
    A sports scholarship was out of the question for me. I’d wanted to play football in high school, but I had been examined by a doctor and told that I shouldn’t play, because I had a rheumatic heart. That diagnosis deeply puzzled me because my heart could only have been rheumatic if I’d had rheumatic fever, and I didn’t recall that ever happening. I have always suspected that my mother put the doctor up to that diagnosis because she didn’t want me to get hurt playing sports. She steered me into music instead. I guess I will never know the truth for sure. Certainly no other doctor, including the meticulous doctors at NASA who prodded and probed me more than I ever wanted, ever found anything wrong with my heart.
    While I studied at college, I found another possible future direction when a high school friend of mine introduced me to his father. He told me about his other son, who had entered the Coast Guard Academy, and then he really began to put pressure on me to apply to one of the military academies. He had never been in the military himself, and he didn’t really care which service I went into. He just strongly believed that attending a military academy would allow me to go to college at no cost to my parents. My father hadn’t been in the military—no one in my immediate family had—and it wasn’t something I’d particularly considered before. But I knew my family’s finances—or lack of them—and it began to look like my only option.
    My initial thought was, hey, I’ll take a shot at this, but I will probably never get in, because there are so many other people out there who are so much smarter than I am. I did not think about what would happen next: that I would have to spend a couple of years serving in the military. I only knew that the academies had great reputations, and that I would get a free education, as well as a way out of Jackson.
    I talked it over with my father, and he agreed that it sounded like something to pursue. So we went to meet with my local congressman, Chuck Chamberlain. The only way I would be able to get in was for my state’s political representatives to personally recommend me. Chamberlain, therefore, arranged for me to take a competitive examination. The results were sent to him, as well as to the two senators for my state. To my delight, I received an appointment from one senator to attend Annapolis,