Today is my younger brother 's birthday. Cecil Thomas VanSant was born February 10, 1929 and would have been 81 years old today. Tom was handsome, 6+ feet tall and slender with big brown eyes and hair. He had a quick smile and a great story teller.
He was a graduate of Berea College and Indiana University. He married the lovely Rosemary Adkins. Their three children Philip, Martha, Jon and families live in Colorado Springs, CO. Tom was always fascinated with outer space. His graduate work in Astronomy, brought him to the space exploration field. He was involved in the early Apollo and Gemni Projects and worked for Ford Aerospace at Colorado Springs for some thirty years.
My first memories of him are when we lived at West Liberty, KY The house had a front porch which was a few feet (maybe only a few inches) off the ground. He and I were playing on the porch, Tom in a rocking chair. He rocked himself off the porch! Mother came running to his loud cries but he wasn't hurt. His inquisitive mind and natural intelligence was apparent at a very early age. He watched the stars out the window from his crib and called them, "little light jacks up in the dorik." He must have been about 18 months old, and a road improvement project was begun on the street in front of our West Liberty house. The crews were using a steam shovel to put in a large culvert, and Tom was missing! I remember that Mother spied him near the huge machine exactly where the next scoop would be taken. She flew to the spot and grabbed him in time to avoid being picked up in the shovel! You can believe that some big brothers were assigned to keep a sharp eye on Tom.
Tom was certainly a precocious child. He was sharply observant of every thing in the scope of his environment. He had a fantastic mind, quickly learning any subject matter offered in our school curriculum. On many occasions our high school math teacher would delegate the teaching of the daily math assignment to be taught by Tom. He was always prepared. Maybe it was a good way to challenge a gifted student.
Once, in Mount Victory, when Tom was home from Berea for a break, a neighbor was upset and perplexed by some pranksters putting a 2x4 piece of lumber into the pipe of his drilled well, preventing him from using his well. Tom inquired the pipe diameter and depth of the water and instructed him to pour a certain amount of water into the well pipe. This allowed the wood to rise to the top of the well where it was easily removed. All the neighbors were duly impressed.
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