Strange Angel by George Pendle Read Free Book Online Page A

miles of walkways wound their way through the gardens, serving thousands of tourists a year (not to mention numerous Hollywood film companies). The miniature buildings and statues scattered throughout the grounds, especially designed to delight the younger visitors, added a touch of magic. Under a darkening bower could be found a small cottage plucked straight from “Hansel and Gretel,” while closer inspection of a fountain revealed a horde of tiny terra-cotta fairies. In such an idyllic setting a young child could easily lose himself in imagining that such tales were true and that such creatures existed, if not here, then where?
    And if the pampered and irrigated environs of the Busch gardens felt too genteel, a real wilderness could be found backing up to it. The Arroyo Seco (dry stream) cut deep into the landscape along Pasadena’s western edge. Here facets of the old frontier still survived. Chaparral covered slopes, and steep rocky sides formed a natural playground for young and old alike. The valley floor was thick with sycamores and tangled thickets of wild grapes. Rabbit and deer could be hunted among the spruce, oak, and bay, and the town’s children made camps, fired BB guns and let off firecrackers. A touch of surrealism was added by the ostrich farm positioned at the valley’s southernmost end. Part Huckleberry Finn playground, part never-never land, Pasadena provided the perfect landscape for the imaginative child, with Orange Grove its most blissfully secluded centerpiece. It was little surprise that Parsons grew up unconstrained by reality. Throughout his entire life he would never feel more at home, or more at ease, than when living on this fanciful street.

2. Moon Child
Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.
    Â 
—from the obelisk of the Russian space pioneer
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
    Â 
    As a boy, Parsons suffered from two of the hazards of being a single child: He was spoilt, and he was solitary. He had few friends, a fact which he would later see as a great boon in developing what he called “the necessary background of literature and scholarship.” Without television and with Pasadena shunning the movie halls that inundated Los Angeles, Parsons read voraciously. His taste tended towards classical tales of romance and fantasy, and he devoured the Arthurian legends, the
Arabian Nights,
the legends of Greek and Norse mythology, and stories of ancient battles. “When he was a youngster he used to read about King Arthur,” a friend from later in his life recalled. “It was a dream of his as a child to belong to a group of men who were doing something noble and wonderful. And he also wanted to go to the moon.”
    This last dream was provided for him by Jules Verne’s classic fantasy of 1865,
De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon).
Verne tells the story of a group of demobilized American soldiers, members of an old artillery company known as the “Gun Club,” who, in seeking an outlet for their frustrated aggression and some use for their ballistic talents, design a plan to literally blast themselves into outer space. By inventing a new explosive powder and constructing a nine-hundred-foot long cannon, they shoot themselves free of the earth’s atmosphere and enter into orbit above the moon. What is most striking about the book is its scientific realism. No scientist of the era would have said space flight was possible, but Verne described it in great detail, using only the technical knowledge available at the time. His talk of velocities and materials, the minutiae of technical method, gave the fantasy that most enticing ingredient—plausibility. To the young Parsons space travel must have seemed only steps away.
    Verne’s story sent Parsons to the pages of pulp magazines for other tales featuring space travel or scientific themes. The pulps—so named because of the inexpensive paper on which they were