John Carson Wickstead, 92, died Saturday, June 10, 2000, at Stillwater Medical Center.
A memorial service will be at 10 a.m., Saturday at First United Methodist Church, the Rev. Stan Warfield officiating. Strode Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
'Wickstead was born March 1, 1908, in Pompton Lakes, N.J. to Charles, Carson and Marie Minnie (Goller) I Wickstead. He married Lucille Colby Forman on March 17, 1943.
After graduating from high school in Butler, N.J. in 1928, he worked for an aircraft manufacturer assembling Murchios biplanes worked. He was with RMI until 1967 when it was to learn about aviation mechanics. Beginning in 1929, taken over by Morton Thiokol Corporation, he worked at Westinghouse's Lamp Division in Bloomfield and studied mechanical engineering part-time at Newark Tech (later Rutgers).
Early in 1940, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. After basic training, he was given advanced schooling
in radiology at the Army's Walter Reed Hospital, in Washington, D.C. He then was stationed at Fort
J DuPont, Del where he served as a medical X-ray technician with the rank of sergeant until the end of World War II.
After the war, Wickstead joined Reaction Motors, Inc. (RMI) located in Pompton Plains and later Rockaway, N.J. At RMI he was in charge of the assembly department, and assembled or helped assemble every one of the famous Reaction Motors I rocket engines. These engines included the first workable liquid rocket engine; the Bell Experimental I Sonic XS-1 which powered Chuck Yeager's plane to
become the first to break the sound barrier in 1947; the hypersonic X-15 series, the most well-known of the RMI engine powered rockets which made nearly 200 flights between 1959 and 1968, establishing the world speed record of Mach 6.7 at an altitude record of 354,200 feet; and the TD-399 Vernier engine used in the first unmanned Surveyor space capsule to land on the moon in 1966. These aeronautical landmarks are on display in the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
He also developed and built the control boxes for the engines on which he worked. He was with RMI until 1967 when kit was taken over by Morton Thiokol Corporation.