The Class of 1961’s Rocket Needed an Aircraft Designer

On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth. In Příbram, in what is now Czechia, a class due to sit its leaving exams that spring decided that its tablo would be a rocket.

A tablo, for the uninitiated, is the framed display of a graduating class’s portraits that Czech schools put in shop windows every spring. Most are rectangles. This one had portholes, and out of every porthole looked a graduate.

The rocket stood in a shop window that spring. Then, because nobody could bear to throw it away, it went home with someone. Over the decades it moved between members of the class, and it came to the reunions.

By 2021 it was in trouble. Sixty years of cellars had done to the silver paint what sixty years do to all of us. The school was marking its 150th anniversary with an exhibition, the class wanted the rocket in it, and in its condition it would not have survived the journey.

This is where it helps to have chosen your classmates well. One of them had trained and worked as an aircraft designer. He took the rocket to his workshop, built it a new frame, reset the portraits and brought it back standing straight.

The class of 1961, in other words, had an aircraft designer on call for its own school photo.

At the anniversary, the classmates did the quiet arithmetic of people in their late seventies. The next big anniversary was a long way off. So the memoir’s author proposed a smaller school gathering every five years, with time to sit in the canteen. The school took the idea politely.

I have the opposite problem. Our family photos are not a rocket; they are a hard drive. Thirty-one thousand images from four countries, unsorted, in a folder called PHOTOS NEW (2). Last Christmas I tried to make an album for my mother. I got as far as Madrid, 2016, and a run of four hundred pictures of the same paella from slightly different angles.

The eldest, who will one day be the aircraft designer in this story, offered to help. He wrote a program to delete duplicates. It deleted the paella. It also deleted the eldest’s entire first year, on the grounds that all babies look the same.

We are now restoring from a backup. My mother still has no album. The rocket in Příbram, in its new frame, is apparently doing beautifully, and I would like its engineer’s number.