Roger Powell’s Story
by David Powell
January 28, 2006
I’ve been saying for awhile now that I’m going to write a book entitled, My Dad Was A Rocket Scientist. He really was. In 1963, Dad went to work for Grumman Aircraft in Bethpage, New York, and worked on the Lunar Module. He was a test conductor, which means he did final checkout and testing. To say Dad was task-oriented is an understatement. During a test, with politicians, doctors, and upper brass swarming around, Dad was focused on the task at hand. He gave one person permission to hit him hard in the arm to get his attention.
Dad once appeared on national television with Jules Bergman, the Science Editor of ABC. Our family never saw it because we didn’t own a television. That interview was months before the Apollo I fire. That day, Dad came home not sad but angry. He had repeatedly warned of the dangers of testing in a pure oxygen environment, had said when, not if, you lose astronauts you’ll take the time to do it right, and now he had been right, and he hated that.
But Dad never lost confidence in the success of Kennedy’s goal to get a man to the moon by the end of the decade. When asked, “Do you think we’ll make it?” he answered “No.” “What do you mean?” “Well, you asked the wrong question. I don’t think we’ll make it, I know we will.” He was part of that failure-is-not-an-option mentality that characterized the whole space program.
For two years, Dad worked at the Grumman plant at NASA. One night, they were several days and millions of dollars behind schedule. Dad decided they were going to catch up that night. He called and woke up the supervisors and told them to call and wake up anyone they needed. When they protested, he asked, “Whose flag are you working under, the Stars and Stripes, or the Hammer and Sickle?” When they all showed up, Dad had coffee and donuts waiting on them, told them he couldn’t accomplish the test without them, and the test was run – they dropped the Lunar Module seven feet to simulate a drop of 42 feet on the moon. For his excellent work at NASA, Dad was awarded the Silver Snoopy and got his picture on the front of the NASA newsletter.
So how did Dad get to be a rocket scientist? Well, he was born in rural Kansas to two very young, very heartbroken parents named Don and Fern Powell. Fern had already lost both her parents when she and Don married, and then they lost their firstborn, Donald Dean, a quiet, sweet-tempered baby, who lived only nine months. Don and Fern waited four years before having more children, and then they had Roger, who was anything but quiet and sweet-tempered. Roger was strong-willed, active, very curious, and very intelligent. Today’s experts would probably have labeled him ADD. And before long, Roger had four siblings, Lowell, Janet, Richard, and Ronald.
In High School, now in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, Roger became interested in repairing radios. He had the neighbors give him all their broken radios, and he fixed them with parts from the Allied catalog. He built a radio cabinet in shop class. It would be a lifelong hobby.
Roger bought a stereo kit and built his own stereo. It was state-of-the-art, and could play a 20-minute song without turning the record over. The demo record was “Rhapsody in Blue”, and Roger loved cranking up the opening clarinet solo, which sounded like police sirens, and startling anyone that happened to be walking by.
Roger loved cameras and was the photographer for the school newspaper. That hobby also lasted a lifetime.
But school was not Roger’s hobby, at least not then. He always seemed to be goofing off and in the principal’s office. But when he was told he’d better get his act together or he wouldn’t graduate, he was motivated. Now he had a task to do. He promised his principal, who was also one of his teachers, that there would be no more goofing off, and he was true to his word.
After graduation, Roger went to live with his Uncle Stan in California. Roger enrolled at the local Junior College, where Stan taught a class in Radio and TV – Trade Practice and Theory. This time Roger got all A’s – except in his Uncle’s class, who gave him a B to avoid the appearance of favoritism. Stan told Roger he would have given him an A if he had known all the other teachers did as well.
After that one semester, Roger joined the Navy and served in the Korean War. Roger was a signalman, who used flags and lights to communicate with the other ships. He also learned to navigate by the stars. The Navy was something he rarely talked about until recently when he began in earnest to reconstruct the whole experience from old scrapbooks and letters, and from something new, the internet. In the process, he found some of his old shipmates.
