Mental Feng Shui
for 2008
ONE. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.
TWO. Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.
THREE. Don't believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.
FOUR. When you say, 'I love you,' mean it.
FIVE. When you say, 'I'm sorry,' look the person in the eye.
SIX. Be engaged at least six months before you get married.
SEVEN. Believe in love at first sight.
EIGHT. Never laugh at anyone's dreams. People who don't have dreams don't have much.
NINE. Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it's the only way to live life completely.
TEN.. In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.
ELEVEN. Don't judge people by their relatives.
TWELVE. Talk slowly but think quickly.
THIRTEEN! .. When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and ask, 'Why do you want to know?'
FOURTEEN. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
FIFTEEN. Say 'bless you' when you hear someone sneeze.
SIXTEEN. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
SEVENTEEN. Remember the three R's: Respect for self; Respect for others; and Responsibility for all your actions.
EIGHTEEN. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
NINETEEN. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
TWENTY. Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice.
TWENTY- ONE. Spend some time alone.
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When the Germans, and Rockets,
Came to Town
By Shaila Dewan
from The New York Times
Published: December 31, 2007
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — In 1950, this cotton market town in northern Alabama lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have revived its mothballed arsenal. The consolation prize was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during World War II, led by a man — a crackpot, evidently — who claimed humans could visit the moon.
Ultimately those German immigrants made history, launching the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit in January 1958 and putting astronauts on the moon in 1969. The crackpot, Wernher von Braun, was celebrated as a visionary.
Far less attention, though, has been given to the space program’s permanent transformation of Huntsville, now a city of 170,000 with one of the country’s highest concentrations of scientists and engineers. The area is full of high-tech giants like Siemens, LG and Boeing, and a new biotech center.
Rocket scientists, propulsion experts and military contractors have given the area per capita income levels above the national average and well above the rest of the state.
Huntsville residents regard their city as an oasis, as un-Alabaman as Alabama can be. But they acknowledge that the state’s backwater reputation is a hindrance to recruiting. Local boosters are hoping to use the 50th anniversary of Explorer I on Jan. 31 as a way to promote Huntsville as Rocket City, unveiling a new pavilion, housing a 363-foot Saturn V rocket, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a museum and popular tourist attraction.
Even the Germans, who had spent five years cloistered on an Army base near El Paso, knew beforehand of Alabama’s spotty “résumé,” as Konrad Dannenberg, who at 95 is one of the last surviving members of the original von Braun team, put it last week.
“We knew that the people here run around without shoes,” Dr. Dannenberg said, in a tone of deadpan gravity. “They make their money moonshining and that’s what they drink for breakfast, and supper. And so we, in a way, were a little bit disappointed that it was really not that bad.”
The residents were wary of the Germans as well. They knew that most of them had been members of the Nazi Party and that they had built the V-2 rocket for Hitler. But the charismatic von Braun accepted virtually every speaking invitation, winning over Rotarians and peanut farmers.
And the Germans tried hard to assimilate. Von Braun insisted that the scientists speak English if there was so much as a single American, even a janitor, within earshot, said Ernst Stuhlinger, 94, another surviving member of the team. Dr. Stuhlinger was one of many who settled on Monte Sano, the mountain overlooking the town, which reminded the Germans of home.
“People said, ‘If you had just been at war with these people, how can you be so accepting of them?’ ” recalled Loretta Spencer, the 70-year-old mayor of Huntsville, offering a visitor a homemade pecan cookie. “But I think we were just in awe.”
In school, the German children’s diligence posed a challenge. “I remember working real hard in physics class to beat Axel Roth, who later worked for NASA,” Ms. Spencer said. “I beat him by a point on the final exam, and I was really tickled by it.”
The Germans also needed thousands of Americans to staff the missile program. Many who answered the call were “rocket boys” like Homer H. Hickam Jr., author of the memoir by that name, who scavenged together his first rockets in a West Virginia mining town and now lives here. Others were young men from cotton-picking families who went to school on the G.I. Bill.
