Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'
'Rocket Boys,' for one reason or the other, just happened to strike a chord across country and across world, maybe because it's set in a little coal-mining town. That's why NASA likes it - most of the engineers come from towns very similar.
Growing up I played piano and I sang at a lot of weddings; I grew up in a very small town, a little coal-mining town in Virginia called Grundy. And my family was very sing-songy at home.
The hardest thing I've had to overcome was being from my small coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My mother was a coal miner for nineteen years, and the expectations of making it out of my town were slim to none.
I've always got on better with boys. Most of my friends are boys. Like, if I have children, I want five boys. Boys love their mothers whereas girls can be so mean to each other.
I started racing BMX when I was five years old. I followed in my brother's footsteps, and I was a little tomboy. When I came into the sport, there wasn't many women. I raced with the boys; I looked up to the boys, and all my mentors were boys.
Sometimes, the hardest foster children to take are teenage boys, which I was one, and I was never adopted or anything, and so I think if people up more for teenage boys, that might be beneficial.
I grew up down in the hills of Virginia. I can be in Kentucky in 20 minutes, Tennessee in 20 minutes or in the state of West Virginia in 20 minutes. And it's down in the Appalachian Mountains, down there. And it's sort of a poorer country. Most of the livelihood is coal mining and logging, working in the woods and things like that. Most people has a hard life down that way.
I always say there's no more little girls, just boys with breasts. Girls act like boys nowadays. Teenage girls, they go after boys. They're predatory just like boys. My goal is to keep my girls, girls.
I'll never forget a meeting with one publisher where they said, 'We don't publish books for teenage boys; teenage boys don't read.'
Why did the little girls grow crippled While the little boys grow strong The boys allowed to come of age The girls just came along The girls were told sing harmonies The boys could all sing songs That's why little girls grew crippled While little boys grew strong.
I have teenage boys and I think teenage boys require a father to have eyeballs on them at all times.
When I was a West Virginia lad of 17, I met a Massachusetts lad of 42 by the name of John F. Kennedy. At the time, I was in a bright orange suit that I had just purchased to wear to the 1960 National Science Fair, where I hoped my home-built rockets would win a medal. Kennedy was in West Virginia trying to win the state's presidential primary.
I grew up listening to my dad, a miner who rose through the ranks to be the mine superintendent in Coalwood, W.V. , yelling orders into his black company phone. He wanted to get coal out of the ground and into coal cars and on its way to steel mills.
I grew up playing with boys in the yard and my brother in the backyard and boys in the schoolyard.
as all women know, there are really no men at all. There are grown-up boys, and middle-aged boys, and elderly boys, and even sometimes very old boys. But the essential difference is simply exterior. Your man is always a boy.
I am such a tomboy. I grew up fighting with boys, mainly - beating up boys, actually.