Mike Rose (1944-2021) authored many books, including The Mind at Work (tenth anniversary edition, 2014), Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education (2012), and Why School: Reclaiming Edication for All of Us (revised-expanded edition, 2014), Public Education Under Siege, a collection edited with Michael Katz. He was a research professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.
These were places where I could imagine anything, be anybody. Space travel was new, fresh, a laboratory of possibility.