One in particular was Bill Dollar, nicknamed Dollar Bill of course, who told Roger what a Christian influence he had been while they were in the Navy together. Just this week, Bill wrote to tell of the time they were stranded in a magnetic mine field and had to explode the mines near their ship as they sailed through it. Roger assisted in navigating them to safety.
One time when Roger was home on leave, his sister Janet introduced him to a girl from Texas named Avanelle, who was there visiting her brother and sister-in-law, neighbors of the Powells, and was helping take care of three little girls, one a new baby. Roger saw in Avanelle a person with whom to settle down and raise a family. A romance by mail ensued, and soon after Roger got out of the Navy and Avanelle graduated from High School, they were married.
Roger took many jobs, but was also anxious to resume his schooling. In between having two children, Roger went to Oklahoma University and Oklahoma State University where he graduated with a two-year Associate Degree in Electronics Technology. He eventually wound up at Texas Instruments in Dallas, now with 3 children and one on the way.
Then Roger heard a preacher who changed his life. Dwain Evans was looking for 80 families who would move to New York, take secular jobs, and plant a church. Roger was convicted. He asked his Dad what he should do, and Don said, “If the Lord is calling you to New York, you’d better go.” So, in the summer of 1963, Roger moved his young family -- with David, age 7; Lynne, age 5; Teresa, age 2; and Ruth, age 7 months -- in a small car with no air conditioning hooked to a U-Haul trailer -- to New York. It was then Roger took his love for electronics and his 2-year associate degree, and got a job at Grumman for $100 a week.
After 4 years in New York, Roger moved his family to Houston for two years, then back to New York, where he finally bought a television to watch the moon landing of Apollo 11. Roger was especially proud during Apollo 13, when the Lunar Module became the lifeboat to bring the astronauts safely home.
But after all that success in the space program, Roger quit Grumman and pursued his lifelong dream to finish his schooling. He moved his family again to Texas, this time to Canyon, where he finished a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and began a Master’s Degree. The space program called him back to work on the Skylab in St. Louis, and then the Viking Mars Lander at Martin Marietta in Denver. His moving days were now over – except for the summer he went back to Canyon to finish that Master’s Degree in Math Education. His thesis was on Mathaphobia.
When Martin let him go for a couple of years because he refused to move to Florida, Roger went to work as a Math teacher at Columbine High School, saying, “They’ll call me back,” and they did. Roger worked for Martin until they forced him out when he turned 60.
In all that time, Roger never quit learning. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable. This kid who barely graduated from High School took continuing education classes every time he got a chance. He surrounded himself with books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, Bible study books, and when he got a computer, educational software. He marveled when all that information became easily available on the internet. Recently, he was one of only two men in a scrapbooking class, where he worked hard to leave his family the story of his life.
And Roger was a man of great faith. When the doctors told him that his infant daughter Lynne would be blind, he believed in God for a miracle, and Lynne did not lose her sight. Much later, in 1999, it was Lynne again who was paralyzed by a falling fireplace, and couldn’t move her arms or legs, and again, Roger believed in God for a miracle, and Lynne is walking here today.
But in 1985, this man of great faith, the rocket scientist who helped us get to the moon, the man who believed that Failure Is Not An Option, that anything could be fixed if you worked hard enough, decided his marriage could not be fixed. Like 1 divided by 0 in math, there was no solution, and he divorced. He was devastated. Everyone around him was devastated. But – Praise God! – this is not a story of devastation today. This is a story of grace, and love, and forgiveness!
God sent Roger a woman of style and laughter named Ginny. She was his roller skating partner, and they competed in dance competitions together. When someone asked how many kids they had, they paused and answered, nine, because Roger had added Mark, Karin, Rick, Ron, and Tracy to his family. All of them loved Roger deeply. But Roger was especially close to Karin and Tracy, and to Tracy’s husband Darryl, because they were part of Roger’s day-to-day household. And Roger now had a new job – being Poppy to Kelsey, Thomas, Alexandra, and Cassidy.
