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Baker’s Heartbeat's avatar

As always, your writing is lovely 🥰 and a joy to read! My dad also raised me in Iowa, and we probably have more in common than might be thought. My dad was a genius and quite gifted.

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Bob Shreck's avatar

Grand Prairie, TX, with new wife and visiting-from-Iowa parents in attendance, on a rented-for-the-occasion B&W TV. Deployment to RVN six days later seemed anticlimactic.

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Chuck Offenburger's avatar

Christie, your columns seem to get better by the week. And I’m jealous as hell about that.

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Marcella Frevert's avatar

As a young adult who saw movies about space and doubted the school assembly speaker who predicted space travel, it actually took President Kennedy and the likes of Alan Sheppard and John Glenn to make a believer out of me. I came full circle when we had the opportunity to host John and Annie Glenn in Emmetsburg as he campaigned tor the Democratic presidential nomination in December,1983.

As I read your beautifully woven piece, it brought back wonderful memories of very special times in our nation and in our family’s life. Thank you 😍

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Joseph A Toubes's avatar

I was the grad assistant at UNI and many nights I stood on the roof of the chemistry building, where the telescope for the Earth Sciences building was located. I would set up the telescope, and then hand a camera for a student to take a picture of the moon or something, then take it back inside to warm before advancing the film, so it wouldn't shatter in the cold winter night. Then develop the film later and print it. Dr. Darrel Hoff and a group of us decided a road trip to all the observatories in Iowa was in order. We went to Iowa City, up to the top of the physics building to see the telescopes up there that students and Dr. Van Allen did use, then spent the night in the observatory in Hills Iowa, another university project, finally out to lake McBride to see the giant radio telescopes talking to the stars. Dr. van Allen was not in town, he was at some conference. But his assistants told us that we should take freshman general astronomy, because the good doctor loved teaching freshman students. I never met him, but at UNI, Dr. Hoff and I wrote about micrometeorites and with any paper you do reading on everything that others did, i got to read the papers on the moon rocks before the media got them, and communicate with those people. Iowa is full of brilliant kids who with the good teaching can achieve just about anything. With the president ruining the department of education, saying that the State of Iowa will take care of schools, and having lived through the ruining of education by the ruling party of the GOP governor, I doubt that we will produce many Van Allens in the future, and it breaks my heart.

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Loretta F Ross's avatar

So much resonates here. I recall the communal sense of wonder, awe and even reverence. We were all so proud of Dr Van Allen. I miss that in these cynical times and rejection of science.

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Wayne Sawtelle's avatar

Thank you!

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