Kenneth Atkins recently (2022) published his epic review of his personal life journey as GOD IS MY CO-PILOT, a title borrowed from a 1945 film starring Dennis Morgan based on the 1943 autobiography by Robert Lee Scott, Jr.
Scott's narrative unfolds as a vivid account of the Flying Tigers and the US Army Air Force in China and Burma during WWII. I remember the film well as I saw it when I was ten years old at the Paramount in Amarillo, Texas. The film affirmed that the fall of Japan signaled the end of World War II.
Atkins' narrative is a chronological account of his life anchored on three pillars: The Spiritual Realm, Family Love and Support, and a History of Academic and Scientific research, development, and implementation.The book sometimes becomes a somewhat dense read amid so many acronyms (more correctly, initialisms) such as NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), OAST (Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology), SSEC (Solar System Exploration Committee), etc.
I met Kenny in high school. I was music and he was sports. He was a pitcher for Amarillo High School, but it was music that brought us together. We were in high school choir, and in a quartet. But somehow, a musical I was writing, Gotta Sing! was approved as an official school production even before it was finished. I remember developing the music and rehearsing in an elegant basement with a grand piano belonging to a cast member on an idyllic tree-lined street. The show was still in development and although I usually did lyrics for my songs, I was feeling pressure of producing new songs quickly. As I was working on a song, Kenny Atkins suggested some lyrics and they fit perfectly. In our minds Gilbert and Atkins became the new song team in town, and we had a brief delusion of being Broadway bound.
At the time, I recognized Ken's gift as a poet... He had a sense of substance and craft, and a poetic awareness that emerges in his extended autobiography filled with technical and scientific data. It is a rare combination: poet and engineer, maybe a bit like Chaucer (Canterbury Tales) who was a poet and engineer, supervising construction of buildings and the repair of the banks of the Thames river. He also wrote a treatise on astronomy. Chaucer was the first to publish in Middle English, a departure from England's official languages of Latin and French. Kenny, like Chaucer, has that rare sensibility of knowing the cosmos as a poet and engineer.
But there was the secret Ken that I never knew. I never guessed his love of flight and his secret flying lessons near Palo Duro Canyon.
Palo Duro Airport near Canyon, Texas was 19 miles from Amarillo on a two-lane highway that unfortunately killed many of our classmates in accidents who had overdosed on the freedom a driver's license brings to a teenager. It was a deadly drive, and I drove it several times a month because we printed the high school newspaper at a press in Canyon City. There is an alternate drive that goes more directly to the canyon, but it is very slow. Little did I know that Kenny was making the same trek to take flying lessons at Palo Duro Airport, which he picked so that no one would know he was learning to fly.
Palo Duro Canyon is a beautiful surprising landscape carved out of the Texas Plains, created during the last glacial retreat 20,000 years ago. It is a beautiful experience to visit the canyon as you see the flatlands dissolve into the panoramic vista of a canyon laced with vivid colors, 120 miles long, up to 20 miles wide, and 820 feet deep, with a few areas that are more than 1000 feet deep. No doubt seeing it from the air must have been a mystical experience for Ken in his first adventures skyward.
I am disappointed that I never knew of Kenny's first real love: flying. I might have pursued flying lessons to know the freedom and exhilaration of flight.
But as he headed for St. Louis for engineering and flight, I headed for Texas Tech for an inspiring arts encounter with my mentor Dr. Gene Hemmle.
I was disappointed that we lost touch after high school. We led very different lives. His was disciplined and progressively grew in skills and reputation in the aviation field, leading to his engineering prowess in space flight research. Ultimately he achieved his pursuit of space research and the successful mission of Stardust, the rocket that literally returned to earth the dust from exploding stars --- Reality erupting into Being.
For Ken, Stardust was a mission into the heart of creation, a mission of discovery revealing the underlying motive of such an amazing quest is "Eternal Love."
I have slightly short-changed his description of a growing family that formed the bedrock underlying his achievements. Without the enduring filaments of family growth, love, and support, there would be no meaning, no knowledge. Ultimately, all knowledge is personal.
Even though there are uses of the word stardust as early as 1400, "stardust" served as a timely poetic quest for existence in Hoagy Carmichael's lyrics for the song "Stardust:"
And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we're apart
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by
Ken, the engineer/poet in search of meaning, was at the helm of humanity's search for reality and meaning, an attempt to reconnect with origins of ourselves and the universe. Stardust is one of our ultimate quests in search of meaning. The frequencies of stars are our new music of years gone by...
For Ken, his record of Stardust reveals the Universe as Love, an infinite truth inviting us to consider a deeper awareness of who we are and where we are going.
No comments:
Post a Comment