NARAM-50 - Herb Desind

Ramblings from your NARAM-50 Contest Director

I am not sure how many people may stumble upon this or even take the time to read it. I somehow feel that it is appropriate that I include this information here on the NARAM webpage as a sort of tribute to someone who influenced me about this hobby of ours. You may have read elsewhere that I started flying model rockets when I was about 10 years old. I received a cold power kit from a neighbor as a birthday present. I remember seeing the ads in the back of Boys Life magazine for flying model rockets and was hooked.

I happened to find model rockets for sale at a local sports/hobby store in my home town of Laurel, MD. I purchased a starter set that contained an Alpha III (the one with a red fin unit and nosecone).The set also included the Porta-Pad, and Astron Launch Controller.

Launching at the ball field near my home was great and always drew a crowd. From talking with friends at school I learned of a "Rocket Club" at Eisenhower Junior High School right next door to the elementary school I attended. This rocket club was nothing more than about 25 kids and one teacher. Many of the kids actually had this teacher for one of their classes. The teacher I am talking about was the late Herb Desind.

Herb was known to many as "Mr. Cineroc". You name it and Herb flew a Cineroc there or near there. Of course the kids that were the most active members not only got to see the films at the club meetings but also got to help chase the models. After ninth grade I pretty much dropped out of flying model rockets and moved on like so many teens to cars, girls and being cool! My memories of Herb are that he always "fun" to be around, he was a teacher of earth sciences, he had an obvious love for photos, and film, but I remember him as a rocketeer. I do not know if Herb was ever an NAR member or not.

Some eleven years later I bought a model rocket and took it out to the Goddard monthly launch being run by none other then the club I would later join known as NARHAMS. Another person was also at that launch that particular Sunday afternoon. Herb Desind was there. Sure he remembered me and we spoke briefly. I learned a few months later that his was the first launch Herb had been to in months. I later found out that Herb passed away after a battle with cancer.

I think back to those early years of flying rockets and can say that I am glad that Herb was someone that I came in contact with and that he was someone that paid forward to the hobby. The following information appeared in the local newspaper the Laurel Leader and in the ZOG-43 newsletter by NARHAMS NAR Section #139.

Jim

Photos Take Flight

Betsy Stein

Reprinted from the Laurel Leader

Herbert Desind, a Laurel High School science teacher who died four years ago, didn't have the right stuff to go up in the space shuttle Challenger, but he will go down in history. An avid follower of the space program, Desind's collection of nearly 120,000 photographs documenting rocketry and space flight has been accepted by the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. The collection will be housed in the Paul E. Garber Preservation and Restoration Facility in Suitland and used by the Smithsonian staff and the public for historical research, according to supervisory archivist Thomas Soapes.

"He would have loved this," said Desind's sister, Barbara Kernan. "He's left a very important and indelible mark on humanity, and I am very proud of him." Desind died of colon cancer in October 1992.

Aside from his teaching -- 13 years at Eisenhower Middle and nine at Laurel High -- his whole life was devoted to his love of space flight and model rocketry, Kernan said. "As a child he was interested in airplanes and anything that left the earth," she explained. "As the space program developed, he had a passion to know everything he could about it." He would spend three to four hours a day writing to people for pictures and information on any and all space missions and projects. "He could talk about any particular space launch in history." Kernan said.

In his Silver Spring home, which he shared with his father, Desind kept his collection meticulously organized in more then a dozen filing cabinets. Included in the collection were photographs of missles, unmanned spacecraft and shots of every aspect of the manned Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space projects, according to a survey of the collection taken by Frank Winter, curator of rocketry in the space history department of the Air and Space Museum. The collection also included eight drawers documenting the space shuttle missions, according to the survey.

"It's really a great acquisition," Winter said. "It fills up quite a few gaps in our collection." "This is probably the largest collection we've acquired since I've been here," agreed Soapes. "With the immensity of its size, it has a number of unique photographs we don't have here and I doubt anyone else has either." Winter said he was amazed at how much just one individual was able to amass. "He traveled overseas and in the U.S. to space shows," Winter said. "It's the kind of thing we should be doing here but we don't have the manpower."

The Smithsonian didn't take all of Desind's collection. Left behind were video tapes of many of the space shuttle launches, numerous slides of model rocket events and films taken from model rockets Desind launched himself. Kernan has kept many of her brother's photos, including those personally autographed by the likes of Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong and James Irwin. She also treasures a picture of Desind with shuttle astronaut Tom Akers in the payload processing area at Kennedy Space Center in the mid 1990s. Kernan also has a copy her brother's 1985 application for the NASA Teacher in Space Project. "Thank God he wasn't picked," Kernan said. The teacher who was, Christa McAuliffe, died when the Challenger blew up seconds after takeoff." He was heartbroken, he could hardly talk about it."

The Smithsonian collection will not be the first memorial to Desind. A scholarship was set up in his name at Laurel High, and a wing of the school, called the Herbert Desind Memorial Space Awareness Center, was dedicated in 1994. A cross between museum and classroom, the center serves as the home base for the school's Cooperative Space Learning Project, an elective in which students work with NASA on processing actual data from satellites. Murals and photographs decorate the walls, and model spacecraft are on display. A weather station is used in the center along with several computers linking students to the Internet.

Desind inspired many students through his lectures on astronomy and space over the years. He caught their interest through exciting projects such as the time he helped a class successfully launch a mouse in a model rocket at Eisenhower Middle. The mouse which made it back to earth alive, later met it's end under a student's foot. In 1991, Desind was named outstanding science teacher of the year by Prince Georges County and the Potomac Electric Power Co. He also received the James Duckworth Award in 1982 for his work with special education students.