AN EYEWITNESS TO FIRST ROCKETS, HURRICANE OF '38 Series: Older Voices Older Voices tells pivotal stories in the lives of older Connecticut residents in their own words STATEWIDE Edition

• Published in: The Hartford courant
• Main Authors: Frank, Jenifer, Courant Staff Writer Jenifer Frank, who writes Older Voices, is a Courant copy editor
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hartford, Conn Tribune Publishing Company, LLC 12.09.1995
• ISSN: 1047-4153

Born in the Rockville section of Vernon in 1911, Emerson C.Reed moved to Glastonbury when he was a year old. Except for his college years in Worcester, he has lived in Glastonbury his entire life, the past 50 years on Coleman Road. He was married to Lillian Bragg of East Hartford, who is deceased. The couple had two children. Reed has five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. He has a lifetime of involvement in various lodges and other civic organizations and has been a lay reader at the First Congregational Church of Glastonbury for 67 years. Reed is the grandnephew of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I graduated salutatorian in my high school, and I was on the honor society at Clark University. Physics is what I followed all along. {He points to a photograph in his college yearbook.} You recognize him, Robert H. Goddard? I worked in his laboratory for four years while I was in college,. . . worked on the first rockets. They sent up the first rockets out on his aunt's farm in Auburn, Mass. Then they went up to Fort Devens. We were working one day, and Charles Lindbergh came in, and he wanted to tell Goddard that he'd been down to New York, and he saw the Guggenheim people, and they had a ranch down outside of Roswell, New Mexico, and they said Goddard could have that for working on his program.