Orville Carlisle’s interests ranged from ground level to sky high. From 1946 to 1988 he owned Carlisle’s Correct Shoes in Norfolk at 420 Norfolk Ave. Selling work boots, children’s shoes and nurse’s Oxfords was honest work, but he really got a charge out of showing people – and especially children – his personal museum. The collection was not footwear.

Carlisle’s 22 cannons and TNT detonators might have been cause for concern had the room not also included rows of fireworks, a cap pistol collection and yards of patriotic red, white and blue bunting. All the explosive items were inert, the gunpowder removed to appease local fire officials. The family museum also included his brother Robert’s small-scale airplanes and Orville’s true passion: his handmade model rockets.

The boys’ fascination with flight began during childhood. Robert made a winged bat for a local production of Dracula. Orville made it fly. Rocket-propelled flying mammals aside, high school chemistry teacher Earl Frandzen added fuel to the creative fire when he allowed the boys to experiment.

Orville grew up with his head in the stars but didn’t want children losing fingers, hands or their lives when playing with model rockets. The time was the 1950s, the dawn of space exploration, when curious boys were building rockets out of steel pipes and other dangerous materials fueled by potentially deadly explosives.

In 1957, Carlisle read an article about the dangers facing amateur rocket builders. He sent the writer, aerospace engineer G. Harry Stein, samples of two rockets that he had developed.

Stein later wrote “Here was the answer to people wanting to build their own rockets. It was safe and fun.”

Carlisle received a patent for his Rock-a-Chute reusable system three days before Independence Day in 1958. Ten years later he lost a court battle against Estes Industries, which had been manufacturing Carlisle’s design – a model rocket that could be safely fired with a solid propellant motor and carried back to earth by its own parachute. The company was not paying him any royalties. Estes claimed knowledge of the rocket was “widespread” and therefore “unpatentable.” After receiving the verdict, Carlisle told the Chicago Tribune on July 4, 1988 that he would never again invent anything “pyrotechnical for profit.”

But the Norfolk inventor was recognized for his work. In 1976, his Mark 1 and Mark 2 Rock-a-Chute model rockets were placed on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

“There will never be any doubt in anyone’s mind as to how, when and where the first model rockets were first developed,” Stein said.

In his hometown of Norfolk, Carlisle was a central figure in the Fourth of July fireworks display that has been an annual event for nearly five decades. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies consulted him concerning pyrotechnics. So did the organizers of Queen Elizabeth’s 25th Jubilee celebration in 1977 and President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. He was featured in national magazines but enjoyed nothing more than showing off the fireworks and rocket collection in the side room of his downtown shoe store.

Carlisle died in 1988 but he never lost his lofty boyhood sense of adventure. His late wife, Mary, once recalled the time that two neighborhood boys knocked at their back door and asked if Orville could “come out and play.”

And what little boy wouldn’t want to play with Norfolk’s inventive rocketeer? More than once Carlisle launched a live frog more than 1,000 feet into the air inside one of his homemade model rockets. His inventions always brought the amphibians safely back to earth, carrying with them the hopeful dreams of every little boy and girl from Nebraska and beyond who ever dreamed of launching from the backyard to the stars.