A Child Of The Apollo Program

I was born at the right time and in the right place: the Space Coast of Florida in the 1960’s — within sight of Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center. As a kid, I got to see literally hundreds of rocket launches, most notably the ones that sent humans to the moon aboard the Saturn V, a ground-shaking rocket that dropped one’s jaw in awe when they saw it lift off on a pillar of fire over one hundred yards in length.

Being in there afforded me views of the Space Race from up close, and as a young kid, I got to see rocket launches on a regular basis. Best of all, my family was involved: my grandfather was one of the originals, the men and women who moved to the Cape Canaveral area when America started building her first rockets aimed at space. My father, for his part, was a fire and safety officer who was the Missile Chief for multiple Apollo missions.

Florida was and is a great place to be, mainly because the length of winter is measured in weeks, not months, and its depths are generally kind — it normally takes only a few fingers to count the nights where it gets below freezing. Summers are hot and humid, but one quickly adapts to the near tropical weather easily. If it’s too warm, there’s an ocean to cool off in. In between, there are months of days around 25C/78F, with little to no rain. Some folks compare it to Northern California.

After Apollo, my family moved away and ended up in North Carolina. Eventually, serendipity brought me back to Florida, where I live and work now, watching the space program once again from a close vantage point.

Professionally, I am a trained engineer, and an IT person now, after having spent the first part of my career as a research scientist in the telecommunications and electrical protection fields. I’m also a published writer, photographer, I play at playing music and am an inveterate traveler. There’s so much of the world to see, but only so many days to see it.

If you’re interested, I am on

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheOldManPar
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/charles.boyer/
Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/charlesandmaggie/

This site is meant as a bit of a journal. Almost all of the art here is my own, and so are the words. Where outside materials are used, the original source is indicated.

So Who In The Heck Is “Old Man Par?”

One of my passions in life is golf. It’s a simple game: see ball, hit ball, find ball, hit again. Lather, rinse, repeat until the ball is in a distant target, the hole. That’s not terribly different than what young kids do when they are playing in their childhood, and like those kids, adults can get a certain pleasure from hitting the ball just right so it goes far, true and as intended.

Of course, that doesn’t always happen. Aim as we true might, swing as honestly as we can, sometimes the ball goes sideways and lands in a worse place than where it started. Try as we might, the results are something that we have to live with. We can curse ourselves, it makes no difference. We can make excuses, but that won’t undo the mistake. And sometimes, even if we did things perfectly, the ball takes a bad bounce, or gets caught in a sudden gust of wind and goes awry.  Such is life.

If one is playing in the spirit of the game, they find that ball and hit it out of whatever troubles that befell it. They try to recover, to fix the mistake, perhaps even prosper from it. Sometimes that works, others not, that is the cycle of golf.  And so goes the cycle of life. Golf is a great teacher that way.

The truth of golf is that the opponent is not the course, it is ourselves. Ourselves and the measure of par — the fair number of strokes from tee to the hole. Golf is a game played almost entirely between the ears, and it serves as a great metaphor for life: play hard, play fair, accept the results because what is done is done and then move on and play some more. What others do is irrelevant to the matter at hand. It is you and the ball, with nothing more than a stick to move it along.

Golf is measured by par, and Scottish legend says that “Old Man Par” guards the course. You play him, and to do so, you must play your self.

And thus, since this website is simply a reflection of things I have seen and done, I thought it apt to name it “Me and Old Man Par.”