Poppy helped them with their homework and made messes in the kitchen with them. They worked on lots of projects together, some for homework and some just for fun. Poppy went to karate and gymnastics, soccer games and school programs. They spent hours at the computer together. When Thomas was just a toddler, he’d lie down with his Grandma for a nap, wait until she was asleep, then sneak off to Poppy’s office and say, “These are the best times of my life, when those girls are asleep, and it’s just you and me on the ‘puter.” When Poppy broke his arm and couldn’t fit it into his shirt sleeve, Thomas insisted on wearing his shirt that way, too. Cassidy gave him a bookmark which read, “The best day is a day I spend with you.” When Cassidy couldn’t have a dog, she said, “That’s okay; I’ll take Poppy on walks to the park.” And he went – even when he didn’t feel like it.
And – grace upon grace – Roger’s family of 30 years and his family of 20 years have grown together. When she was six, Cassidy took Poppy to the Olive Garden for his birthday, and Uncle David came too. There, Roger celebrated with his oldest son and his youngest granddaughter. Last May, Roger and Ginny gathered at Avanelle’s house to celebrate Jenn’s graduation. And this week, we have all laughed and cried and shared together what Roger has meant to us.
And this is what we’ve learned. Roger loved lots of things, but he was serious about his ice cream. Back in High School, he was a soda jerk at the local drug store. At a recent Fifties’ party at church, he got to relive that. Roger loved to use the hand-crank freezer and the milkshake machine. He made the grandkids milkshakes for breakfast. His favorite place to go for celebrations was the Cold Stone Creamery. And the store-brand he liked was Dryer’s Grand Vanilla – and only Dryer’s Grand Vanilla. He waited until it went on sale, bought 10 cartons at a time, and rushed it home to get it in the freezer. There was a right way to dip ice cream, and a right way to fix it – with extra vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg. This week, when friends brought something besides Dryer’s, we were afraid the refrigerator would spit it out.
May I share something I’ve learned? Remember it all – the good and bad, the pleasant and the difficult, the accomplishments and the failures. It doesn’t help to tell only part of the story. And then remember this, especially his kids and grandkids –
Rog, Dad, Grandpa, Poppy – he loved you!
He was proud of you, and thrilled at all of your accomplishments!
He enjoyed your company!
And he found grace, and died in the arms of his Savior, Jesus.
Now abides faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.
Dad once appeared on national television with Jules Bergman, the Science Editor of ABC. Our family never saw it because we didn’t own a television. That interview was months before the Apollo I fire. That day, Dad came home not sad but angry. He had repeatedly warned of the dangers of testing in a pure oxygen environment, had said when, not if, you lose astronauts you’ll take the time to do it right, and now he had been right, and he hated that.
But Dad never lost confidence in the success of Kennedy’s goal to get a man to the moon by the end of the decade. When asked, “Do you think we’ll make it?” he answered “No.” “What do you mean?” “Well, you asked the wrong question. I don’t think we’ll make it, I know we will.” He was part of that failure-is-not-an-option mentality that characterized the whole space program.
For two years, Dad worked at the Grumman plant at NASA. One night, they were several days and millions of dollars behind schedule. Dad decided they were going to catch up that night. He called and woke up the supervisors and told them to call and wake up anyone they needed. When they protested, he asked, “Whose flag are you working under, the Stars and Stripes, or the Hammer and Sickle?” When they all showed up, Dad had coffee and donuts waiting on them, told them he couldn’t accomplish the test without them, and the test was run – they dropped the Lunar Module seven feet to simulate a drop of 42 feet on the moon. For his excellent work at NASA, Dad was awarded the Silver Snoopy and got his picture on the front of the NASA newsletter.
So how did Dad get to be a rocket scientist? Well, he was born in rural Kansas to two very young, very heartbroken parents named Don and Fern Powell. Fern had already lost both her parents when she and Don married, and then they lost their firstborn, Donald Dean, a quiet, sweet-tempered baby, who lived only nine months. Don and Fern waited four years before having more children, and then they had Roger, who was anything but quiet and sweet-tempered. Roger was strong-willed, active, very curious, and very intelligent. Today’s experts would probably have labeled him ADD. And before long, Roger had four siblings, Lowell, Janet, Richard, and Ronald.
