By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Smile, you might be on "Capsule Camera."
One of four rockets launched Wednesday evening at the "Splashdown" at Southwestern Michigan College of the One Book-One Community reading project contained a camera.
One rocket launched by Principal Dan Smith and one of his former Kincheloe students, sixth grader Brad Hornburg, reached the SMC parking lot from the grassy expanse bordering Cherry Grove Road, but managed to miss all cars.
Smith started with a rudimentary physics lesson: "For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction.
In a rocket, "Smoke is crammed into a tiny space and it wants out of there. It's under pressure," Smith said. "It's not pushing down right now because we haven't made the smoke yet. Fuel takes up this much space, but the smoke is a big cloud. Once you burn the fuel, the smoke starts out inside the rocket. It wants out so much that it will push really hard down," sending the rocket aloft.
Electricity ignites Smith's rockets from a safe distance.
The launch was to be followed by discussions on Homer Hickam's memoir "Rocket Boys" (aka October Sky), but the sunny blue skies outdoors were too alluring after everyone reviewed rocket-related items on display from The Museum at SMC, including clip of 1945 Dowagiac graduate Iven Carl Kincheloe's appearance on a national game show and interview with a dark-haired Walter Cronkite.
One Book-One Community was sponsored by Cass District Library, Dowagiac District Library, Fred L. Mathews Library and Dowagiac Union Schools.
The community-wide reading program concept was first introduced by the Washington Center for the Book in 1998.
Since then hundreds of communities across the country have used similar programs to heighten interest in reading in their communities.
In January, 14 public libraries in southwest Michigan launched the community-wide reading program, "Read, Share, Grow: Bringing Communities Together."
The project runs through National Library Week April 10-16, culminating in the Splashdown event at SMC on April 13.
The "One Book - One Community" concept has proven to be successful in building a sense of belonging to a community, encouraging the formation of new communities and, in some instances, opening up communication on sensitive issues.
It functions under a variety of names and in a variety of forms, but it always has the same purpose: to build a community of readers by creating a program that advocates the mass reading of the same book.
Selecting a book that would be of interest to a broad audience was the first step in the Read, Share, Grow project.
A committee made up of representatives from each of the 14 participating communities met last spring to select five possible titles. The committee was asked to select books that are available in print, readable in a two-week period and appropriate for all readers from eighth grade to adult. Additionally, the selected book needed to provide interesting discussion and programming opportunities. Other than those considerations, the committee was free to nominate any five titles they chose.
They chose Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam Jr. because, like the project itself, the book emphasizes the importance of community ties.
Universal themes of community, family and destiny make it of interest to a wide range of readers.
From the first paragraph in the book, the reader knows he is about to go on a journey he won't forget: "Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn't know my home town was at war with itself over its children, and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives. I didn't know that if a girl broke your heart, another girl, virtuous at least in spirit, could mend it on the same night. And I didn't know that the enthalpy decrease in a converging passage could be transformed into jet kinetic energy if a divergent passage was added. The other boys discovered their own truths when we built our rockets, but those were mine."
In 1957, Homer, who was then known as Sonny, was inspired by Werner von Braun and his Cape Canaveral team. Although just 14 years old, Sonny decided to build his own rockets.
They were his ticket out of Coalwood, W.Va., a mining town that was dying.
Sonny, along with several friends, formed the grandiosely named Big Creek Missile Agency.
The story of the group's struggles toward a gold medal at the National Science Fair in 1960, an unprecedented honor for a miner's kid, is rich in humor as well as warm sentiment.
Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shared the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams.