Immediately following the deaths of the Challenger
astronauts I wrote a resolution for the American Archery Council. We were
meeting later that week in Nevada.
This resolution passed unanimously and was sent to El’s widow and children, and
was also printed along with my article in
Archery World. Here’s what it said:
WHEREAS, astronaut
Ellison Onizuka, of the space shuttle Challenger 51-L crew, demonstrated his
interest in archery and bowhunting often throughout the years, and,
WHEREAS, he and his
fellow crew members aboard the space shuttle Discovery on Flight 51-C, Jan.
24-27, 1985 carried into orbit with them a bowhunting broadhead in recognition
of America’s archers and bowhunters, and,
WHEREAS, this
broadhead was later presented to The Fred
Bear Museum
for permanent display in Gainesville,
Florida, and,
WHEREAS, El Onizuka
enjoyed shooting a bow and arrow around the Kennedy Space
Center,
Be it hereby
resolved by the American Archery Council at its annual meeting in Las Vegas,
Nevada on Feb. 1, 1986 that the sport of archery, through all of its national
organizations, representing America’s more than 2 million archers and
bowhunters, assembled here in body, recognize and thank the late astronaut Ellison
Onizuka for his support of our sports of archery and bowhunting.
Dr. James J.
Shubert, president
Dr. Dave Samuel,
vice president
Christine McCartney,
secretary
Two years later, I had a very eerie thing happen that I
will believe until the day I die involved El Onizuka. Here’s how I wrote it up
and reported it to his sisters, brother, widow and children not too long ago. I
leave it to you to either believe it or not. But this really happened. And I
have kept quiet about it, other than telling a few close friends, for the past
15 years, for fear of being ridiculed.
“The Oriental Bow”
Japan
is composed of four large islands, 600 smaller ones, and 8,000 small islets.
Between 3000-1800 B.C., during the Neolithic Period, a nomadic Caucasian race
of people known as the Ainu arrived in these islands.
Later an Oriental race of people came from either the
Asiatic mainland or the islands of the south and also settled. They were the
predecessors of today’s inhabitants. Japan’s
first emperor, Jimmu Tenno, then came across from the island
of Kyushu to the main island of Yamato in 660 B.C. These people
eventually drove the Ainu from most of the islands over to Hokkaido
and Sakhalin in the north, primarily because
they had superior archery equipment. Just remnants of the Ainu remain, but
those who do still use the bow and arrow as an integral part of their ancient
bear-cult ceremonies.
In 538 A.D. Buddhism was brought to Japan from India
by way of China and Korea.
Reincarnation is embraced by Buddhists. Here is an excerpt from the Dhammapada
and the Samannaphala Sutta: “Buddha speaks: With his heart thus serene, made
pure, translucent, cultured, devoid of evil, supple, ready to act, firm and
imperturbable, he directs and bends down his mind to the knowledge of the memory
of his previous temporary states. He recalls to mind ... one birth, or two or
three ... or 1,000 or 100,000 births, through many an aeon of dissolution, many
an aeon of both dissolution and evolution.”
The history of archery in Japan thus goes back many thousands
of years. From their ancient Ainu people, through their Samurai bowmen, up to
the present time. This unique group of island-dwelling people have long
practiced the bow and arrow sports. Archery also has an integral place in the
practice of Zen Buddhism. From ancient times shooting the ceremonial
whistling-arrows was believed “to disperse evil, stop calamity, bring peace and
render happiness.”
And not only is the bow and arrow ingrained into the
history and culture of this island society, but even the shape of the bow in
Japanese history is unique from all others used in the world.
The traditional Japanese bow is thicker at its bottom end,
or limb, as it is known in archery circles, than at the top limb. And the top
limb, being more slender is also longer. Matter of fact, the grip area in a
Japanese bow is two-thirds of the way down the length of the bow, rather than
half the distance as is found in all other cultures. One explanation is that
most of their earlier bows were made of saplings and when cut were thicker at
their base than at their top.
Back in the late 1980s I was writing a book about
reincarnation, a topic that has always fascinated me. The book has been
completed for many years now, but I have never sent it to a publisher. I wrote
it more to put my own beliefs down on paper than for any reasons of a
commercial nature. My working title for the book was “Next of Kin.” The book is
a work of fiction and contains a cast of characters who had all lived before as
incarnations of the same basic soul. One of my characters, Jymy, is an
astronaut from the future who had died at a base on the moon.
I had been making notes about Jymy for several weeks in
preparation for writing his chapter. As is my custom, the working area next to
my word processor was stacked high with piles of material within easy reach.
The five or six pages of notes about Jymy were on top of one of these stacks.
On the Saturday morning of Jan. 9, 1988, I was about to go down to my home
office and begin work on the Jymy chapter.
