First, a bit of backing for this---
This is from a book they gave us in the 5th grade that's around 75-80 pages of nothing but dumbed-down Oklahoma history. I'd rather read the ingrediants of Roseanne's lunch (which would kill two days) than digest this much useless crap about America's biggest rest stop. But getting to the point, this mass of badly-copied pages tries desperately to make it seem like Oklahoma has something to be proud of. Whether its the fact we were the forced crashpad of the Indians, or that we had Mastadons back in the day, it just always comes out sad and screaming "Please be impressed!"
There's one entire section that deals with Oklahoma's crucial role in space travel... there's a few pages featuring the world's worst portraits ever of Okie astronaughts (which I may scan if ya don't mind them having been altered into Hitlers and Pirates with a pencil) and I swear one of them is Barney Fife. It also mentions the city of Tulsa and their part in all the NASA business... I'll now type, verbatim, what the book says on this....
"Oklahomans will be important to our country's future air travel. But they won't have to leave the ground. Today, in Tulsa, a plant of Rockwell International builds doors for the spave shuttles. Every time astronaughts go into space, they count on the word done by people in Tulsa. And the people at Rockwell in Tulsa know it. One of them said, 'If the shuttle gets up there and the doors don't open, that scrubs the mission. And if they open but don't close out there in space, the crew can't bring the shuttle home through the atmosphere because there's no way to keep it from burning up. In our plant here they tell us over loudspeaker how each mission is going, and when the shuttle has landed. Now that's a fine feeling.'"
To think--without Tulsa, NASA would have had to find some *other* city! Or perhaps they just would have trashed the space program altogether. So let's hear it for Tulsa! |
