Epilogue Summary and Analysis

In the epilogue, all of the rocket boys go to college. Roy Lee becomes a banker and O'Dell goes into insurance and farming. Quentin, Bill, Sherman and Sonny become engineers. Sherman dies unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 26. Jim becomes a football coach. Dorothy grows up and becomes a wife and mother. He meets her twenty-five years later and still loves her. Although Miss Riley's disease went into remission, and she teaches a few years, she dies at age 32 in 1969. Sonny never meets Wernher von Braun but, after serving in Vietnam, he goes on to fulfill his boyhood dream and become an engineer and, 21 years after he fired his last rocket, works for NASA. His career in NASA is everything he dreams and hopes it will be. His parents settle in Myrtle Beach, after Homer Sr. is forced into retirement...