Hey, there! Log in / Register
Boston space oddity
By adamg on Mon, 10/22/2018 - 11:11am
On March 23, 1963, Arthur Fiedler and his wife Ellen visited with Werner von Braun at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL.
Von Braun had briefly lived near Fiedler, although the Pops conductor didn't know it at the time. In September 1945, the military shipped von Braun and some other Nazi rocket scientists to an Army fort on Long Island, as part of a secret program to learn the secrets of the V2 by basically ignoring the Nazi stuff and letting the scientists get American citizenship.
Also not that far away at the time: Tom Lehrer, getting his BA in mathematics at Harvard. Lehrer later wrote and performed a ditty about von Braun:
Topics:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Nike
Interestingly, to me anyhow, there was a Nike missile launch site on Long Island.
http://www.themilitarystandard.com/missile/nike/bo37.php
Squantum at the time, leading to Moon then Long Island, had no houses really, as it was a naval air base.
Squantum?
Squantum had lots of houses back then.
Marina Bay, where the Naval Air Station, originally a private airport (see the Harvard Air Meets), and for a brief time during WWI, a submarine / destroyer shipyard (run by Joseph Kennedy), was a post 1980 development.
The former hanger used to have flea markets a la Raynham until the early 1980's.
It was only when the O'Connell's got hold of Marina Bay in the mid-1980's did residential and related marina / restaurant development take off. They made a mint, one of their sons had a Porsche in college as the same time as me. I had an 84 Rabbit.
Squantum has been a well built up area prior to WWII, though many of the houses away from the water are late 1940's until mid-1950's vintage, before the Nike base.
It would be great to go out to Long Island and see the old Nike base, but you can't because Jack Connors and Tom Menino didn't want you too.
http://www.airfields-freeman
http://www.airfields-freeman.com/MA/Airfields_MA_Boston_SE.htm#squantum
One of my favorite songs
I just thought to add that to the original post!
Great minds and all that! Plus, local angle, since Lehrer was getting his BA at Harvard at the time.
I remember when that album first came out
My mother brought it home and we listened to it over and over. Always loved that song (and the rest of the album) and think of it whenever I hear Von Braun's name.
"Once the rockets are up, who
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun.
Ashtrays on the Table
Yep. Everyone smoked everywhere before the Surgeon General's report on lung cancer landed. Even scientists. Everyone did it, nobody knew any better.
Oh, well, I guess that's that
Just to refresh my memory, where does second-hand smoke (tobacco, not weed) rank on the list of cardinal sins these days?
I ask because the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is next summer and I need to know whether to celebrate or to apologize.
Breitbart and Fox News have been uncharacteristically silent on the subject.
Celebrate outside
With the cannabis crew!