A Curious Discovery: An Entrepreneur's Story

by John S. Hendricks

The great postwar changes of the 1950s eventually reached even a little hamlet like Hatfield Bottom. As a kid who had never left West Virginia, I found my mind opened as wide as the skies by news of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik. The idea of a satellite orbiting the planet was so exciting to me; it was like a doorway to a huge new world beyond earth. I was stunned to learn that the satellite was traveling an amazing 18,000 miles per hour—I couldn’t imagine anything moving so fast. And lots of people—including our little Hendricks family in West Virginia—listened to Sputnik’s “beep, beep, beep” on the radio as it circled our side of the world. We sensed, even if we didn’t know how, that Sputnik would change our lives. Even in my earliest West Virginia years I loved thinking about space travel. My favorite book was a little Wonder Book titled Tom Corbett: A Trip to the Moon. It told the story of a space explorer who journeyed with a boy and girl named Johnnie and Janie in the spaceship Polaris. This was an era when space travel seemed almost within our reach—Tom Corbett: A Trip to the Moon allowed me to dream about my impending life far beyond the hills of West Virginia. The space race was on, and almost every kid my age dreamed of somehow being a part of it. I felt privileged and lucky to have been born into one of the great Ages of Discovery.