Huntsville, Alabama, 1965

In 1964, our family moved to Huntsville, Alabama. Huntsville was a little town near the Tennessee border. In many ways, Huntsville was like any little town in Northern Alabama. I remember visiting the farmer's market and seeing turnip greens and peas and vegetable and fruits which I had never seen or heard of. Downtown Huntsville was much like any other county seat in the south. It could have just as easily been the scene for To Kill a Mockingbird.

Outside our subdivision were fields and fields of cotton. On the north of the subdivision were woods where we found sassafras. Suddenly, we were walking down the street and picking bolls of cotton of the plants and finding sassafras root for tea. Everything was old South and a skip back in time. Or so it seemed.

The difference was that in the 1940's, the U. S. Army had brought a bunch of German scientists, as prisoners, to the area, and these scientists had developed the rockets and spaceships which sent our Mercury astronauts into space. These scientists lived and worked in Huntsville.

When we moved there, NASA was working on the science which would send the Saturn V rockets around the moon and ultimately land a man on the moon. Our fathers went to work in the morning and worked on the science and technology which would slip the bonds of earth and send us to other celestial bodies.

So, for the year and a half we lived in the odd combination of the old south and the space age which Huntsville provided in 1965.