one thing that I have noticed is that I have a love of darts, golf, rockets, and markmanship shooting. These are about projecting your will over distance. Anyone else that way?
JS

I remember taking an old double-barreled cork shotgun (corks were attached to the barrels with string, you just shot the corks out of the barrel, and the string kept them handy). Well... I took the corks off and made darts out of toothpicks and needles with paper fins, put them in, and lo and behold!, they shot out and hit a bulletin board! It was great... until I shot one through my thumb. Ah, kids... also the Space Race, as Joe mentioned... the only excuse in my family for missing a day of school, unless I was really sick, was watching a launch, first ones in black and white. 🙂

After watching Apollo 11 at age 3 I knew I wanted nothing more than to fly in space. But back then, test pilots couldn't wear glasses so I was SOL. Found model rocketry through the Cub Scouts (1st Rocket: Estes Viking). My friend's dad built an Interceptor and Andromeda and I was awed. Built various small Estes kits, balsa cone V-2, Orbital Transport, Maxi X-Wing (POS). Early rocketry career ended with a Big Bertha with a nosecone full of gunpowder (painstakingly removed from an old box of shotgun shells) that barely made it off the pad, us kids trying to hide behind a boat engine battery, the panes of the second floor sliding glass doors bending in from the explosive force, behind which sat my dad, quietly reading. BTW, the PNC split along a seam, we recovered part of the cone and one fin. My head almost split along a seam too once my dad was finished with me, and that was the end of my rocketry as a youth. (got into plastic modeling and hunting/trapping instead, we used to sell muskrat pelts for beer money as teens)
Fast-FWD from '79 to '98, now I have toddlers and we got our first egg-lofter and a Skywinder. Good fun there. But one of my boys built a Mosquito at age 5, put an astonishing amount of work into it (great work on the fins and paint!) and of course we launched it from 9th St. Park in Boulder and it was gone. I felt sooo bad for him! (consequently I made a TP tube upscale for his 13th birthday. He's building an Executioner for MHM07) Between then and now we've had various launch troubles from trying to get an Estes controller to ignite ANYTHING to finding a decent place to launch without trees and/or misunderstanding neighbors.
Found HPR searching the web during late 90s, tried to join NCR last April but got too busy to follow through, so here I am again because I want to build a Mach-buster. And my son saw a national event on Discovery where they launched a "P" size motor. He drools when he talks about it.. Now how am I going to afford that?! Ok, son, I can help you buy a car or we can launch the refridgerator. Your choice.