Rocket Boys become first full group inducted into West Virginia Hall of Fame

McDowell County’s best-known rocket story got a new marker Saturday at Pipestem Resort State Park, where the Rocket Boys were inducted as the first full group into the West Virginia Hall of Fame. For Coalwood, the honor did more than celebrate six men and a film. It pushed one of the county’s defining stories back into the state’s public memory and onto a stage that can still draw visitors.

The ceremony ran from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at McKeever Lodge in Pipestem, Summers County, and state parks officials tied it to National Kids to Parks Day, now in its 16th year and organized by the National Park Trust. West Virginia State Parks billed the gathering as the inaugural Hall of Fame induction recognizing distinguished West Virginians, and the Rocket Boys fit that description with a story rooted in Coalwood in the late 1950s.

State parks materials said the group, known formally as the Big Creek Missile Agency, was inspired by Sputnik and built rockets despite local opposition and limited resources. The six members were Homer Hickam, Roy Lee Cooke, Jimmy O’Dell Carrol, Billy Rose, Quentin Wilson and Sherman Siers. Hickam and Cooke attended the ceremony and accepted on behalf of the group, while Wilson died in 2019.

Pipestem Resort State Park Superintendent Aaron England presented the plaque and said he had used the Rocket Boys story for years as a history teacher to inspire students. The presentation underscored why the group still matters far beyond McDowell County lines: their names continue to connect a small coalfield community with one of the best-known science stories in West Virginia history.

That reach has long extended into popular culture as well. The Rocket Boys later won a gold medal at the National Science Fair, and their story helped inspire the 1999 film October Sky. In Coalwood, the legacy remains tied to place as much as memory, with the boys’ experiments still representing a moment when a remote company town briefly became the center of a national story.

Cooke said the team used alcohol as part of rocket fuel and relied on local bootleggers in Coalwood to obtain it. Hickam called the honor “long overdue,” and said he was there because of the other five men. For McDowell County, the Hall of Fame plaque at Pipestem offered another reminder that Coalwood’s identity reaches well beyond its borders, and that the Rocket Boys remain one of the county’s strongest destinations story lines.