Taken Somehow By Surprise

Uncle Bud, Unshaken in the Wake of Sputnik : October 1957

39 i. Maybe because they were strangely so much alike: 180 pounds and transmitting essentially meaningless signals from their distance— although Sputnik, with its intermittent beeping, was moving undeniably faster than my uncle, orbiting the Earth every hour-and-a-half. It took Bud that long just to wake up, make coffee, and scramble his eggs before heading into another day full of his unfinished, get-rich-quick inventions, muttering to himself on his unhurried way to anywhere. Overnight, the Russians had clearly taken most of the world by surprise, and what, exactly, was that satellite supposed to be doing up there, anyway? No one ever really knew what Uncle Bud was up to, either, clanking and banging through so many impossible nights in his workshed, but they weren’t about to lose any real sleep over him. ii. The only reason for the beeping: a one-volt-battery-powered radio transmitter so Sputnik could be tracked over those three weeks before it fell silent. It stayed in orbit another seventy days, visible to anyone looking up just beyond the familiar horizon. And Uncle Bud couldn’t help but look quietly upon it, every chance he got. He saw it as someone’s personal triumph, no matter how small—old-fashioned know-how flying high, before the inevitable crash-and-burn. Uncle Bud, Unshaken in the Wake of Sputnik: October 1957 40 Half a world away, Little Richard saw it too, during an outdoor concert in Australia, and took it somehow as a sign more divine than ingeniously human. Immediately, he walked off the stage, renounced rock ’n’ roll, and for a while fell into his own good-golly brand of evangelism. But Uncle Bud was saying to hell with rock ’n’ roll long before Sputnik was even a gleam in Little Richard’s wide eyes. iii. And while the Cold War was taken to new, out-of-this-world heights, the fear was still down-to-earth. The country that had launched this harmless beach ball of a satellite surely wasn’t doing it for fun, could just as easily target anywhere on the planet with a guided nuclear warhead. And this was only a guess: that would be us. And so a suddenly white-knuckled USA got cracking. Thanks to those no-goodnik Russians, I’d soon be weighed down with more grade-school science and arithmetic than I’d ever counted on, now that we had serious catching-up to do—even if no one could touch us when it came to engineering the coolest automotive tail fins in the world. iv. On the same day that Sputnik was fired into orbit—the first in an upcoming flurry of launches we insisted, for a while, on calling space-shots— Jimmy Hoffa was elected Teamsters president. He stayed aloft for years before disappearing into the vastness of some different space altogether. Leave It to Beaver was just getting off the television ground that night. And the Yankees, the goddamn Yankees, were back again in the World Series, where it would be up to Braves pitcher Lew Burdette, spitball or not, to shut them down and finally out. In the year of the ill-fated Edsel, which went absolutely nowhere, in the year of the worst flu outbreak since the end of World War I, Americans were also coming down all over 41 with acute Sputnik-itis—an unhealthy obsession with Russia’s eye-opener. Headlines like RED MOON OVER AMERICA had them knocking back their share of Sputnik Cocktails: two parts vodka, one part sour grapes. They’d lighten up later with Sputnik lamps, Sputnik hairdos, Sputnik shish kebob. They’d come to say going Sputnik for anything that seemed even the least bit way out there, like Uncle Bud himself, or like those newly christened beatniks that Bud had no time for, either. But first it was the night-sweats, weakness, a national case of the willies. Report after unconfirmed report had Sputnik setting off thousands of those new electric garage-door openers all across the country. v. Twelve years later, America would finally put its foot down, beating the Russians to the Moon. Bud would find it tough to believe anyone was truly on the Moon and not a top-secret movie set hidden away in Arizona or somewhere else he’d never been. My Uncle Bud— always one small step or two ahead...