Webmaster
This web site in maintained by Charlie Myers and Leonard Berry of NMT Web Designs, LLC in Portland, Tennessee.
 Charlie |
 Leonard |
If you have comments, corrections, etc., please contact Charlie by e-mail. We also invite you to submit photographs, stories and links about Coalwood and the surrounding area that you think others might enjoy. We will be happy to give you credit for all of your submissions!
About Leonard
Leonard was born in the 1940s in Yuba City, California. He has bachelors and masters degrees in biology. Over the years, Leonard has worked in medical research labs in San Francisco, California, and Nashville, Tennessee. Following 18 years as a medical researcher at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Leonard retired.
Leonard lives in Portland, Tennessee.
About Charlie
I was born in 1951 in Orlando, Florida, simply because that was the nearest hospital to where my parents lived. I grew up in the small town of Rockledge, Florida, in Brevard County. For those of you not familiar with Brevard County, the county holds a more famous geographical spot: Cape Canaveral.
My family had been in the citrus business in the area since just after the Civil War. We had hundreds of acres of orange groves on Merritt Island (across the Indian River and north from Rockledge) and a citrus packing house in Rockledge.
The space race changed all that. Brevard County grew from being a small, agricultural community to being (more or less) a metropolis today. All of our orange groves on Merritt Island were taken over (eminent domain) by the federal government and are now inside the fences of the Kennedy Space Center. As a matter of fact, the KSC visitor center is surrounded by an orange grove which my aunt used to own.
It was interesting growing up in these times. I stood on the banks of the Indian River and watched every manned space shot from Freedom 7 to Apollo 11. (In the 1950s, we got to see quite a few rockets explode in the sky. This was quite spectacular at night!)
In 1969, I ventured off to the big city of Atlanta to attend Georgia Tech (my father's alma mater - he was a Mechanical Engineer). In 1972, I graduated with an Industrial Engineering degree and worked all over the country until the 1990s when I retired.
In 2004, I was on a trip to Las Vegas and decided to take a 14-hour bus trip to the Grand Canyon, a place I had never seen. As it turns out, the bus had TV sets in it, and one of the movies the driver showed was October Sky. I had never heard of the movie, but I loved it.
When I returned home, I bought the movie, found out it was based on a book, bought the book, bought the sequels and read them all several times.
In 2005, we decided to set up a web site to honor Coalwood, and that's why you are reading this.
We hope you enjoy the web site, and we hope you'll contribute your own Coalwood materials and thoughts so we can share them with everyone throughout the world that loves Coalwood.
There are a surprising number of people, like me, who have been genuinely touched by reading and watching about Coalwood and the people of Coalwood.
Charlie lives in Dallas, Texas.
|
Strange Coincidences In case you haven't noticed there are a bunch of strange coincidence in all of this! There are actually a few more ... |
|
| Homer | Charlie |
| Industrial Engineer | Industrial Engineer |
| Interested in rockets in West Virginia. | Grew up near Cape Canaveral. |
| One brother named Jim | One brother named Jim |
| No sisters. | No sisters. |
| Homer worked for NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center. | Brother Jim works for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center. |
| The driver on the bus to the Grand Canyon had planned to show a different movie. The tape had broken the night before, so he brought October Sky from his personal collection at home. | |
| There were two buses from the same company going to the Grand Canyon that day. The one I ended up on was the only one to show October Sky. | |
| Jake Gyllenhaal (who plays Homer in the movie October Sky) and I have the same birthday, December 19. (Jake is, however, a lot of years younger.) | |
| Linda Hickam tells us, "Naomi is still a good friend of Homer's. We met on set [of October Sky] - they argue politics by email almost daily!" | In the 1980s, I wrote a letter to Naomi Foner, the screenwriter of the movie Running on Empty. (A great script!) This is the first and only letter I've written to a screenwriter. Ms. Foner actually wrote back, and I still have that letter. The coincidence? Naomi Foner is Jake Gyllenhaal's mother. |
Another Strange Coincidence for Charlie I was so impressed with Rafe's book that I mailed him a thank-you letter and a few books and DVDs for his classroom's lending library. The DVD's were the six volume set of The Films of Charles and Ray Eames [if you teach math or science, you should see these!] and, of course, several copies of October Sky. I knew the box had been delivered by the Postal Service, but I was surprised to get an e-mail from Rafe shortly after that. Here is part of the e-mail:
|
In addition, there are a few Tennessee connections we'd like to point out. Please see below.
Tennessee Connections
In the book
Rocket Boys, Homer mentions that the only radio station they could pick up
at night in Coalwood, West Virginia, was from Gallatin, Tennessee. (In
reality, the station was WLAC in Nashville. However, since the programs
were mainly sponsored by Randy's Record Shop in Gallatin, the Coalwood kids
assumed the broadcast was coming from Gallatin.) Gallatin is nine miles
south of Portland. It is the county seat of Sumner County, and Portland is
in Sumner County.
[Jerry Hatmaker, author of The Coalwood Misfits, sent us this comment: "Another station we could get in Coalwood was the Big One, WLW out of Cincinnati. Most Coalwood folks were Red Leg (Reds) fans. It was a 50,000 watt station, but before 1939 it pumped out 500,000 watts. Sometimes, though, we did have to go to the top of a mountain to hear it."]
The entire
movie October Sky was filmed in East Tennessee. It was simply too
difficult to get all of the trucks and equipment into position in Coalwood, West
Virginia. (Too many twisty roads!) It turns out that parts of east
Tennessee have similar geography as southern West Virginia. The studio was
able to find all of the filming locations they needed within just a few miles of
I-40 outside of Knoxville. In addition, the area had easy access to
hotels, restaurants, airports, catering, and other services a film crew needs.
We have actual shots of a few locations where the movie was filmed on our
October Sky page.
WV 16, as it
passes through Coalwood, is named Tennessee Avenue. The Hickam house was
on Tennessee Avenue.
|
Final Thought
Homer Hickam
We agree 100%, and we hope our web site will help in keeping the Coalwood Way in the minds and hearts of everyone in the world. Charlie Myers |