Section B·Page 4
The University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, June 30, 1999
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Rocketry presents challenges, fun
"Kids don't understand why they have to learn to read and do math." Ulrich said. "With rocketry, they have to know how to read directions and to do measurements. It makes all the academic things important, and then they get a real sweet reward for it at the end."
Through her work as a speech and language pathologist in Ottawa, Ulrich said that she had learned that rocketry gave children the opportunity to apply practical application to the basic skills that they were learning in school.
They have run, and even if their rockets don't go anywhere, it's still fun to try and figure out why it didn't fly or why it crashed and burned." Ulrich said.
Continued from page 1B
The sweet reward is when the children get to blast their rockets off, Ulrich said.
Some of the children get to take their rockets home after the first launch. Some don't.
"Some of the rockets go up and don't come back — they're lost forever." Ulrich said. "In our soybean field, every once in a while parts of a rocket that wasn't recovered will turn up."
More than just a mounter Roger Miller. manager of George's Hobby
More than just a model
House, is another rocket enthusiast. He still recalls his first rocket launch.
"I was about 10 years old. It was a successful flight; the parachute deployed, and then the rocket went off into the trees," Miller said. "Other than the fact that we never recovered the rocket, it was the perfect flight. I was pretty much hooked from then on."
"You build something that doesn't just sit there," Miller said. "With rocketry, it does something — it launches — you can watch it go up in the air."
Rocketry seems to be an equal opportunity hobby. Miller and Montague both said that about half of their rocketry customers are female.
The allure of rocketry is the experience itself. Miller said.
"We sell rockets from the first week of spring right on until about the first big snow." Miller said.
Rocketry is a seasonal hobby.
It's also a weather-dependent hobby, as Montague knows.
"Windy days are detrimental," he said. "You watch the rocket go up, and you don't know where it will go after that."
"A lot of people think that you just build the rocket and go out and push the button," Montague says. "But that's not what model rocketry is about. It's about trying to achieve perfection, trying to achieve a perfect launch without failure, to keep it on track. There's a lot of challenges involved beyond the normal type of hobbies."
The cost of buying an initial rocket kit ranges from $25 to $35. This includes a launch stand and everything else needed. After that,
additional individual rocket kits can be purchased for as low as $3. The rockets are reusable, and replacement engines cost from $3 to $7 for a back of three.
Rocketry is a hobby filled with unexpected challenges.
Or as Ulrich said, it's a hobby for joy, a hobby for tears and a hobby for mystery.
"I enjoy the looks on the kids' faces when their rockets go up, and I feel their sorrow when the fins fall off and their rockets make a nose dive into the ground. You know how much work they put into making them perfect, and you don't know what's going to happen to them," Ulrich said.
Do rocket sales get a boost as the Fourth of July approaches? Montague chuckled and said he wished they did. "Rocketry is safer than shooting off fireworks," he said. "And if you're lucky, you get it back to launch it again."
This is a glimpse of Mount Oreard during the early days
— Edited by Derek Prater
was taken in 1867, east of the site of Memorial Stadium. Contributed art.
1700s set different Lawrence scene
Before Europeans settled the region, fire ruled the prairie
By Katie Burford
Kansan campus editor
In 1776, a room full of Anglo-Saxon men declared the sovereignty of a fledgling nation and not a whisper of that declaration was heard on the open prairie of what would one day be Lawrence.
"Tall-grass prairie is maintained by a fire ecology," said Stan Loeb, acting director of the environmental studies program. "As non-native humans moved in, they suppressed fire."
Loeb said that lightning would frequently set off grass fires that would burn for days.
Although there may have been few trees, there were people.
In 1776, east-central Kansas had sporadic human traffic, of the native and non-native variety, but none had left an indelible mark on the land.
The area's indigenous population consisted predominantly of members of the Kansa and Osage tribes, said Rita Napier, associate professor of history.
These groups were of the Siouan oral tradition, Napier said. They lived in permanent
villages, sustaining themselves with food from the gardens they tended. They would supplement their diet with meat from elk, deer and other game in the vicinity. Occasionally they would go on hunting expeditions that would take them into western Kansas.
Napier said that the Kansa and Osage had methods for food production and preservation and were surprisingly sophisticated.
"Many people have the idea that they were mostly nomadic bison hunters," she said. "That's not true."
The Kansa and Osage used creek bottoms to protect their gardens from the Plains' scorching winds and rotated crops to get a maximum yield from the soil, Napier said. Squash, maize and beans were a few of their staples.
The Kansa had come to this area in the 17th century after being pushed west by European settlement.
Kenneth Davis, author of "Kansas: A Bicentennial History," said that the Comanche tribe, on the other hand, was a nomadic tribe dependent on buffalo hunting. The Comanche hunts often took them across what is now Colorado, Wyoming and western Kansas.
The Comanche are an example of how even a temporary appearance of Europeans could unalterably affect the
people of the region.
In 1540, Spaniard Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, along with 300 soldiers — 250 of whom were on horseback—and several hundred Native Americans, began a trek northward out of Mexico in search of mythic treasure. The expedition made it as far as central Kansas before the group turned around.
"In 1758, a French official reported that in one band, the Pawnee, they had been reduced from eight villages to one." Napier said. "They were really decimated by disease."
What they left behind were horses. Prior to this, there were no horses in North America. Those that were stolen or left behind proliferated rapidly in the fertile environment. The Comanche soon became master horsemen, gaining a marked advantage over more agrarian tribes, such as the Kansa.
But trade and horses had nominal impact compared with the devastating effect that smallpox had on indigenous people. Smallpox was a disease brought by the Europeans to which the Indians had no immunity.
Edited by Chad Bettes
The Spanish weren't the only ones whose influence was felt in this region. French explorers and traders came from the north and set up transient fur trading posts, Napier said.
Even after the war, there were separations of loyalties between the northern and southern states. The atmosphere was still politically charged, Earle said, and would remain so for some time.
"Creating a new nationalism was a very difficult task, and also an awesome task," Earle said. "That is why the celebration of Independence Day was so important. It was crucial in bringing Massachusetts and Georgia together. Two very different states yet now part of the same country."
Fireworks festivities were part of first 4th
Continued from page 1B
Most of the traditional celebrations were in place from the beginning. It was something the 13 states had no disagreements over. From Boston to Philadelphia, red, white and blue was used to dress up armed ships in the harbor — today those colors are used to dress up its citizens.
Fireworks were even present as early as 1777. The only thing that has changed is two centuries of ingenuity and technology. Across the nation people celebrate in the same ways — the Declaration of Independence is read, parades march down Main Street U.S.A., and cannons are discharged time and time again — in honor of our nation.
Only the history behind the holiday does not always come to mind on the holiday.
"I do not necessarily think about the history of the Fourth of July. It comes to mind, but I don't dwell on it unfortunately," said Jill Brown, Overland Park graduate student.
In the "melting pot" that is the United States, the celebrations on the Fourth of July remain a constant source of culture for the country — whether people realize it or not.
"The holiday is very important to the cultural history of the U.S. and has been from the beginning," Earle said.
- Edited by Mike Miller
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