Meaning of Success? 02
Copyright © 2008, By Odell Sneeden Hathaway, III
To start at the beginning, I suppose that the one desire or dream that has meant the most in my life is that of that little boy who wanted to fly in space and be an astronaut. I know that we are talking about a dream on a par with being a cowboy or ballerina, but this dream has been a major force in my life and is the springboard off of which all other dreams are launched.
I held that dream from my earliest memories all the way up until I was sixteen years old, and even though I gave up on making it happen, it is still a very special part of my life. There are very few manned U.S. launches that I have not watched, and I still try to follow the space program. (Don’t get me started about the CEV.) Like a jock who still roots for his football team even though he will never set foot on a gridiron.
I am not certain why I am so drawn to the space program. My parents were both very interested. When I was small, my father started taking flying lessons and I used to go to the airport and watch him fly while taking care of Susan, my kid sister.
After my father set aside his dreams of flying (for financial reasons), we would still spend most Saturdays at the airport eating lunch and watching the planes take off. We called it “Hamburger Plane,” and it is one of the parts of my childhood that I truly treasure. Today, the 94th Aero Squadron sits where we used to sit.
My first clear memory was of watching the TV as an Agena spacecraft was launched. Before I was declared brain damaged, I would go to the other classes in my school and tell them about the space program—a second grader lecturing to the sixth graders. Even my last memories of childhood are centered around the launch of Apollo 8. I was sick as a dog as it lifted off at 4:51 in the morning of December 21, 1968. Later, I listened to the transmissions from the moon on Christmas Eve while driving home from my great-grandmother’s house.
Only a few weeks were left before my world would be destroyed and I would be told, “yes, you’re brain damaged.”
My love of space even saved me from my world being destroyed. My desire to fly—and to fly in space—led me to science fiction. As a young boy I remember with such joy my parents taking me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was six years old but my love for space was already firmly set. Unfortunately, I have no idea when I was first introduced to Star Trek.
Star Trek saved my life, in a very literal sense. After I was told that I was brain damaged and would have to retake the second grade, my life became a living hell. Everyone at school was constantly making fun of me—not just the other kids but the teachers as well. I even had a great-aunt who was brain damaged, so I knew what it meant and I did not want to be that, or to be me.
I know that I was well on my way to becoming the first Kip Kinkel. I wanted to strike out at the world—to kill everyone at my school, and most importantly, myself.
Star Trek changed all of that for me. I thought Mr. Spock was just like me—he lived in a world where he was different from everyone and rejected by them. (I will tell you more about my desire to be a Vulcan like Spock later.)
As I aged, I never lost the desire to fly in space, and my rejection of my humanity made that desire even greater. I wanted off this miserable rock. I wanted to go someplace—any place—where life was better.
My favorite movie later in life would become Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wanted to be Roy Neary and be given the chance to get off this rock. In fact, I think if a spaceship landed in my backyard, I would be more than willing to go.
In the movie Top Gun there is a song by Cheap Trick called “Mighty Wings.” It starts with the words: “It’s just a ball of dust, underneath my feet. It rolls around the sun, doesn’t mean that much to me.” That pretty well sums it up for me.
As I moved from grammar school to high school, I still had my dream and was working on a plan to make it happen. I would go to the Air Force Academy. I even joined the Civil Air Patrol to make it easier for this to happen.
It was not until I got into high school that fate stepped in and threw up a roadblock that made me give up this dream. When I took driver’s ed, they found that my eyesight was terrible and I had to get glasses. Well, you can’t be an astronaut if you have to wear glasses—or so I believed. I was very upset a few years later when the first launch of the Space Shuttle took place and video came down of Young and Crippen both wearing glasses in space.
I of course do not think, looking back, that I ever had much of a chance at this dream. My dyslexia would see to that. Also, I had no discipline. It was not something important to teach someone who was never going to succeed. No one expected greatness from me, and it was hard enough dealing with life day to day without expecting it from myself.
Today the military academies have programs for the LD cadet. But if I had gone, I would have been the first person to have tried (at least the first to know they had this disability when they entered—Patton was dyslexic). It was hard enough being the first at CSUN. Also, I have never been very physically fit, and that would have been a problem.
I have not completely given up on my dream of space. I still hope someday to get a ride on Spaceship Two or something like it. I even cherish a little fantasy of having my body put on a probe like New Horizons and blasted out of the solar system. I would truly love to be the first person for whom “dust to dust” did not apply.
What I have written is important, but it does not really address the base question of what it is about being an astronaut that made it such an important part of my life. What made a fat, out-of-shape, dyslexic outcast with no idea of what discipline was want to reach for the gold ring of gold rings?
I think I can boil it down to a few things:
- First of all, I wanted to be free—free in a way that only someone brought up in a world where the moon was something we were going to get could be free. Today the magic is gone for those growing up, but then there was no such thing as impossible.
- I wanted to prove to the whole world that I was not brain damaged—that I was a person worthy of respect and even admiration.
- I wanted to prove it to myself (most of all).
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