Whoosh!

If you know a reader who has enjoyed Whoosh! — or if you yourself have enjoyed it — I urge you to check out this recent BBC interview with Lonnie Johnson.

In it, Lonnie goes into greater detail about many aspects of the story Don Tate and I tell in Whoosh!. He also offers up anecdotes that he shared with us but which we didn’t include.

One of my favorites of the latter:

I put together a working engine out of parts from a scrapyard, and we stuck that engine on one of our go-karts. It had thin wagon wheels instead of tyres, and the hood was just a crate. You controlled the steering with a piece of string. It was not perfect. We had to push the car to get it going, but after that it could sustain itself. And we had a lot of fun with it — though we were stopped by the police, because the vehicle was not exactly street-legal.

I also appreciated this, which I know will resonate with lots of Whoosh! readers:

I also take [Super Soakers] into schools to give talks. Kids need exposure to ideas, and they need to be given an opportunity to experience success. Once you get that feeling, it grows and feeds itself — but some kids have got to overcome their environments and attitudes that have been imposed on them. In spite of the things that have been perpetrated on my race — holding us in bondage under slavery, then making it illegal to educate us and then subjecting us to long-term discrimination and criticism — we succeed anyway, to a very large extent. We just need to realise what we’re capable of.