Warren is blessed with a rocket. It was once an intermediate range ballistic missile, but it’s basically the same rocket that launched America’s first astronauts Allen B. Shepherd and Gus Grissom into sub-orbital space. It’s enough to be proud of, anyway.
RoadsideAmerica.com has a story on our rocket, but it’s based on reader reports and it seems people just don’t know what town they’re in when they see the thing.
I found a brochure about the Warren Redstone. It features the story of how and why the rocket came to Warren, written by Ted Asselin, the man who brought it here. It also has information about the progress of the rocketry in the 1950s.
A neighbor tells the story this way: “There aint no brochure that can tell ya what I can tell ya. Ted and his buddies were drunk one night, and they decided to get it. Ted knew where it was, just sitting and going to rust, and they decided to go get it.” I’ve not heard a good explanation for what happened between that moment and the day they drove off in a semi to get it. Logic cries for some sort of planning or orginizational discussion at that point in the story, but no sources report that any such preparation took place. “They got fined in New York and New Jersey, ’cause they didn’t get any permits, and they had to go around Massachusets ’cause they got turned away.”