Note: this one is not about tech communities exactly, but it is tech adjacent, and the more I think about it, this experience was fundamental in shaping how I view communities to this day.
In central Nebraska the summer days would fade slowly, and if there no were storms the sun would take its time merging with the hot and dusty horizon. In the lingering orange twilight you could hear the irrigation pumps in the corn fields nearby, and you could catch a whiff of a freshly mown lawn. As it got darker the bugs would start coming out, mosquitoes of course, but also June bugs buzzing, crickets singing, and fireflies flickering.
Around the lights there would be moths, but we avoided the lights, moving to the darkest corner of the church parking lot as the sky darkened. Lights were the enemy because at barely 11 years old we were setting up our little telescopes for a night of astronomy.
Our target might be the moon, an easy target for beginners, or maybe Jupiter, bright and easy to find, with its four largest moons visible to even our puny telescopes, just as they had been to Galileo. Through the better scopes we could see the rings of Saturn and convince ourselves that Mars was indeed red, even though we couldn't make out the “canals” we read so much about in sci-fi stories. As we grew more skilled, we moved on to pursuing the star clusters and hunting the nebulae cataloged by Monsieur Messier centuries before.
Those are my first memories of my first "community" that was based on a shared interest. We didn't think of it as a "community" then, not in the way I think about communities now. Back then, it was just a club, a bunch of geeky pre-adolescent boys and girls who met with the Methodist minister in the name of astronomy and telescopes and stuff.
Stars in a summer night
The evening meeting would start in Tap's (as he was known to us, his wife, his parishioners, and the world) office, where we'd discuss whatever space or astronomy news we had and trade opinions on science fiction stories and TV shows (of course, we all watched Star Trek). Occasionally Tap would read us a sci-fi story from the latest (discreetly covered) issue of Playboy.
Particularly in the summer, those meetings were usually just a way to pass the time until it got dark enough to go outside and set up our little telescopes in the church parking lot to observe the heavens.
With Tap as a gentle, but unflappable, presence to guide us, we grew, both as a club and into our adolescence. At Tap's suggestion, we soon dubbed ourselves C.C.A.O.S. for the Central City Astronomical Observers Society. It was pronounced "chaos" which delighted all of us and puzzled everyone else.
We recruited guest speakers, we went on trips to see an actual moon rock and to hear Pete Conrad, the third person to walk on the moon. Tap also booked us a booth at our county fair and with only a little bit of help we decorated and manned it for the duration. We even constructed a mini planetarium and we took turns giving tours of the heavens as projected onto a sky of taped together newsprint. With the donations we raised from that, we bought a mirror grinding kit and committed to grinding the mirror for our own 12 ½" telescope. It was all pretty amazing for a bunch of kids in the middle of the Nebraska plains.
Losing a leader
Being kids, it never occurred to us that something might happen to change everything. At least it never occurred to us until Tap was reassigned to a different parish an hour's drive away. Tap had convinced the incoming Methodist minister to take over CCAOS, but it was a poor fit. After all, an interest in astronomy was hardly a requirement for being a Methodist minister, and in spite of his good will, we could tell that the new guy didn't really share our passion for astronomy at all. Enthusiasm waned, the telescope project stalled, and meeting attendance got thinner.
Tap had always kept to the background and encouraged us to do things on our own, so we had taken him a bit for granted. Now we were feeling his absence. We knew that we needed to do something, but what? How do you move on from the loss of a key leader?
It wouldn't have been surprising if we'd just given up, if we'd each moved on to other activities. You wouldn't really expect much more of some barely teenage kids. In fact, the same thing often happens with adults - when a key leader moves on, no one wants to step into that role. They have too much to do, they feel they don’t know how to take over, they’re waiting for others to come forward, whatever. So people drift away, and many times the group withers away.
Yet for some reason we didn't give up. As we talked about it, we came to realize that we needed to find a sponsor interested in what we were doing. To our minds, "firing" the Methodist minister meant that we also probably had to find a new place to meet. So we had two problems to solve.
Finding a leader
We finally decided to approach Jim, our middle school science teacher (by this time we were in our first year of high school. He had taught us eighth and ninth grade physics and earth science, and we had gotten along well with him. A small delegation of us went to his classroom one afternoon and begged him to take over as our sponsor.
