YURI
GAGARIN:
|
|
|
|
||
|
Yuri was born on March 9, 1934 in Klushino, a small village 100 miles west of Moscow. His father was a cabinetmaker, carpenter, bricklayer, and farmer, and his mother was a milkmaid. Together they worked on a kolkhoz or collective farm. By Soviet social standards, his heritage was impeccable. He was the third of four children. During the war, the Nazis threw his family out of their home and took away two of his sisters. Yuri helped his parents dig a dugout where they lived untill the war was over, then the family moved to Gziatsk. When he was a teenager, he witnessed a Russian Yak fighter plane make a forced landing in a field near his home. It was just returning from battle, its wings bullet-ridden. When the pilots emerged covered in medals, he was extremely impressed. As he later recalled, |
|
Yuri at age 10. |
"We understood immediately the price that had to be paid for military decorations. We boys all wanted to be brave and handsome pilots. We experienced strange feelings such as we had never known before." |
Young Yuri, 3rd from left, told how he and his friends made trouble for the Nazis. |
He completed six grades of secondary school where he studied mathematics, his favorite subject, and physics, then went to a trade school where he became a foundry-man. At the same time he read Longfellow's Hiawatha and the works of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, as well as the works of the Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935). After
a year and a half at the trade school, he joined a four-year technical
school in Saratov. In his fourth year at school he was offered the
chance to join a flying club. And so began the realization of his
dream to become a pilot. He took his first solo flight in 1955.
He was frequently praised for his ability to handle a plane and
his skill in making a smooth landing; "He'll make a wonderful pilot,"
his instructor and mentor Dmitry Pavlovich Martyanov said. |
|
|
Yuri was so excited about flying that he spent an entire summer in a tent next to the airfield.
|
||
He
took his first solo flight in 1955. |
||
Photos: The Russian State Archive of Scientific & Technical Documents. |