The Fort-Knight Dispatch

Born in 1919, Robert T. McCall would grow up to be one of the greatest  artists to capture the hope and vision of the future. Often Mr. McCall’s brightly lit and somewhat impressionistic style of painting would capture my imagination again and again. I found out today that he passed away.

Who is Robert McCall? What did he paint? If you’re asking these questions then I’ll ask you to Google his name and look at just at a single page of his work. I bet you this, you’ll recognize more than one piece. Why am I so certain? It wasn’t that he was simply prolific.  His art and concept paintings influenced so so many people and projects:  2001: A Space Odessy, Star Wars, the US Space Program, the US Air force and Disney. His art graced the pages of magazines where I can first remember seeing his art. Then there was his work for Star Wars. A year or so later, as a child I would see murals of his at EPCOT Center in Orlando. When I started collecting stamps with a space theme, there was his work again. His paintings of the Apollo program, then the Space Shuttle captured the brightness and hopefulness of the future. He continued painting images of America’s changing space program painting Space Station Freedom, eventually what became the ISS.  His style of bright colors made space look like a calidascope (which in reality, through Hubble, we would all learn how right he was).

Always within his paitings of space there were always the people.  He would capture all the technical details of a spacecraft but it’s the people and their emotion I remember the most. Like Norman Rockwell he captured a moment in his subjects eyes and facial expression of hope and purpose.  The one case that stands is contrast, as there is no face, just a face mask, is his incredible mural in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.  The image of Apollo astronatus standing on the moon converys raw emotion all through body language and lighting.  A few years ago I was able to take my father and son there to see DC and this painting. That moment is captured and hangs on my den wall.

I’m not sure what the best compliment to pay an artist is. Certaily I would love to own his work but that’s not an economic reality. All I can say is that his art work inspired me and affected me when I was a child and still does all these years later. I’ve always wanted to live in his paintings, his visions. Maybe that’s  the best thing I could say of his work. Godspeed Robert McCall.

Other remembrances:

http://www.collectspace.com/news/news-022810a.html

http://trueslant.com/milesobrien/2010/02/28/the-late-great-robert-mccall/

On January 28th, 1986 I was 15 years old. I awoke knowing that the Challenger would be launching around lunch time. It was a school day. At 15 I was enjoying my time in high school. I had every reason to look forward to going to school, seeing my friends. I was one of those kids, who for the most part, liked school. This morning though I wanted very much to stay home. I showered and got dressed and looked my self over in the mirror. I took at deep breath and decided to try something. I walked down stairs to where my mother was pouring herself a cup of coffee. I asked, “Mom, the shuttle is going up later this morning…”. She looked straight into my eyes. I froze. After a second, I continued, “I know they won’t say anything or show it at school…” She interrupted, “I suppose you aren’t feeling well today.” She said it in almost a flat tone and as she spoke the word, “today”, she drew it out, her lips turned to a sly smile. “No, I suppose I don’t”, I said. My smile was far more obvious than hers. I could hardly hold my self back from laughing. The cause of my joy, wasn’t simply because of my mother’s good nature in supporting my interest in all things space. No, she had been doing that since before I was born. I was happy because, I had watched, with great excitement, every shuttle launch until that point. I had cut newspaper articles since before Columbia first flew and put them, carefully more or less, into kind of scrap book. A year before Columbia’s first launch, I had toured Kennedy Space Center and seen the preparations for the launch. I was so hooked on space and had such a supportive family that on that day back in 1986, I was simply over joyed.

Leading up to the launch, I had a frustrating time actually finding any news coverage of the launch itself. I was growing up in a small suburb of Indianapolis, Mooresville.  The local ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates weren’t showing or mentioning anything about covering the launch. My mother, always an avid news radio listener, began in parallel to my efforts, of scanning the AM and FM dials for any coverage.  We found it shortly before launch, maybe 10 or 12 minutes before.

I won’t describe what happened to the vehicle or crew after launch. What I remember, what is burned into my memory is this; my mother and I were standing in the kitchen together, smiling at one another. We were sharing some rare teenage son and mother quality time. Our little secret (Mooresville High School, I didn’t have the flu that day), that I wasn’t sick. Both of us, fans of our country’s space program. My mother, who had watched every Apollo launch, the one who had sat me upon her lap at watched the last mission to the Moon, the one who had covered one part of our kitchens wall with clippings from each mission.

