Page 177 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

At home he was called John, or Jack. Jack Parson’s mother filed for divorce when her son was 5
months old, having discovered that her husband was visiting prostitutes. The spirit of sexual
immorality would later surface in Jack’s own life. His mother’s parents moved to California to be
with their daughter, who was now a single mother. They were wealthy and bought a mansion on
Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, a street which was locally known as “Millionaire’s Mile.”

From his youth Jack Parsons exhibited a deep interest in science fiction, rocketry, and the occult. He
was befriended by Edward Forman, an older boy from a working class family who defended Jack
from bullies at school. In 1928, at the age of 14, Jack, along with Edward, began making rockets
using gunpowder as a propellant, and launching them from the Parsons’ property, as well as in the
nearby Arroyo Seco canyon. Around the same time, Jack developed an interest in the occult. He
performed an invocation, inviting the devil into his bedroom, but being frightened that he might have
succeeded, he ceased his occult activities for a time.

Jack did not do well in the public schools, so his mother enrolled him in a private boarding school
in San Diego - the Brown Military Academy for Boys. He wasted little time in getting expelled from
the school by blowing up the toilets. In 1931, at the age of 17, Jack was enrolled in the University
School, a private school with an unconventional approach to learning, where he finally began to
flourish. He began working weekends and holidays at the Hercules Powder Company where he
furthered his knowledge of chemicals and explosives. Jack continued to pursue his interest in rockets
with Edward Forman, and the two corresponded with a number of famous rocket pioneers including
Robert Goddard and Wernher Von Braun. Parsons spoke for hours with Wernher Von Braun on the
telephone about their various experiments with rockets.

In 1934 Parsons and Forman attended some lectures at Caltech, hoping to gain access to the
institution’s state of the art facilities and equipment. They made contact with a doctoral student,
Frank Malina, who had the technical training the other two lacked. Together, these three gained
approval to form a rocket research group at the school. It was called GALCIT, and served as the
nucleus for what would eventually become JPL. The three men worked well together, with Parsons
acting as the chemist, Forman the machinist, and Malina as theoretician. Parsons lacked the
educational training and discipline of a typical rocket scientist, but this was offset by his productive
imagination and intuitive sense of what combinations of chemicals and materials would work
together.

By the late 1930s the three men were making progress developing a liquid fueled rocket engine and
were joined by a couple more team members. They were allowed for a time to conduct experiments
at the Caltech campus, but after a number of explosions which caused damage to buildings, they
were banned from further testing there. They relocated their work site to the Arroyo Seco canyon
under rather primitive conditions. Due to their penchant for unintentionally blowing things up, they
gained the moniker “the suicide squad.” Jack Parsons, nevertheless, obtained a reputation as an
expert in explosives and was called on to testify in a court case where explosives were used in an
attempted murder.

Parsons... appeared as an expert explosives witness in the trial of Captain Earl Kynette, the head
of police intelligence in Los Angeles who was accused of conspiring to set a car bomb in the
attempted murder of private investigator Harry Raymond, a former LAPD detective who was fired