The baby in the photo from the early 1950s wears an impish smile while playing with his dad’s shoe. Huntsville native Frank Broyles learned early to be creative and dream big.
His photo was among nine runners-up in the Redstone “Space Baby” contest. Nancy Joyce Carpenter, 11 months, was announced as the winner on the front page of the Redstone Rocket on Sept. 29, 1953. She was selected to receive a ticket to the moon. Eight of the nine runners-up would get a ticket to one of the planets in the solar system; and one would receive a pass to a satellite station planned as a way station to other planets.
Broyles, now 73 and a community pastor in the Rocket City, did in fact get a certificate for a trip to Mars. It was signed by Wernher von Braun. The certificate got lost through the years, but Broyles will always have the legacy of being selected from among 52 Space Baby contestants.
“It’s an honor but I had nothing to do with it,” Broyles, who resides in the Five Points historic district, said. “My parents submitted the picture, and we won the ticket (to Mars). I felt honored but it was nothing that I did. My parents were very innovative and creative, and it did not surprise me that they entered the contest.”
Franklyn and Jessie MacGuire Broyles were married in Montgomery, and they moved to Huntsville in 1952 so Franklyn could work as an engineer for the Army at Redstone Arsenal. Broyles was born in October 1952. His sisters, Sherry, 71, and Kathleen, 69, both of Taos, New Mexico, were also born in the Rocket City.
Broyles remembers sitting beside Margrit von Braun, the space pioneer’s daughter, in third grade at Blossomwood Elementary School in Huntsville. She would retire as an environmental engineer.
Franklyn Broyles, an Auburn graduate and World War II veteran, became a senior engineer at the Ordnance Missile Laboratories and retired in 1980. He knew von Braun and spent some time with him. Kathleen Broyles, the youngest sibling, is also the family’s unofficial historian. “I wonder if the letters found in his mother’s scrapbook actually suggested he was quite possibly near the town and date where von Braun surrendered (in World War II),” she said.
Kathleen was a Sundance Institute creative consultant for decades, and her clients included Robert Redford. Sherry, the older sister, is an attorney by training and an artist.
“Our family was raised to dream big, to not be mundane, and dream broad,” Broyles said. “And welcome being special.”
Broyles knew that math and engineering weren’t his forte. Instead, he pursued religion and sociology. He graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis in 1974 with a bachelor’s in religion and sociology. He received a Master of Divinity in 1979 from Vanderbilt Divinity School. Broyles returned to Huntsville, but his father died of a massive heart attack at age 56 in 1980 just six months after retiring.
For 32 years Broyles was a minister of church and community at Faith Presbyterian Church in Huntsville. “And they provided me with a foundation to do community ministry in Huntsville,” he said. He has been a community pastor for 47 years. He is a supply preacher in a Presbyterian church in Decatur.
Broyles also worked for the Interfaith Mission Service and Huntsville Association for Pastoral Care for 20 years. During the 1980s and early 1990s, he taught two classes under contract for chaplains at Redstone Arsenal.
“When I dream of being in space, it’s to be able to go up high enough in the sky to see one Earth, one people, one God. It’s fascinating,” Broyles, a proponent of the noetic sciences pioneered in 1973 by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell, said. “I’m always a believer in the interconnected world in which we live.”
Rhonda Broyles is his wife of 14 years. His hobbies include fly fishing, reading and speaking, and traveling.
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