On the wall in front of me in my home office where I wrote
was a framed copy of the article I had written at the request of Archery World magazine regarding
our friends who were lost in the Challenger explosion. And sitting on top of my
word processor was a small figure of a sitting gorilla that I found
particularly funny and always kept there while writing. Another of the
characters in my reincarnation book was a woman from the early days of mankind
who lived in Africa 3 million years ago and
who was more apelike than human in appearance.
No one was in my home office when the next thing occurred.
I was at the other end of the house, my visiting mother was in the bathtub and
my wife was occupied elsewhere. Suddenly I heard a crash. Thinking my mother
had fallen in the tub I rushed to that end of the house. It had not been her.
She was fine.
Next I went into my office. Somehow the framed article
about the Challenger crew had fallen off the wall, hit the ape on top of my
word processor on its journey downward as well as the stack of notes about Jymy
I had been working on, and continued on down to the floor. The framed article
was now sitting directly on top of my Jymy notes on the floor. The ape figurine
lay nearby.
I called to my wife to come see the strange thing that had
happened. As she entered the room and I told her about it she quietly said,
“Look at your chair.”
The framed Challenger article had also hit the plastic
cover of the folding chair that I used while working at my word processor. And
the edge of the frame had hit the plastic covering and cut a perfect oriental
bow design in the plastic. Complete with the grip being two-thirds of the way
down the handle.
I immediately knew that my Buddhist friend Ellison Onizuka
had reached out to me to let me know that I should continue work on my book. As
a result, my dedication in the front of this unpublished book reads: “For the
friend who visited me after he was gone, to let me know that he was still
here.”
Little more than three months later, Fred died. Ellison
also considered him a friend and looked up to Mr. Bear.
While astronaut Joe Engle was at our house for Fred’s
funeral, I worked up the courage to show him the oriental bow chair that El had
left at our house. I didn’t know if he would poo-poo it or laugh. He did not.
He advised me to take pictures of it, protect the chair and put the photos in
our safe deposit box. That I have done, and the chair, itself, now sits in a
closet about 10 feet from where I’m writing this with a protective cover over
it.
Ancients, Astronauts and Archery
That’s the end of the story that I sent to El’s family,
but before I leave this topic, you might be interested in some research I
stumbled across in the writing of my book, “The Genesis Rocks”, about our lunar
landings and the world events that preceded each of those historic flights.
This will be of particular interest to those of you who are archers or
bowhunters.
I wrote to my friend at the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C.,
Lee Saegesser, who had helped me over the years gather information for my
various space-related books. He put me onto some archaeological research that
had been done at Cape Canaveral when the space
program was just beginning. It seems that Tuequesta Indians had inhabited the
area 4,000 years ago. And in that area the researchers had sifted through one
particular location in which I was interested.
Known to the University of Florida archaeologists as BR
79, this ancient Orange Period midden site offered up pottery fragments, animal
and fish bones and two whole and one partial chert atlatl points when the
Apollo 11 launch pad was built, the only projectile points found in more than
50 Native American sites on Cape Canaveral. At this precise location, on a
small hill rising over the sea, we had built our own projectile site, Apollo
Launch Complex 39A ... our launch pad. All Apollo flights except Apollo 10
would leave from this concrete and steel “cathedral to the eternal night.”
It occurred to me that a photo of the chert atlatl points
might be an interesting thing to include in my book. It took several letters to
Washington, D.C. trying to track these items down. Much
to my surprise, they were hidden in a drawer at the State of Florida Museum at
the University of
Florida, less than three
miles from where I lived at the time! I’m including a photo of me holding the
whole atlatl point in this chapter since this hunting device was the implement
that preceded our bows and arrows.
One final comment about Fred’s relationship to the space
program is a rather oblique thing that happened. Tom Pucci had been at Bear Paw
Landing in Canada
hunting when our Bear Archery gang was there in 1974. And Fred was one of Tom’s
heroes, as he was to so very many people. In the early ’80’s Tom commissioned a
bust be done of Fred to help immortalize his memory. The sculptor selected was
Ed Dwight of Denver, Colorado. Dwight had been an aeronautical
engineer, pilot and Air Force captain when President Kennedy asked him to train
to be an astronaut in 1962. He was the first African-American selected for the U.S. space
program. The Monday after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Dwight was
transferred to Germany.
He resigned from the space program and the Air Force in 1966 and never flew a
space mission. But he did later become a very accomplished sculptor.
In 1976 when Fred was inducted into the Hunting Hall of
Fame he was sponsored by Congressman John Dingle of Michigan who asked Virginia Kraft, associate
editor of Sports Illustrated
magazine to present Fred on the occasion. Here is what she said:
“In this age when man set out to conquer space, and did,
when he turned from Earth’s green fields to heaven’s vastness for his quarry,
one man, as unique an adventurer in his own right as those whose sights have
been on the stars, turned back instead to a period of man’s history that was
perhaps his most basic. Fred Bear, who learned to hunt with a gun, put it away
more than 50 years ago and took up instead one of the oldest weapons known to
man, the bow and arrow.”
