Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is often listed as UA1LO on Internet compilations of famous radio amateurs. We were surprised to discover his alleged ham status several years ago, given no apparent mention of it in Road to the Stars, the state-issued autobiography we received from Radio Moscow, and flaunted as a shortwave-listening sixth-grader of the early sixties. Perhaps Gagarin became a ham after he got famous, we figured. Perhaps he just needed a diversion from what must have been one exhausting rubber Chicken Kiev circuit. And that's about all we figured until just the other day, when we selected his book for Dashtoons' EX LIBRIS page, dug a little more and stumbled on this footnote written by YL2DX questioning Yuri's listing on the Original Famous Hams and Ex-Hams site.
Ham or not, Yuri was our hero. All spacemen were heroes to us, from Flash Gordon on up. We threw over Hoppy, Wild Bill and Roy Rogers for Tom Corbett, Rocky Jones' Space Rangers and the Mercury Seven astronauts.
Now, as you ten or twenty people left on Earth who care know, in addition to your astronauts you had your cosmonauts. And those similar syllables made all the difference. Yes, COSMO-nauts -- launched from the super secret cyclopean Baikonur Cosmodrome. Some called it Tyuratam. And for some time since the Golden Horde passed through, they called the surrounding acres Khazakhstan. Regardless, Russian space shots took us to a place where one thing was for sure. We weren't in Cocoa Beach anymore. And some of us found la difference wicked awesome. Given centuries of Russian Cool Name Hegemony, we wouldn't be surprised, if not formally christened, one or another Soviet booster rocket was at least nicknamed Baba Yaga. Their space program surely had, (by our quirky kid taste, anyway) far and away the most exotic spin -- throwing off a spectrum-wide associational field with a pulpy, distinctly Serbo-Tartarian Weird Stories polarization.
But of course we were homers...and Yankee fans...and got a lump in our throat whenever Popeye's spinach music started. You bet your CAPCOM, mister. We tracked every move of Shepard, Schirra, Slayton, Glenn, Grissom and Gordo Cooper...with props to Shorty Powers.
But like, Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov, Andriyan Nikolayev, Valentina Tereshkova -- man, this rocket kid couldn't hear those names without his head exploding, just a little bit, with the reverberance of other names, from Ming the Merciless of Planet Mongo, to the farthest-out handle of them all -- the distinguished Leo G. Carroll's stellar and sublimely-haunted Cosmo Topper.
No kidding, we do mean to be funny. Yet that's not all we mean. This is also a sincere, honest, and, if we do say so ourselves, accurate recollection of real life as it was actually daydreamed, unfit for history books and not ready for prime time sociology. Double Secret Private Ham History it is, perhaps. Yeah, that's it -- imagery and fantasy as experienced by a TV-irradiated Western subset afflicted with early-onset rocket fever and shortwave radio complications.
You know the type -- kids who should have gone out to play but couldn't tear themselves away from T-minus 22 hours and holding.
Note: A $25 paperback that seems to be a reprint of this slim volume is available from Amazon. For not too much more, by shopping around some venue like Abe Books, you'll find the original hardcover edition produced by Moscow Foreign Languages Publishing House for listeners to the UnVoice of America. Our first copy was put out with the rubbish many years ago, along with our baseball cards, Novice QSL cards and other more pedestrian packrat staples. This wholesale liquidation took place in our absence one especially rocky college semester our parents decided they had no son. All that sorted out, forty years later, we acquired our second copy from an overseas source, provocatively inscribed book arrived from Moscow, 30.7.62 complete with very vaguely Constructivist dust jacket just as we remembered, looking for all the world as if it were printed with potatoes and a three-colored stamp pad. It's all a bit of a piece -- the paper, printing and photography, the shellac of vintage Socialist Realist editing, ghostwriting, knock-down, drag-out extreme punching-up? We couldn't begin to guess how many degrees of separation there are between this tale and the cosmonaut's real life, but that's okay. As a hand-held Way Back Machine, it'll work for you, your favorite space buff or collector of shortwave keepsakes.
K1NSS
