Banking On Memories in Coalwood, W.Va.

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“I was proud to live in Coalwood.”
- Homer H. Hickam Jr.
“Rocket Boys”
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Listen to the audio interview with Homer Hickam

COALWOOD, W.Va. – Bill Bolt doesn’t fashion any more nozzles to fuel the dreams of the Rocket Boys.
But he does fashion himself, almost daily, as an informal tour guide for Coalwood. Bolt greets any and all camera-clicking cruisers, orbiting through the wilds of West Virginia and landing here, reaching for the remnants of a proud people, the words of a teacher and the dreams of boys.
“You wouldn’t believe the visitors we get,” said Bolt, a retired machine shop foreman. “And we still have a lot of people.”
Travelers to Coalwood, W.Va., yearn for the nostalgia of the 1950s, when Coalwood’s “Rocket Boys” dared to dream beyond the dark and deadly challenges of working in a coal mine.
These “Rocket Boys” – six teenagers who built and launched model rockets – included Homer H. “Sonny” Hickam Jr., a retired NASA engineer who wrote a best selling memoir called “Rocket Boys” and, by 1999, adapted the book into a big-screen movie, “October Sky.”
“Before ‘October Sky’ came out, we didn’t have nothing,” said 90-year-old Coalwood resident Red Carroll. “That movie has put us on the map.”
Still, this unincorporated town – in McDowell County, W.Va., about 15 miles beyond the Virginia border – continually fades like a satellite signal lost in space. It was once a busy beehive with about 2,000 workers. Come here today, and you’ll find no restaurants, no place to spend the night and just one store, offering convenience items.
In the 1980s, Bolt said, all mining ceased in the Coalwood area, and this once-proud town began returning to the coal dust from which it grew.
“Coalwood, I think, it’s down to about 250 people,” said Hickam, who left town in 1960. “It was about 2,000 when I lived there.”

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“The deep mine is aban-doned, its tunnels flooded, the equipment inside covered with black water. Nothing commemorates the site, only rubble and faded signs in overgrown thickets where hundreds of men once toiled and sometimes died. Coalwood’s industrial symphony is forever stilled. All that remains are distant echoes and husks of what used to be.”
- Homer H. Hickam, Jr.
“Rocket Boys”
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‘IT WAS A BOOM TOWN’
Coalwood may be the most aptly named of all coal camps in the Southern Appalachians. A prosperous industrialist, George L. Carter, planted seeds for the community in the late 1800s. Over time, Carter’s coal company furnished the town with paved streets, churches, schools, a store and homes.
Carter died in 1936. Seven years later, Coalwood became the birthplace of Hickam, the author, in 1943.
About that time, Coalwood boasted its own drug store and movie theater.
“It was a boom town,” remembered Jimmy O’Dell Carroll, one of Red Carroll’s sons. “People drove new cars ... It was the cleanest, prettiest coal camp anywhere around.”
Company officials removed litter from yards and creeks.
And everybody knew everybody else’s business, Bolt said.
“We didn’t have anything but our rear ends,” Bill Bolt said. “And we thought we had everything by the tail, growing up. We had a good time.” 

‘EMPTY LOT LOOKS BETTER’
What remains today sits in a thicket of poverty, trapped by the straight-up mountains of McDowell County. The narrow, paved roads leading in and out of Coalwood boast more curves than the rattlesnakes of the surrounding wilderness.
“Coalwood, like the rest of McDowell County, it’s hard to get to,” Hickam said. “The roads are pretty good. But they are the same roads we had in the 1940s and 1950s.”
Bolt, a lifelong resident in his 80s, said many residents are elderly or disabled.
A few houses in this hamlet are neat and tidy; Bolt’s home is immaculate. Others look in need of disaster relief. Some shacks scattered along side streets appear sad and lonely. Many have been ravaged by floods and caked with mildew.
“What we’ve got here is a couple of burnt-out houses - or three,” Red Carroll said. “All the other houses are full.”
About 100 houses – “or better” – have been torn down since the coal boom era, Bolt said.
In the center of town, the cracked glass walls of the machine shop stand several stories tall. Like a scary skeleton, this abandoned building looks intriguing but almost horrifying.
Block by block, Coalwood fades away.
“I’ve gotten so used to it, it doesn’t bother me like it used to,” Bolt said. “It’s like the (company) store. They tore down our store and such up here. It was getting to look so bad, I think the empty lot looks better than the store did.”
An out-of-state corporation, Alawest, Inc., owns most or all of the old coal company buildings. Acquired at a bankruptcy sale about 16 years ago, Alawest has sold some homes to individuals and now leases a swimming pool and tennis court to the community.
Hickam, the author, suggests Coalwood’s “Clubhouse” – a grand structure owned by Alawest – should be renovated and used as a bed-and-breakfast, to help foster tourism.
“One of these days, we may fix that clubhouse up for the heck of it,” said Alawest president Gene Taylor, who visits Coalwood about three or four times a year.
Still, Taylor said the Northport, Ala.-based Alawest has “no intentions” of selling any particular property at Coalwood.
“There’s a lot of history to the town,” Taylor said. “It’s kind of sad to see something like that go down.”

