Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program Read Online Free PDF

never spoke of it. It was just one more burden that these brave and stoic men were accustomed to enduring, with never a complaint.
    My Uncle Stanley left the mine that night and never set foot in the mines again. He moved his family to Connecticut, the closest place to our home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he could find work. Stanley and his family did not move back for many years. Stanley never did return to the cold, dark, dangerous network of shafts and chambers under the valley, some only a few feet high and often with a foot of cold water.
    Stanley did not return, but my Dad did and worked in the mines into 1951. I absorbed this experience without much discussion from either of our parents directly with us kids. This was a time when kids did not ask questions of their parents, especially when it was a serious matter. Much later in life, I learned more about the fear that gripped my Dad during his years as a coal miner. Mom told me how Dad hated to go to sleep at night. He knew that when he woke up, he would return to that fearful, dark place again. It never got any easier for him. But, he did it, like thousands of other men in Pennsylvania and other mining regions. He did it because it was the only way he had to take care of his wife and family. Now in my seventies, the more I reflect on those times, the more I appreciate the simple human dignity, even nobility, of these men and their wives. It was only later that they became known, also to others, as our “greatest generation.” We already knew that.
    The coal mines of the Lackawanna and Susquehanna valleys are gone now. Their demise can be traced to the Knox mine disaster in January 1959. At that time, mining operations were continually being extended to chase the coal seams, but got too close to the ice-swollen Susquehanna River. The subsequent cave-in of the river through the roof of the River Slope mine flooded a major part of the interconnected mines. The flooding could not be slowed even by dumping coal cars, truckloads of gravel and fill and some eight hundred railroad cars into the whirlpool. Sixty-two fortunate miners were able to escape, but twelve more were swept away by the deluge. After more than a century of commercial coal mining, Mother Nature finally ended this period in the history of our region.
    But the mines continued to deliver more pain to the decent people of this area long after they were closed. The process of separating the coal from the useless slag resulted in large dumps of waste that still contained some coal. It is believed that these dumps eventually caught fire and the fire spread by burning exposed coal near the surface and then beneath the surface. This burning emitted a foul smelling gas (hydrogen sulfide) strong enough to peel the paint from houses and making it appear that, in many places, the ground was burning. It also was responsible for the deaths of families as the gases leaked into basements at night and filled the home like a silent killer. Or the erosion collapsed the support for the structure of the house.
    And, finally, many of the miners – some of the toughest stock you can find – died early because of the damage from coal dust to their lungs. This condition took my Dad in 1985 after years of fighting to breathe. We were told that his heart was like a marathon runner but his lungs were simply unable to perform.
    This awareness in my early years left me with many feelings and convictions, some of which I can identify and some are just baked into who I am. However, there are at least two occasions, which always trigger a response directly from the legacy of this experience:
    First, any news report of a mine cave-in or trapped miners anywhere on the globe, immediately and with an emotional punch, causes me to stop, reflect and pray for their safe recovery and for their waiting families.
    Second, much later in my life, and long after my time in MCC, I was occasionally confronted by employees who wanted to talk about