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10 July 1962: Telstar 1 was being launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket.
HOT AUGUST NIGHTS
In the summer of 1962 I was working as a driver’s assistant for Frank Duff’s Dundas Confectionary Company. I had no idea that on 10 July Telstar 1 was being launched on top of a Thor-Delta rocket. The first television pictures and telephone calls, the first live transatlantic television feed, took place that summer. I played my last games of baseball for the Burlington juvenile all-stars and felt the warm breasts of a girl for the first time in my life. That latter experience was on a hot August night as Neil diamond sang it in a double album he put out in 1972 by the same name.
I was 18 that summer. On my birthday, 23 July, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir were the featured musical anchor for the first of these satellite programs that aimed American culture and technological prowess at Europe. Again, I had no idea this had happened immersed as I was in baseball, that confectionary company job, life in a small town in Ontario Canada and my last two years living at home before the big world called. And the big world did call. In late August 1962 I moved to a nearby town with my parents. They helped form the first local spiritual assembly of the Baha’is of Dundas, and I got ready for the most difficult year of my academic life: grade 13 with its nine subjects.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs and thanks to Wikipedia on 21 September 2010.
Goodness, half a century ago!
It’s hard to believe now….like
it happened to someone else, a
tangential-tie to my life, some
person who lived long ago in a
little town, in a little house-with
a little life before it all exploded
insensibly and sensibly over the
next five decades. Those so hot
summer nights and days, a local
place was my life & the universe
was the last thing on my mind---
indeed, that small town was my
universe--but not for long--& it
all happened in the twinkling of
an eye, like a vapour in the desert
which the thirsty dreams as water
and when he comes upon it finds
it to be mere illusion with those
obscuring dustmites of knowledge.
Ron Price
21 September 2010
Posted for: IceInSpace Forum
On: 22/9/'10
-the vernal/aumtumnal equinox
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