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partnership that was to last for the rest of their lives.
Lovell
The waters of the western Pacific were cold and dark, and the night sky was black. At 1,500 feet, Jim Lovell had no idea where he was, and had no way of finding out. The instrument lights on his cockpit dashboard had failed and his radio homing beacon wasn't working. Somewhere in that blackness was his landing field, a tiny aircraft carrier only a few hundred feet long. If
     

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Lovell failed to find this target, he'd have to ditch his plane and parachute into the bone-chilling waters of the Pacific.
The year was 1955, and Jim Lovell was making his first nighttime landing on an aircraft carrier over foreign waters.
As a child Lovell had been captivated by space and rockets. He would read the comic books of his time, showing Superman and Captain Marvel doing fantastic deeds, and he would draw his own imagined rockets and planes. He was mesmerized by Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Jules Verne. And he would listen enthralled as his uncle, a navy pilot who had fought in World War I, told him stories of dogfights over the fields of France.
Fascinated with astronomy and space, young Lovell studied the stars and constellations. He read how astronomers had only recently discovered that the universe was much vaster than they had thought, comprised of endless numbers of grand galaxies.
Like Frank Borman, Jim Lovell's family was poor and struggling. His father, James Lovell, Sr., had been a coal furnace salesman in Philadelphia. When his father was killed in a car accident, Blanch Lovell suddenly became a poor widow with a twelve-year-old son and no means of support. She moved to Milwaukee to work as a secretary for her brother, who sold and marketed the same furnaces there. She and Jim settled into a tiny one-room apartment. The kitchen was in a closet, the beds folded up against the walls, and the bathroom was down the hall and shared by all the tenants.
Though they didn't have much, Blanch Lovell made sure that Jim had everything necessary to become whatever he wanted to be. By the time Lovell was seventeen, he had graduated from comics and books and was building his own model airplanes, flying them in an empty lot across the street from his apartment house. He and some high school friends even tried to build a homemade rocket. They had started out trying to construct a liquid-fueled engine, then switched to a dry-fueled solid rocket because it was easier and cheaper. They purchased gunpowder, packed it inside a cardboard tube so that it would burn instead of explode. For a fuse they used a soda straw filled with gunpowder and inserted into the rocket's tail end.
On launch day his mother watched from their apartment window, feeling both feat and pride. She could see her son and his friends in the lot
     

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across the street. She saw Jim prop the rocket against a rock, crouch down to light the fuse, then run for cover behind some nearby rocks. Seconds later the missile ignited, hurling itself high into the air with a high-pitched whistle and a bright flash. Then it exploded with a bang.
Also watching from Jim's apartment was fourteen-year-old Marilyn Gerlach. Earlier that year Jim, the sophisticated high school junior, had noticed this bright eyed thoughtful girl in the school cafeteria. Several times he had asked her if she would go on a date with him, but she had always said no. Though Marilyn thought Jim was good-looking and was very impressed that one of the school track stars was asking her for a date, he was so much older.
Near the end of the school year, Jim Lovell tried again. He had no date for his junior prom, and he wanted Marilyn to go with him.
Once again she equivocated. "Well, I don't know how to dance."
"Don't worry," he said. "I'll teach you."
For the next several weeks Jim brought records over to Marilyn's home and the two practiced dancing in her living room. Before long they were going steady.
At the same time that Jim Lovell was getting