‘JUST A BUNCH OF KIDS’
As the son of the coal mine superintendent, Hickam constantly witnessed the ugliness of the underground as coal miners risked danger – or simply coughed themselves into the ground with black lung disease.
But then, in 1957, the young Hickam’s eyes turned to the heavens as the Russian satellite Sputnik streaked across the October sky. That historic flight sent far-out fever across the world, touching down even in Coalwood: Hickam became obsessed with space travel and recruited a restless crew of friends to be “Rocket Boys.”
Among them: Jimmy O’Dell Carroll, now a part-time rancher and insurance agent in Gate City, Va.
“We weren’t seasoned scientists or anything. We were just 10th grade boys,” said Carroll, 66. “We blew so many things up, we were just happy when one finally went up.”
Bolt assisted the efforts. As the foreman of Coalwood’s machine shop, Bolt helped make parts for the rockets launched by the Rocket Boys in the 1950s at “Cape Coalwood” – a slack dump on the outskirts of town.
“We used to fix bicycles and wagons and such for the kids,” Bolt said. “And these boys came down and wanted a rocket built. They hadn’t done too well with ‘em, and I asked them what they wanted. And we had some good machinists here, and we fixed them up for them. They were just a bunch of kids, wanting to do something.”
Encouraged by a teacher, Miss Freida Joy Riley, the boys’ rocket adventures – and experimental launches – eventually blasted into a first-place finish at a national science fair in Indianapolis, Ind.
Launching all these model rockets, still, never seemed dangerous to Bolt.
“It didn’t enter my mind,” Bolt said. “You know, we were around in this mining town where danger always exists underground, more so than anything else – explosions and roof falls.”

NEXT CAME HOLLYWOOD
Coalwood’s capers – and rocket science – would have been forgotten had it not been for Hickam.
In the late 1990s, Hickam won major attention for writing “The Big Creek Missile Agency,” a 2,000-word article for Smithsonian Air and Space magazine. Detailing the adventures of his rocket-launching buddies at Big Creek High School, this piece received so much response that Hickam was inspired to write the “Rocket Boys” book, published in 1998.
Using a poetic license, Hickam combined a few characters and used different names for others.
Next came Hollywood, and the movie “October Sky” changed Coalwood even more.
“The movie is about 90 percent true,” Bolt figured.
There’s a character based on Bolt, but it doesn’t look much like him: Actor Randy Stripling, an African-American, portrays a machinist named “Leon Bolden.”
Such a switch did not fit reality in Coalwood , Red Carroll said. “There were no black men working in the machine shop.”
Regardless, Bolt only seems to care that the movie was filmed at Petros, Tenn., near Knoxville, instead of Coalwood.
“The way they had it filmed there and all, you wouldn’t have known the difference,” Bolt said. “But it would have been so much better to have it in McDowell County.”
Coalwood’s dense mountains would have cast too many shadows on a movie set, Hickam said.
Down in Tennessee, however, it rained while the movie was in production, turning the sky gray, Hickam said, “and that gave the movie kind of a gloomy feel.” 