In High School, now in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, Roger became interested in repairing radios. He had the neighbors give him all their broken radios, and he fixed them with parts from the Allied catalog. He built a radio cabinet in shop class. It would be a lifelong hobby.
Roger bought a stereo kit and built his own stereo. It was state-of-the-art, and could play a 20-minute song without turning the record over. The demo record was “Rhapsody in Blue”, and Roger loved cranking up the opening clarinet solo, which sounded like police sirens, and startling anyone that happened to be walking by.
Roger loved cameras and was the photographer for the school newspaper. That hobby also lasted a lifetime.
But school was not Roger’s hobby, at least not then. He always seemed to be goofing off and in the principal’s office. But when he was told he’d better get his act together or he wouldn’t graduate, he was motivated. Now he had a task to do. He promised his principal, who was also one of his teachers, that there would be no more goofing off, and he was true to his word.
After graduation, Roger went to live with his Uncle Stan in California. Roger enrolled at the local Junior College, where Stan taught a class in Radio and TV – Trade Practice and Theory. This time Roger got all A’s – except in his Uncle’s class, who gave him a B to avoid the appearance of favoritism. Stan told Roger he would have given him an A if he had known all the other teachers did as well.
After that one semester, Roger joined the Navy and served in the Korean War. Roger was a signalman, who used flags and lights to communicate with the other ships. He also learned to navigate by the stars. The Navy was something he rarely talked about until recently when he began in earnest to reconstruct the whole experience from old scrapbooks and letters, and from something new, the internet. In the process, he found some of his old shipmates.
One in particular was Bill Dollar, nicknamed Dollar Bill of course, who told Roger what a Christian influence he had been while they were in the Navy together. Just this week, Bill wrote to tell of the time they were stranded in a magnetic mine field and had to explode the mines near their ship as they sailed through it. Roger assisted in navigating them to safety.
One time when Roger was home on leave, his sister Janet introduced him to a girl from Texas named Avanelle, who was there visiting her brother and sister-in-law, neighbors of the Powells, and was helping take care of three little girls, one a new baby. Roger saw in Avanelle a person with whom to settle down and raise a family. A romance by mail ensued, and soon after Roger got out of the Navy and Avanelle graduated from High School, they were married.
Roger took many jobs, but was also anxious to resume his schooling. In between having two children, Roger went to Oklahoma University and Oklahoma State University where he graduated with a two-year Associate Degree in Electronics Technology. He eventually wound up at Texas Instruments in Dallas, now with 3 children and one on the way.
Then Roger heard a preacher who changed his life. Dwain Evans was looking for 80 families who would move to New York, take secular jobs, and plant a church. Roger was convicted. He asked his Dad what he should do, and Don said, “If the Lord is calling you to New York, you’d better go.” So, in the summer of 1963, Roger moved his young family -- with David, age 7; Lynne, age 5; Teresa, age 2; and Ruth, age 7 months -- in a small car with no air conditioning hooked to a U-Haul trailer -- to New York. It was then Roger took his love for electronics and his 2-year associate degree, and got a job at Grumman for $100 a week.
After 4 years in New York, Roger moved his family to Houston for two years, then back to New York, where he finally bought a television to watch the moon landing of Apollo 11. Roger was especially proud during Apollo 13, when the Lunar Module became the lifeboat to bring the astronauts safely home.
But after all that success in the space program, Roger quit Grumman and pursued his lifelong dream to finish his schooling. He moved his family again to Texas, this time to Canyon, where he finished a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and began a Master’s Degree. The space program called him back to work on the Skylab in St. Louis, and then the Viking Mars Lander at Martin Marietta in Denver. His moving days were now over – except for the summer he went back to Canyon to finish that Master’s Degree in Math Education. His thesis was on Mathaphobia.
When Martin let him go for a couple of years because he refused to move to Florida, Roger went to work as a Math teacher at Columbine High School, saying, “They’ll call me back,” and they did. Roger worked for Martin until they forced him out when he turned 60.
