Tom Myers never really left the family farm northeast of Webster City.

It was just up the Stonega blacktop from Old Highway 20, but before you reached Mulberry Center Church. In those days — I’m talking the late 1950s and early 1960s — Mulberry Center was more than a church; it was a neighborhood. Before the church was moved into Webster City and sited at Wilson Brewer Historic Park, it was the hub around which families that shared names and experiences gathered.

Miller. Dinsdale. Curtis. Myers.

It’s a small world. It seems at one time or another, each lived on another’s family farm. Dinsdales lived on the Curtis farm. Some of them lived on the Myers farm too.

Helen Myers, Tom’s mother, made tiny, intricate marzipan fruits one Christmas and delivered them to the Curtis household. The Curtis family was present when George Myers, Tom’s father, and his mother hosted a barn dance in the new machine shed they erected on the farm some time when I was just a kid. I very clearly remember the corn meal spread on the concrete floor, all the bottled pop I could drink, and not much else.

It’s not rocket science to understand that a place with that kind of history stays with you, no matter if you live along Stonega or in California.

Tom Myers lived in California.

On Thursday, he came home.

Not literally. His ashes were scattered off the coast where he lived. This was a coming home of the kind that said in his heart he had never left. How else would you explain the care that went into his memorial luncheon? People whose lives he either touched or in some way influenced gathered to remember the man who was, literally, a rocket scientist.

As friends and family trailed into a dining room at Briggs Woods Conference Center, a group of high school students accompanied by two adults quietly made their way to a table and sat down. They were members of the Webster City High School Rocketry Club.

Thomas Tritt Myers was a member of the Rocket Club in high school — he graduated from Webster City in 1964. Even though he apparently could be blamed for blowing up a chicken house or two on the family farm, he went on to study at Iowa State University and the University of California, Los Angeles, worked for the United States Air Force, NASA, and some other aerospace organizations that may be unknown to those of us who aren’t in the business. Lockheed Missile and Space Company. Northrup Grumman. Boeing.

He explored family ancestry with his mother, who was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

His father was a Webster City school board member.

He loved his aunt’s pet pig. In fact, on the back of his memorial booklet there is this:

“All I need to know about life I learned from a pig.”

“Wallow while you may.

“Live high on the hog.

“Never squeal on your friends.

“When the world gives you slop, pig out.

“Don’t get too much exercise.

“Go ‘wee, wee, wee all the way home.

“Don’t let anybody bust your chops.

“Take time to stop and smell the mud.

“Don’t boar people with the same old lines all of the time.

“It’s smart to keep a little something in the piggy bank for the future.

“You reap what you sow.

“Tall tails are fun, but curly ones are even better.

“It’s okay to squeal with delight.

“Pink is beautiful.

“Pigtails are always in style.

“Ham it up.”

Tom left the family farm to ISU. I wonder, does that institution know it has gained some remarkable community history, which includes the site of so many rocket fuel experiments?

The chicken houses cannot tell.

They are gone.

What is left?

Memories.

Jane Curtis is interim editor of the Daily Freeman-Journal.