Surprisingly, Jim agreed. We packed up our telescope mirror making stuff rather quickly and set up shop in Jim's basement. Unsurprisingly, the minister was just fine with being fired, so we parted ways with no hard feelings.
The next three years we spent much of our free time in Jim's basement, walking around the mirror grinding stand (an oil drum full of water), taking turns grinding our giant mirror. We also resumed our trips, had observing sessions in the backyard or drove out into the country to set up telescopes literally in corn fields, in both sub-zero winters and Nebraska's hot and humid summers.
As a club or community we had little hierarchy, no formal dues, and I don't recall a sense of people being shut out. Pretty much everyone got plenty of turns pushing the 20 pound 12" glass disk over the grinding tool, a disk of the same size. At the end of the process, the expert work of ensuring that the curve was "figured" to be optically correct fell to the one club member who'd done it before. (He also did the figuring on the 6" reflector I built at the time, which I still have to this day.)
We struggled together, led by Jim's experience and knowledge, to solve all of the problems of building a complete telescope and an observatory to house it. Looking back, it should have all been impossible. We were just a bunch of high school kids, with a very limited budget. But somehow an old car axle (the product of a daring daylight raid on a junker in a cow pasture) became a motorized telescope mount; an irrigation pipe became a telescope tube; the fiberglass resin our music teacher used for his hobby of modding Corvettes became a spring loaded mirror mount; and the corner of a corn field sprouted a modest concrete block observatory. And as far as our skills allowed everyone was involved in that work.
End of the journey
Early in our senior year of school we were enormously proud when we dedicated our observatory, dubbing it the Taplin-Weir observatory, in honor of our two mentors, who were both at the ceremony. Through the rest of that year we experimented with the telescope and astrophotography, finding various bugs in the telescope and observatory and working on fixes.
In the years after we graduated we slowly drifted away, off to colleges and careers. There were no new members, so as we came home from college less frequently, the telescope saw less and less use. A couple of years after its completion the telescope suffered some misadventures, surviving a fire that wiped out a city block in our little town, then eventually being repaired and re-installed, thanks to the insurance.
Eventually everyone moved on and with no users (it's safe to say that no one else in that little Nebraska town showed the same interest in astronomy that we did) the telescope and observatory we had built fell into disuse.
Under-appreciated gifts
While we had no idea at the time, in spirit CCAOS was not so different from some of the tech communities I'm a part of today. We were only kids, true, but what brought us together was an excitement about the latest technology, which at that time was astronomy and the exploration of the moon.
Through our teen-age years, CCAOS became a source of friendship, sometimes even early romance, and of connections many of us have maintained over almost 50 years. For many of us Jim and his wife Connie (who was our Spanish teacher) became our role models, our advisors, and our friends.
More importantly, our experience in CCAOS showed us what could be achieved by a group of people working together (even a group of kids in the middle of Nebraska) for a sustained period of time. In my case, and I'm pretty for others as well, the notion that surprising things were possible if you tried was a gift I carried into my later life. It gave me the confidence to attempt big projects and keep working on them until they came about.
Our experience back then also illustrated some truths that I didn't understand at the time, but I've come to appreciate with experience. We saw that having a single leader can mean crisis when that leader has to move on. In our case, our answer was to just replace our single leader with another leader, but at least we had the sense to understand that without that leader we would be doomed. (Spoiler: the theme of leadership succession will feature prominently in the next few stories as well.)
We also saw what ultimately happens to a group when there isn't a steady flow of new members. The original members will eventually drift away, and when that happens, everything ends.
Given that many communities of adults are still learning these very lessons, I'm not inclined to be too harsh with our teenage selves for failing to deal with those two truths. In fact, it took me a few more experiences and a few decades to assimilate those lessons, which is something I'll talk about in a later installment.
On the other hand, even though our little observing society eventually collapsed as life happened, it also showed us that communities don't have to last forever to have value. In those days before the Internet just living in a tiny town on the Nebraska prairie was isolating, particularly for kids with interests like ours, so to have a group of like-minded folks to share interests with was a lifeline.
In the years we were together we formed lasting connections, learned how to be a community, and gained a sense of confidence. Even if it didn't continue after we left, CCAOS served us better than we imagined. That's probably the last lesson our little community taught us, even though we were too young to understand - a community doesn't have to grow or last forever or be perfect to be of value. As long as it brings people together and helps them grow, even a little, a community has done its job.