In all that time, Roger never quit learning. His thirst for knowledge was insatiable. This kid who barely graduated from High School took continuing education classes every time he got a chance. He surrounded himself with books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, Bible study books, and when he got a computer, educational software. He marveled when all that information became easily available on the internet. Recently, he was one of only two men in a scrapbooking class, where he worked hard to leave his family the story of his life.
And Roger was a man of great faith. When the doctors told him that his infant daughter Lynne would be blind, he believed in God for a miracle, and Lynne did not lose her sight. Much later, in 1999, it was Lynne again who was paralyzed by a falling fireplace, and couldn’t move her arms or legs, and again, Roger believed in God for a miracle, and Lynne is walking here today.
But in 1985, this man of great faith, the rocket scientist who helped us get to the moon, the man who believed that Failure Is Not An Option, that anything could be fixed if you worked hard enough, decided his marriage could not be fixed. Like 1 divided by 0 in math, there was no solution, and he divorced. He was devastated. Everyone around him was devastated. But – Praise God! – this is not a story of devastation today. This is a story of grace, and love, and forgiveness!
God sent Roger a woman of style and laughter named Ginny. She was his roller skating partner, and they competed in dance competitions together. When someone asked how many kids they had, they paused and answered, nine, because Roger had added Mark, Karin, Rick, Ron, and Tracy to his family. All of them loved Roger deeply. But Roger was especially close to Karin and Tracy, and to Tracy’s husband Darryl, because they were part of Roger’s day-to-day household. And Roger now had a new job – being Poppy to Kelsey, Thomas, Alexandra, and Cassidy.
Poppy helped them with their homework and made messes in the kitchen with them. They worked on lots of projects together, some for homework and some just for fun. Poppy went to karate and gymnastics, soccer games and school programs. They spent hours at the computer together. When Thomas was just a toddler, he’d lie down with his Grandma for a nap, wait until she was asleep, then sneak off to Poppy’s office and say, “These are the best times of my life, when those girls are asleep, and it’s just you and me on the ‘puter.” When Poppy broke his arm and couldn’t fit it into his shirt sleeve, Thomas insisted on wearing his shirt that way, too. Cassidy gave him a bookmark which read, “The best day is a day I spend with you.” When Cassidy couldn’t have a dog, she said, “That’s okay; I’ll take Poppy on walks to the park.” And he went – even when he didn’t feel like it.
And – grace upon grace – Roger’s family of 30 years and his family of 20 years have grown together. When she was six, Cassidy took Poppy to the Olive Garden for his birthday, and Uncle David came too. There, Roger celebrated with his oldest son and his youngest granddaughter. Last May, Roger and Ginny gathered at Avanelle’s house to celebrate Jenn’s graduation. And this week, we have all laughed and cried and shared together what Roger has meant to us.
And this is what we’ve learned. Roger loved lots of things, but he was serious about his ice cream. Back in High School, he was a soda jerk at the local drug store. At a recent Fifties’ party at church, he got to relive that. Roger loved to use the hand-crank freezer and the milkshake machine. He made the grandkids milkshakes for breakfast. His favorite place to go for celebrations was the Cold Stone Creamery. And the store-brand he liked was Dryer’s Grand Vanilla – and only Dryer’s Grand Vanilla. He waited until it went on sale, bought 10 cartons at a time, and rushed it home to get it in the freezer. There was a right way to dip ice cream, and a right way to fix it – with extra vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg. This week, when friends brought something besides Dryer’s, we were afraid the refrigerator would spit it out.
May I share something I’ve learned? Remember it all – the good and bad, the pleasant and the difficult, the accomplishments and the failures. It doesn’t help to tell only part of the story. And then remember this, especially his kids and grandkids –
Rog, Dad, Grandpa, Poppy – he loved you!
He was proud of you, and thrilled at all of your accomplishments!
He enjoyed your company!
And he found grace, and died in the arms of his Savior, Jesus.
Now abides faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.