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a twenty dollar bill every day,” remembered Helen Parsons, Jack’s first wife. At a time when the average wage was fifty-six cents an hour, the beneficence of Walter Whiteside hung like a “kick me” sign from Parsons’ back. “Ed took Jack under his wing because he saw the help that he needed,” said Helen Parsons. Later in his life Parsons would call his friendship with Forman “essential in developing” his “male center.”
    Parsons appreciated the advice and the protection Forman gave him, while for his part Forman not only enjoyed helping spend Jack’s pocket money but also listening to the eloquent and well-read Parsons holding forth on any number of strange and mysterious topics. With the eagerness of a lonely boy, Parsons would have told Forman of the magical worlds of Parsifal and Sir Gawain, of eastern religions and outer space. Forman was no stranger to this last subject. He was already an avid reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series of books on Mars, in which the hero, John Carter, falls asleep in a cave in the Arizona desert and through an unexplained mystical process finds himself waking on the red planet. It was not long before the two boys were spending their spare time reading and earnestly discussing science fiction together.
    It was at this time in his life that Parsons would later claim to have had his first mystical experience: He attempted to invoke the devil in his bedroom. He would describe the experience later as his “magical fiasco,” which put him off further occult study until he was older, but he also intimated that he had succeeded and scared himself witless. If he had mentioned the story of the devil to Forman, one can only imagine how it might have intrigued the older boy. “I think Ed just worshipped Jack,” remembered Jeanne Ottinger, Forman’s stepdaughter. “Ed was bright, very bright, but he just didn’t have the formal education that Jack did. He learned a lot from Jack and I think Jack and he were exactly the same kind of adventurous person.”
    Above all it was Parsons’ interest in rocketry that captivated Forman, and between Parsons’ pocket money and Forman’s engineer father, the two would have plenty of materials to work with. “It was our desire and intent,” remembered Ed Forman, “to develop the ability to rocket to the moon.” The pair adopted the phrase
Ad Astra per Aspera
—through rough ways to the stars—as their motto. They swiftly became inseparable as they drove each other on to create more complex and explosive skyrockets, the balsa wood tubes growing larger, more aerodynamic, sprouting fins and nose cones just like the rockets they had seen pictured in the pulps. They seem to have made efforts to replace firework powder with an explosive even stronger, for by the time the two moved to Pasadena’s John Muir High School in 1929, they had gained a reputation for mischief. “They were a couple of powder monkeys,” remembered Marjorie Zisch, a fellow pupil at John Muir. “They would go out into the desert and make rockets and do all sorts of explosive stuff.” With the exception of Forman, Parsons still had few friends, and he made little effort to fit in. While John Muir prided itself on its football, basketball, baseball, and track teams (the great baseball player, Jackie Robinson, was only a few years behind Parsons at the school), he preferred fencing and archery—solitary sports surrounded by an air of old-world romance.
    At some point during his teenage years, however, his increasing fondness for explosions and his poor school grades began to worry his mother. Whether Ruth Parsons thought that her boy needed to be toughened up, or whether she hoped to tame his increasingly volatile enthusiasms, she decided that Brown Military Academy for Boys, 130 miles to the south in San Diego, would be the best place for him. She could not