By the time Explorer I was launched, the residents of Huntsville had so thoroughly adopted the Germans that there was an impromptu celebration. Charles E. Wilson, the former secretary of defense whose severe curtailment of the Germans’ work was blamed by some as having allowed the Soviet Union to beat America to space with Sputnik, was burned in effigy.
And by the mid-1960s, von Braun had so mastered the local culture that when he wanted voters to approve a bond issue for the Space and Rocket Center, he persuaded Bear Bryant, the revered University of Alabama football coach, and Shug Jordan, the rival Auburn coach, to make a television commercial supporting the project.
Rocketry permeated Huntsville, where windows shook and dishes cracked each time the powerful propulsion engines were tested. Children built rockets powered by zinc powder and sulfur, and the mad-scientist-in-the-basement tradition still has a hold. Tim Pickens, a rocket designer who helped a private manned spacecraft win the $10 million X Prize in 2004, attached a 200-pound-thrust engine to a bicycle in his garage here.
City officials trying to capitalize on this kind of ingenuity are irritated that prominent scholars have chosen this moment to scrutinize the von Braun team’s Nazi ties.
A new biography by Michael J. Neufeld portrays von Braun as a man who made a Faustian bargain. Diane McWhorter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Birmingham native, is at work on a book on the space race that compares Nazi ideology to contemporaneous white supremacy in the South.
Most Huntsvillians concluded long ago that the Germans had been coerced into joining the party. And, though skeptical of claims that the scientists were thoroughly apolitical, Ms. McWhorter says Southerners might easily understand that membership in an organization is not necessarily the best indicator of sentiment.
“There were members of the White Citizens Council in the South who were probably less racist than people who weren’t members,” she said.
Residents point to the symphony and the Huntsville branch of the University of Alabama, both nurtured into being by the Germans, and say their enlightened views contributed to the fact that the town had the first integrated elementary school in the state. Dr. Von Braun himself was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan for hiring blacks, said Bob Ward, a Huntsville newsman and von Braun biographer.
Besides, Huntsville is a forward-looking place. The Nazi question “just doesn’t come up,” said Loren Traylor, a Chamber of Commerce vice president. “That was then, this is now.”
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Subject:
Your Class of '64 Video \
Name Removed by request
I ran across your video on youtube.com of the Lee High School Class of ’64 picnic while I was searching on Google for Judith Keel. What a thrill to see her exactly as I remember her on your class of ’64 picnic home movie. She and I met in ’65 I believe it was, working as temps together, and became fast friends until late 1966. She still loved the Bermuda shorts and loose sweat-shirts. I met my husband while she and I were out cruising at Jerry’s and the Big Boy Drive-in in Huntsville. She and I used to cruise the drive-ins together in her cute little white convertible Corvair with red leather seats. As my husband was German Airforce stationed at Redstone Arsenal at the time (to train with the Pershing Missile system), I went to Germany for 8 years in 1966 when he went back home. Judith came to visit me there about 5 years after I left, when I’d had my son. Then we lost touch.
A few years ago, she contacted me out-of-the-blue by email and was in the process of moving to another state down south (somehow I remember something about Texas) with her husband. Unfortunately during the time she was relocating, my computer crashed and my hard-drive had to be wiped clean. I lost her email address in the process and then never heard from her after that. I’ve wondered ever since if she’s okay and what she’s up to now. For the life of me, I could not remember what her new married name is and have not been able to locate her. Have you any recent information about her? I would love to contact her again. I can be reached at this email address. If I only had her email address, I would like to try getting in touch again.
Thanks for any help you can give me.
(Editor's Note: Can anyone give us a hint how me might be able to locate Judith Keel? Please email me with any information you might have.)
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Subject:Class of '68 40 Year Reunion?
Calvin Balch
Class of '68
Tommy, I enjoy checking the issues each week and having my memory jogged about the past. I know you cover 1964-66 mainly,but I wondered if you have any information about a reunion for the class of 1968. Thanks.
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