Paging through BOYS' LIFE, Part 2: Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sunjammer"

[beamjockey]

Google has now scanned in my all-time favorite issue of Boys' Life, namely March 1964.

We were deep into the Space Age, racing the Russians to the Moon. Mercury was over; Gemini was about to begin.

I read the SCIENCE section faithfully in Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine, along with anything about space in Reader's Digest or National Geographic or

Comments

I created, based on this

[archiver_tim]

This is the one I read at that time, also. But, for the first time that I can recall, it was the first story that caused me to become a fan-participant. Junior High School, 8th or 9th grade, an art class assignment to paint something. I don't know if the assignment was multi-media to start with, but mine ended up that way. I wanted to paint one of the Sunjammers, but use aluminum foil and thread for the sail. I recall it being the German Cross sail seen in the lower right of the cover picture we see now. I don't recall if I was working from illustrations I could see at the time, or my impression of what the ship should be. But I created fan-related art 20 years before I found their was a whole community of this type of creativity. The art teacher and or school liked the result enough that they wanted to show it off for awhile, so I gave the painting to them, now more proud of what I had done. I never did get it back. I don't know how long it stayed on exhibition.
Memory of it faded almost entirely away until Michael Longcor, in a filk concert, talked about reading a story in Boy's Life that inspired him to finally write Windward Passage, then sang it. It can be found on the (now) CD, Drunken Angel, put out first as a cassette in 1991.