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The Thicket’s Prodigy began as a simple project composed of my personal recollections of life growing up in East Texas and spending a few years in Los Alamos New Mexico. But it became much more. And so did the research. Dad’s story required a factual accounting of three, highly complex topics, each constituting a story on its own: Texas’ Big Thicket, Los Alamos and the atomic bomb, high-powered computation, and NASA’s trip to the moon. Added to those was my insider’s experience with a World Wide Web business startup, and what we have come to know today as the Internet. For Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project’s making of the atomic bomb, followed by the bomb’s remaking, much has been written. True genius, the extraordinary intellect that few possess, occurs as randomly as lightning strikes. Stories of overcoming impossibly difficult circumstances to achieve colossal accomplishments most often describe pioneers of science and industry. In extremely rare incidents, such stories may have extended beyond probability to have strained disbelief in even the least skeptical. One such story describes the life of Eugene H. Gene Brock, who was this type of individual. He was also my father. But The Thicket’s Prodigy didn’t begin that way. The story started as an autobiography describing my own life experience, ending with my role as the founder of a pioneering internet company following the World Wide Web’s introduction in 1995. In my first cut at an outline, the process resulted in an awakening, and I started to examine the reality of my father’s accomplishments. The result triggered an awakened admiration of my Dad. He was, in short, a phenomenon. During a lifetime of achievement extending well beyond what anyone could reasonably have expected, he participated in and mastered the early stages of two highly complex subjects: atomic bomb technology and high-performance computer technology. But it was how he arrived there that shifted the narrative’s autobiographical focus to include Dad’s biographical story. My part was played as an observer during my early years, then became a separate story as both of us continued in our individual careers.
