Eventually, he landed a job as the first African American scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he designed computer chips for the Galileo space probe to Jupiter.Ī family man at this point, Dr. He went on to get his PhD in nuclear engineering. This probably explains why his classmates called him “The Professor.” It’s also why Lonnie was able to win a University of Alabama Science Fair as a high schooler-despite the fact that U of A did everything it could to prevent Lonnie, the one black kid in the competition, from even entering. Lonnie got pretty good at scrapping together parts from weird objects and turning them into dart guns and go-karts and robots.
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The Johnsons were poor enough that Lonnie’s father taught his kids how to make their own toys. Lonnie Johnson was born in Alabama in 1949. My father was surely picturing a 5-foot-nothing woman 100 miles away, juggling two toddlers and a newborn, who had no idea just how screwed we were. The old man in the front took deep, cold breaths. The darker it got, the worse things looked. Cold, dry sagebrush stretched endlessly away on both sides of the highway. We were busy fighting, as usual.Īt this time of day and in this part of the country it was rare to see another car, much less a cop or a tow truck. He was a year younger than me, and I thought it proper to hate him. My brother Mat was in the back seat with me. This was one of those vans where you could pull off the dashboard and see the whole engine from the inside, which was convenient, given the weather. Shaky with age and cancer, Grandpa puzzled over the array of car parts strewn across the front seat. My grandfather was a kindhearted Korean War vet. My dad had an 8-track and a tape of Stevie Wonder: greatest hits.
The fuel pump was broken: a little contraption the size of a soda bottle that squirted tiny, precise amounts of fuel from the gas tank into the engine every few seconds. Scientist that he was, he soon sniffed out the problem. Dad was halfway inside the engine, tinkering with different parts. He worked at a nuclear power plant in the middle of the desert, which is why we lived an hour and a half north of Nowhere. But we four sat stuck on the muddy shoulder off a lonely stretch of highway my dad like to call Nowhere, Idaho.Ī hundred miles from home, Dad’s groovy ride had decided to quit. Mom and my two youngest siblings-toddlers both-were waiting for us at home with the baby. Grandpa Snow had a newborn grandkid to meet. We’d gone to Northern Utah to fetch my grandfather. My dad’s van was a rolling monument to Middle America in the 1970s. A lingering sour odor, like the restless ghost of some milkshake long spilled. My father, my grandfather, my little brother and I-we all sat huddled inside our minivan. If the elements didn’t kill us, my mother was going to.
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