“It must be Italian” actor Darren McGavin (playing Ralphie’s dad, Mr. Parker) excitedly quipped when unpacking his “major award” in the 1983 movie, “A Christmas Story”. “Frah-gee-lee!”, he added, phonetically pronouncing the word “Fragile” stamped on the crate. It turned out, if you’ve seen the movie, that his major award (the “leg lamp”) was, indeed, “frah-gee-lee”.
Really, if you think about it, most things are “frah-gee-lee” depending on how one looks at them. We humans are fragile. We can—and do—break down physically and emotionally with relative ease. Drop us from a few feet and we’re broken, if not dead.
Airplanes are designed, engineered, and built with great strength and ability to withstand significant “G’s” and other stressors. But run into an aircraft with a tug or another airplane and they break apart with ease. Helicopter rotors even occasionally and tragically separate from their transmissions as evidenced by the recent Hudson River Bell 206 Long Ranger mishap of the sightseeing helo this past April.
And yes, even our planet is fragile. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, thought so based on his view. “I realized up there that our planet is not infinite. It’s fragile.”
According to History.com and downloaded in May 5, 2025 from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/may-5/the-first-american-in-space, “On May 5, 1961, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
“NASA was established in 1958 to keep U.S. space efforts abreast of recent Soviet achievements, such as the launching of the world’s first artificial satellite—Sputnik 1—in 1957. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers raced to become the first country to put a man in space and return him to Earth. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely returned to Earth. One month later, Shepard’s suborbital flight restored faith in the U.S. space program.
“NASA continued to trail the Soviets closely until the late 1960s and the successes of the Apollo lunar program. In July 1969, the Americans took a giant leap forward with Apollo 11, a three-part spacecraft that took U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon and returned them to Earth. On February 5, 1971, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, became the fifth astronaut to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission.
Onward and upward!
Kind regards,
Barry R. Fetzer
ECAHF Historian