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through a telescope a junior engineer named Jake Mosby had set up for us boys on top of the Coalwood Club House roof. It just popped out of me.
“We should go to the moon!”
I said with such vigor that I got applause and cheers from everybody still standing around. There was some laughter, too, but it was good-natured, since the entertainment value of the senator’s entire enterprise had gone up a notch.
    The clapping and cheering and laughing seemed to surprise Senator Kennedy. He straightened a little, surveyed the crowd and their grinning faces, and then, as if he had a sudden inspiration, he said maybe I was right, that what we needed to do was get the country moving again, and if going to the moon could help that, maybe it was just the thing. Then he’d asked me what we should do on the moon when we got there, and I said we should find out what it was made of and go ahead and mine the blamed thing. That idea, too, had just popped into my head. Our audience responded with more whoops and hollers and cries that West Virginians could go and “mine that old moon good!” I got a benevolent smile from the senator before Emily Sue dragged me off to Belcher and Mooney’s men’s store to exchange my beautiful orange suit for something drab and awful.
    After that, I’d gone on to win the gold and silver medal for propulsion in the National Science Fair, and Senator Kennedy had gone on to win his elections in West Virginia and the entire country, too. He’d done it by proposing to get the nation moving again, not only around the world but in space, too. To make good on his promise, he’d recently stood up before Congress and announced:
I believe this nation should commit itself, before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
    “You can see now, sir, why I have to be an engineer, can’t you?” I asked. “This is all my fault.”
    Dr. Byrne perused my grade transcript a little longer, then rolled his eyes. “Well, I’ll tell you what, boy,” he said, reaching across the adding machine to take my hand and give it a good shake, “I still don’t think you’re going to get through my engineering school, but if half of what you say is true, which I sincerely doubt, then I can certainly see why you’ve got to try. Good luck to you. I think you’ll need it.”
    I quoted my uncle Robert. “Luck’s a chance but trouble’s sure; I’d be rich if I wasn’t poor.”
    Dr. Byrne laughed out loud. “Get out of my office, Hickam,” he said by way of summarizing our interview.
    I got out and, since I knew the deans were watching, got to studying. I even stayed awake during chemistry class, at least a significant percentage of the time. During spring quarter, my grades climbed until I was a solidly average engineering student, not bad for a tough place like VPI, I thought.
    On a Saturday in early May, I was told to go to the squadron lounge, that a visitor was waiting there for me. It turned out to be my mom, which was quite a surprise. “Sonny boy,” she said, smiling from her seat on the couch. “How nice you look in your uniform.”
    Her hair had turned a bit grayer during the past year and her pretty, heart-shaped face looked a bit more drawn and there were a few more wrinkles on her forehead, but otherwise she was the same Mom. I sat beside her. “What are you doing here?” I asked anxiously. It had to be something terrible for her to have made the trip all the way to Blacksburg, uncountable mountains away from Coalwood.
    “I’m on my way to Myrtle Beach,” she said. “I finally found a house down there that I can afford. I had to act fast to get it and I did. It just needs a little fixing up, and that’s what I’m heading down there to do.”
    Mom had always said a house in Myrtle Beach was what she wanted more than anything in the world, and she’d kept on about it for years. Myrtle Beach, a coastal resort city in South Carolina, was the vacation destination