It was difficult for those first meeting him to guess his age. Perhaps this was because only Frank was a student at the university. Hardly anyone thought of them as scientists. It all started with three young men: Frank Malina, Jack Parsons, and Ed Forman. The group drew attention the way a circus attracts a crowd, with outlandish stunts and an eccentric appeal. It was a foreboding beginning to the experiments that a team of men, known as the Suicide Squad, would run that day. Yet this March day in 1939 was unusually overcast.
She'd escape the shackles of her typewriter and walk across the campus, drinking in the fresh air and the Southern California sunshine. As Barby moved away from the scene, the students around her were whispering it was as if after so much noise, they hesitated to add a decibel.īarby often had lunch with her husband in the afternoons.
When the dust settled, the campus seemed impossibly quiet. She gasped when a piece of the building followed the debris to the ground, the bricks breaking apart into powdered clay. The homemade scientific equipment landed in a heap resembling little more than trash to the onlookers. One after another, a platform, a rocket motor, and a pendulum fell to their doom. But Barbara, known by everyone as Barby, knew what the thing falling from the sky was.įrom a safe distance she watched as the warped hunks of metal rained down on the sidewalk. A blur of faces surrounded her, all gawking at the scene, unsure of exactly what they were witnessing. Filled with a sudden terror, she hurried away, her heels clicking on the red-brick paths of the California Institute of Technology campus. With her eyes fixed on the looming accident, the seconds slowed down as she stood frozen in place. Barbara Canright whirled around to see a car-size piece of twisted steel teetering dangerously on the roof of the building above her. Then the grating sound of metal grinding on metal came as loud as a thunderstorm. The first noise she heard was a low-pitched growl.
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