It was as if my whole fifth-grade class had gone mad, teacher included, as egg after egg flew out the third-floor windows of Gatewood School. Standing on the playground below, several teachers had to dodge this barrage of eggs plummeting to the ground. Plop...Smash...Plop... One after the other they hit the hard pavement. Mr. Cacchione, our fifth-grade teacher, turned to me and said to throw mine. I did. Whoosh...out into the air it flew. It seemed to hesitate slightly before gravity took over. Then I nervously waited for it, the loud sound that seemed a thunderclap, the sound my package made as it slammed to a stop near the yellow hopscotch squares far below. I leaned out the window, looked down and, with fingers crossed, hoped for the best.

Though we were tossing raw eggs, no yolks smeared the cement, and there wasn't a cracked shell in sight. In fact, the casual passerby would not know eggs were involved. That passerby might also have questioned their own, if not our, sanity. For what they would have seen were dozens of shoe boxes flying out the windows and falling to the ground. What we were doing was a science project, a much looked forward to event. The space race was in full swing, men would be landing on the moon shortly, and schools throughout the city were doing space related projects. Gatewood had chosen to do the egg-drop test. Each student had to come up with a way to pack an egg so that it would survive a three story fall: wads of cloth, cotton balls, whatever you thought would work could be used. Deciding how to pack the egg took the better part of a week, and everyone would keep their packing material of choice top secret.

We brought our box and egg to school on the appointed day and anxiously awaited the appointed hour. The clock seemed to tick slower that day, the minutes passing painfully slow till zero-hour arrived. When it did the windows were flung open and, one by one, we launched our eggs into space. After each box crashed to the ground a teacher would carefully open it and make the call. Shame or glory, which would it be?

For me it was shame. The wadded up newspaper inside my box (the Herald of course) was coated with a slimy mess. One student packed her egg in a nest of water balloons. She ended up with the fixings for a watery omelet. Most of us found shame. Though one boy found glory, his popcorn-packed egg survived intact.

Needless to say I didn't end up a package designer. But those grade school experiments did leave me with a lot of respect for the designers of those Russian space capsules that land astronauts on the frozen Siberian steppes.

Hmm... I wonder if they use popcorn?

Marc Calhoun may be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com