Truly Significant presents the one and only Homer Hickam, best selling author of multiple books including Rocket Boys that was adapted for the feature movie October Sky. 

He was born in a small West Virginia coal town called Coalwood — a place where dreams were supposed to be buried as deep as the mines themselves. His daddy ran the mine, his mama ran the house, and young Homer Hickam? Well… he ran outside one October night in 1957 and looked up.

 There, streaking across the heavens, was Sputnik. And that—ladies and gentlemen—was the spark that lit a boy’s heart on fire. While other boys were learning to swing pickaxes, Homer was learning to launch rockets. He and his friends—the “Rocket Boys”—turned a scrap heap into a laboratory, a coal-town canyon into a launch pad, and failure after failure into something far greater: faith in possibility.

They were ridiculed by some, doubted by most. But Homer believed that curiosity was a kind of courage. He believed that science and wonder could lift a man out of his circumstances, without losing sight of where he came from. And years later, after college, after the Vietnam War, after NASA… Homer Hickam came home—not just to Coalwood, but to America’s imagination.

His memoir Rocket Boys became the book that inspired the film October Sky. A story that reminded us all that genius can bloom anywhere, that small towns can grow big dreams, and that sometimes—just sometimes—the most significant discoveries aren’t found in outer space… …but within ourselves.

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