‘TICKLES THEM’ 
Now such gloom seems cast on real-life Coalwood – a place that’s been circling the drain for at least half a century.
For one day a year, Coalwood does shine – like a black diamond – during “October Sky Day.” Held annually on the first Saturday of October, this festival attracts “October Sky” fans from all over the world and even lures people to the nearby Elkhorn Inn, an artsy bed-and-breakfast that sells copies of Hickam’s book in Landgraff, W.Va.
With nearly 4,000 people in town, the festival appears to propel Coalwood out of a black hole, at least for a few hours, and doubles as a reunion for former residents, said Bill Bolt’s wife, Reba.
“The year before last, in 2007, it was the 50th anniversary of Sputnik,” Reba Bolt said. “And we really had a crowd then. Really.”
Hickam holds book signings. And Bill Bolt, just as he does on other days, turns out to greet visitors.
“It tickles them to death,” Bill Bolt said. “I usually take them up to the house and talk to them, because I hate for them to come in this remote area and not talk to anyone.”
All festival proceeds help local residents.
“Every festival we have, the money we have, it goes back to the community, taking care of the swimming pool, the tennis court,” said 84-year-old Coalwood resident Helen Carson. “We try to keep this place up.”
The community group makes about $8,000 during each festival, said Carson, the vice president of the Cape Coalwood Restoration Association, a community activist group.
A native of Russell County, Va., Carson’s home faces Coalwood’s tiny Cassell Park, where a 6-foot-tall model of a space shuttle rises from a concrete pad. That monument more than fits a place known for its “Rocket Boys.”
Still, the actual dumpsite where the Rocket Boys made their launches, “Cape Coalwood,” is located across town and has since been made into a small park, thanks to a few grants, Reba Bolt said.
“And then the kids destroyed it,” she quickly added.
Vandals stole one table from Cape Coalwood, burned another and smashed part of a picnic shelter, Reba Bolt said.
“It’s still a good place to live,” she insisted. “It’s not a lot of crime – mischievous kids, that’s all.”

‘WITHERING AWAY’
Today, Jimmy O’Dell Carroll has become a popular speaker on his true “Rocket Boy” adventures. In the “October Sky” movie, the composite character Sherman O’Dell is based on Carroll and the late Sherman Siers.
“It’s a good motivational story for students and teachers,” Carroll said.
Even so, Carroll has no motivation to return to Coalwood.
“I don’t see it coming back. It’s like all ghost towns that you go to. It’s withering away,” Carroll said. “And there’s no land to develop anything on. It’s one holler right down into another.”
From his ranch in Scott County, it takes Carroll a little more than two hours to visit his father, Earnest O’Dell “Red” Carroll, at Coalwood.
The elder Carroll is featured in the “Rocket Boys” book, but he did not make the cut in the “October Sky” movie. This retired garbage collector, still, talks openly about the experiences of being a “Rocket Boys” father and life in Coalwood.
“I wouldn’t know how to live any place else,” Red Carroll said, slowly.

‘SO PROUD’
At 65, Hickam continues writing books. His sequels to “Rocket Boys” have included “Sky of Stone.”
“I love Coalwood,” Hickam said. “That’s why I wrote four memoirs about it.”
The author and his wife, Linda, make their home at Huntsville, Ala., but visit Coalwood once a year, usually during the “October Sky Day” festival.
Hickam, too, maintains a passion for “Rocket Boys,” which, he said, will be made into a Broadway musical in 2010.
“The people that are still there still cling to those old values as best as they can, considering their economic situation,” Hickam said. “I’m so proud to be from those people, and I’ll do anything I can for the rest of my life to bring their story to the rest of the world, which, by the way, really, really needs it.”

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“Even now, Coalwood endures, and no one, not careless industry or overzealous government, can ever completely
destroy it – not while we who once lived there may recall our life among its places, or especially remember rockets
that once leapt into the air, propelled not by physics but by the vibrant love of an honorable people, and the
instruction of a dear teacher, and the dreams of boys.”     
- Homer H. Hickam, Jr. “Rocket Boys”

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THERE’S MORE: On the Web
—Hear Joe Tennis’s exclusive interview with “Rocket Boys” author Homer H. Hickam, Jr., at http://www.tricities.com.
—Watch recent editions of WJHL’s “Cable Country” featuring interviews with “Rocket Boys” author Homer Hickam and residents of Coalwood, W.Va.
—http://rocketboys.8m.com/
—http://www.homerhickam.com