(From the archives, a column first published in the The Journal in Friendswood, Texas, April 1, 1982)

Waylon and Willie had a song out a few years ago entitled “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.” It was a melancholy tune, but you could tell from listening to it that the aging singer hadn’t lost his respect for the cowboys he idolized as a youth.

I guess you could say that my heroes have always been astronauts.

I was born in the mid-1950s, and the manned spacecraft program grew up as I did. While previous generations of youngsters all wanted to be policemen or firemen, mine was the first to grow up wanting to be astronauts.

And why not? The seven Mercury astronauts captured the imagination of a generation and became America’s Team long before the Dallas Cowboys emerged as a football powerhouse.

I remember a banner headline in the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune from May 1962 that proclaimed, “Carpenter Found Safe on Raft.” It never entered anyone’s mind that the story may have referred to a woodworker missing at sea. Everyone automatically knew it was astronaut Scott Carpenter, whose capsule plunged into the ocean a couple hundred miles off target.

Parents also approved of astronauts as role models for their children. As Tom Wolfe said in “The Right Stuff,” they were all family men shaped into the All-American Boy mold of John Glenn. They all had those Pepsodent smiles and were an extension of the renaissance spirit of John Kennedy’s America.

Kennedy died when I was 7 years old, but the space program continued to thrive. The next summer we moved to Florida and I lived in the shadow of the space center, watching from my front yard as those balls of fire took off into space.

Being a generation in search of heroes, we all had favorite baseball players by whom our spirits rose of fell each summer depending on such things as batting averages.

We also had favorite astronauts. Mine was Gus Grissom. I don’t remember if it was because he looked like my Uncle Ray, or if it was because he was emerging as the “star” of the program, being on the first Gemini flight and scheduled for the initial Apollo mission. I read recently he was also supposed to be the first man on the moon

Of course, that all came to an end when Grissom achieved another “first” in January 1967 when he, Ed White and Roger Chaffee became the first American astronauts to die in the line of duty.

Having your hero up and die on you is a tough thing to handle, especially for a kid. However, after the pain of wondering “Why?” passes, you learn that life goes on despite whatever tragedy presents itself to you.

As the years roll by, the heroes of childhood go by the wayside or are put on a shelf to be thought about on rainy days and the like. When you get older, society tells us, you are supposed to have your life in good ordered not be dependent on others for a role model.

It’s a shame, too. Having heroes gives you an outlet for your imagination and lets you share in somebody else’s triumphs in those times that your own life seems a little on the ordinary side.

As we learned from the recent death of comedian John Belushi, though, there is always the danger of somebody’s hero having “feet of clay.” It’s a powerful responsibility that we place on people we choose for our heroes. Some can handle it, but some can’t.

Gratia Lousma, wife of astronaut Jack Lousma, told the Journal in an interview last year that the men who fly into space aren’t really special people. She said it was just their opportunities that are special.

Some heroes, like Alan Ladd in “Shane,’ are reluctant ones. By having a unique occupation, astronauts will continue to be idolized by many.

As for me, I’ll probably always have sweaty palms and a quickened heartbeat every time I watch a rocket lift off carrying astronauts on another mission in space.