I remember her face. I remember as how the words changed her giddy smile and joy from the announcers description of a beautiful launch, that turned so quickly to tragedy. I remember she stared straight into my eyes. We never broke our gaze. As the words began to register in her brain and sudden denial washed over her, her eye brows furrowed. She stared at me as confused as my own child would later when Columbia was destroyed. My mother began to shake visibly. She continued to look me in the eye and ask what the words the announcer was speaking, meant. I translated into half technical terms and half gibberish. I was trying to take it all in, to rationalize it. I tried by offering words of comfort to my now sobbing mother. I tried to think of ways the crew could have survived. My mother added into the conversation, remembering how show had seen a video or photo of astronauts and an ejection system in the Shuttle.. I corrected her. Her lip trembled as I had hastily spoken what I knew was fact. I said it in such a matter of fact way, I was oblivious to how it had the affect of a knife to her gut. She reached out and put a hand on our stove to steady herself. I pulled up some chairs and we say there in our kitchen, huddled close, listening to the tinny AM signal coming through a 30 year old radio perched on a small shelf above our range.

In the living room, the reporters were not turning their attention from a launch, to a national tragedy.  We both watched and listened for the rest of the day. We talked. We yelled. We yelled at the sky, we yelled out for a reason this had happened, for someone to blame. We prayed together for the crew, for their families, NASA and for the country.

I don’t remember the first launch after Challenger. It seems strange to me now. I don’t remember the launch that came three years later. What I do know is that my mother was watching and I remember her smiling again.

If things have worked out, this post will now be visible whether you went to fort-knight.com or fortknightdispatch.com . If it did. Step 2 to world domination!

I fulfilled a life long dream of watching the launch of a manned space flight. Yesterday I watched the Space Shuttle Atlantis start it’s trip to the International Space Station. I’m still trying to find the words to describe it despite talking and Tweeting about it since it happened.

I love Swiss Army knives. I’ve had a series of them over the years. Along with “multi-tools” they represent the utilitarian in me best. Google Wave which, I plan on blogging quite a bit about in the future is… nearly a complete mystery… and I likes me a good mystery. It’s a like the big swiss army knife with all sorts of treasures inside.. and I haven’t opened them all up yet. So.. in the next few days I’ll be spending some time getting to know this “thing” and sharing what I discover. So what is Google Wave? I’ll spare Google’s description.. which think confuses people as much as a blank sheet of paper… and say this. It’s all the inner workings of chat and twitter and email and Google’s applications like Maps and Search turned in to Lego bricks. Follow me. So what if you could pick up these bricks and put them together. What would you have if you stuck a chat conversation and map together? Not sure but it might look like one of those fancy real time polls they did during the last election. Or what about if you and your family was planning a weekend vacation in a WAVE chat and you snapped on a weather map brick.. kinda useful. Or if you had a really interesting question like “Do you get this blog post?” and could slap on a WAVE Yes/No/Maybe brick right here in this blog? [this space left blank for GOOGLE WAVE BRICK THINGY].

All not sure when or how it happened but while looking into some technical problems with the blog, I realized at some time in the past my site www.fort-knight.com was hacked. I am in the process of changing hosting providers and will be posting to a new domain www.fortknightdispatch.com until I can get www.fort-knight.com point at my new provider. My apologies and thanks to all those who pointed out some strangeness on the blog (other than the posts).

It’s been a while since I’ve really posted anything here. There have been many reasons and one of them has been that I’ve been in the process of changing jobs. Anyone who has gone through this knows it can.. be a bit time consuming even when it’s within the same company. That being said, I’m still working for Whirlpool Corporation but am no longer an Innovation Manager, a role that I enjoyed very much and was proud to have had for as long as I did. My new role will be in our global engineering and technology group helping develop and launch new appliances around the concept of what is being referred to as the “SmartGrid”. These new appliances will be able to communicate and respond to both the needs of the household (doing appliance stuff.. cleaning, cooking, etc., saving money) as well as the power grid (saving energy, money…). More on this stuff in a later post.

Finally.. something I can talk about.