George Morgan: Rocket Girl

Mary glanced at her father to see his reaction, then turned back and nodded her head.

“Come on,” said Betty, offering her hand. “I have a surprise for you.”

Mary stepped forward and entered a ray of sunlight that poured in through a cracked window. She wore a threadbare print dress, but no shoes. Her face was sullied, her hands filthy. Her hair was scraggily and oily and seemed to have attracted two flies in orbit. Sinfully nearsighted, her eyelids were affixed in a near-permanent squint.

Mary took the woman’s outstretched hand and followed her to the door. She stopped next to her father.

“Daddy? May I go outside?”

Michael said nothing for several moments. He finally broke the suspense with a single word.

“Go.”

“Come on,” whispered Betty.

As the sheriff signaled he would stay with Michael, Betty led the young girl outdoors, but not before giving her sister Elaine a sideways glance. Betty knew it was just a matter of time before she would be back for the little one.

Most of the storm clouds had moved on, leaving a brilliant midday sun to brighten the Dakota prairie. A slight breeze blew, creating waves along the tops of the grasses and pulling with it the dreams of young girls.

“Do you like horses?”

Mary nodded.

“Would you like one for your very own?” Betty walked to the back of the trailer with the girl in tow. Mary could hear the animal’s huge lungs breathing in and out as the woman opened the rear trailer door.

“Come on, boy.” She pulled out a short wooden ramp and led the horse down to the muddy ground.

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you give him a name?”

Mary thought a while, looking around the farm as if for some sign of inspiration.

“I’m going to name him Star.”

“Star?”

“Every night I like to come out here and look up at the planets and the stars. I like to watch them move across the sky. I’m going to name him Star.”

“Then that’s his name.”

“Am I going to ride him to school?”

“Not for a while, honey. We need to get you some riding lessons first. For the next few days Sheriff Knowles will be driving you to school. A horse is a big responsibility. Once you know how to ride him—and take care of him—Star will be all yours.”

Betty tied the horse up to the lonely gate. The sheriff came out of the house, removed two bags of feed from the trailer, and set them on the porch. Then he opened the rear door of the Chrysler.

“Ready to meet your new classmates?”

They got into the car and the sheriff started the engine. He pulled the car around and headed back toward the highway.

The two lane road—Highway 2 on the map—followed every rise, descent, ridge, and rill of the landscape, its engineers having made no attempt to straighten out Mother Nature’s work. Betty glanced back to see how her charge was handling the ride.

“When we get to the school we’ll clean you up a bit. Before we introduce you. Okay?”

Again Mary quietly nodded.

Betty turned and watched the road spool beneath the car, like some oversize conveyor belt. She had no way of knowing the historic effect the young girl behind her would have. Mary was just another neglected kid who needed to get out of the farmhouse and into the schoolhouse. Betty handled at least two dozen such cases every year—nothing special about this one.

The “War to End All Wars” [1] First quoted by H. G. Wells, made famous by President Woodrow Wilson. Wikipedia , s.v. “The War to End War,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_war_to_end_all_wars . had been over for more than a decade. Yes, the Great Depression was in full force, but Ray, North Dakota, was hardly Detroit or New York; the woes of Wall Street were barely felt in the northern frontier. Here on the Dakota prairie, economic depressions neither arrived nor left. At least the world was at peace. Yet even now there were rumblings in Europe—the humiliation of Germany having been a gag in the throat of its people. Soon the land of Prussia would be home to great factories building secret and mysterious weapons—weapons that would spread fear to every country. One of those weapons would evolve into the seed of a future space race between the world’s two most powerful countries.

Mrs. Manning had no way of knowing, of course, that the scrawny and scraggily eight year-old girl seated behind her would play a major role in that race. She had no way of knowing that a second world war was in the offing—that the unwashed little urchin she was now escorting to school would one day contribute to the war effort as a chemist in a weapons factory. Or that she would play a pivotal role in the coming space race. Or that she would one day rise to become America’s first female rocket scientist.

Or that she would become a champion bridge player.

Betty Manning could know none of this, all of it being too far ahead to see. Little Mary Sherman was just a child, a face, a name. A name like Jennifer or Susan or Elizabeth or Star. A name on a very long list of names.

The one-room schoolhouse came into view over a rise. Betty Manning—dedicated social service worker with Williams County, North Dakota—opened her briefcase and pulled out her next assignment.

At the same moment that Betty Manning was marching the urchin farm girl toward Ray’s one-room schoolhouse, Captain Heinrich Strugholdt, Berlin’s chief of police, was doing a little marching of his own. Moments before, a homemade steel rocket had slammed into the Berlin North Police Station, [2] Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), p. 47. puncturing a four-inch hole in the station’s roof and filling every cubic centimeter of the building’s interior with noxious fumes. The three-foot-long rocket had come to rest atop the desk of one Officer Ernst Ritter, who had been so terrified by the experience he had to go home and change his underwear.

Captain Strugholdt clutched the rocket firmly in his right hand as he negotiated the twelve steps outside the main entrance. There was no doubt where the rocket had come from, or who owned it. The small cadre of young college students was well known around the city for their rocket experiments at an abandoned World War I ammunition dump just north of the city. Consisting mostly of bleak, open fields of grass and swamps, the surplus property was owned jointly by the city of Berlin and the German Defense Ministry. The land and its few scattered, dilapidated buildings had been lent to the young rocketeers thanks to the space-dreaming, fast-talking, entrepreneurial salesmanship of one Rudolf Nebel, [3] Erik Bergaust, Wernher von Braun (New York: Cobb/Dunlop, 1976), p. 40. a college student with dreams of building a rocket to fly to the moon. Captain Strugholdt had personally visited the area several times to watch the launchings and inspect the goings-on. None of the students’ rockets ever seemed to go high enough or far enough to reach occupied buildings—the closest being more than a kilometer away. Clearly, however, the work of these enthusiastic rocket experimenters had progressed considerably since his last visit.

As Captain Strugholdt approached the city boundary, the four-story office buildings gave way to two-story hotels and apartments, which then yielded to small shops and markets. Passing Lars Michel’s shoe store and a few small residential cottages, the road narrowed and the vista opened, revealing the raw, undeveloped fields and brilliant green grass of the ammunition dump’s periphery. It was this field that the youthful rocket experimenters had begun referring to as their Raketenflugplatz (Rocketport).