OREANDA-NEWS. March 10, 2009. He said "go", and his name entered the history pages. Yury Gagarin would have turned 75 today. He was sincere, modest. He had a wonderful smile. His fate was incredible. He laid the road to space, he was the first in the world to reach the stars, but he had never behaved as a “star”.

A son of a farmer, he made his step into space from a plow. His father used to say:”Yura, you’d better become a worker, or a tractor operator”. But he was lured by the sky. The stars looked so high and attractive from a dug-out, in which Gagarins lived during German occupation.
  
Gagarin was not tall, only 165cm, but he was as if rushing high.  He started from a trade school, then there was an industrial school, aero- club, Military Aviation School. His fortune was injecting him into orbit.

Chief Designer Sergey Korolev intuitively recognized Gagarin to be the first. Everybody knew that it was a fatal risk. However nobody was showing it, they were joking instead. Gagarin liked a joke about a parrot who was sitting in a cat`s mouth. The parrot said: “Go!”
  
Space honor fell down on him. His palm was painful because of many hand-shakes. The number of trees he set all over the world would be enough for a small forest. He met a lot of noblemen.

He was not arrogant with common people at all. When he entered his school, his teachers were blusing. “How would we call him? Yury Alexeevich?” He laughed:”No, I am still Yura, just Yura…”

He was eager to fly again, but he was not allowed to because of fear to lose him. Especially after the accident which caused the death of Vladimir Komarov. Gagarin was his backup.
But he wanted to fly anyway. He was testing airplanes. Even today`s traditions, customs and habits of the cosmonauts were laid by Gagarin…
  
One of these traditions is to come to Gagarin`s native village Klushino on his birthday, or before a space mission, to drink some water from a local well. This is for good luck in space.

Gagarin`s good luck left him only once. But this was fatal. Gagarin and his second pilot were testing MiG-15. It is still unknown what happened on March 27, 1968, only in 7 years after the first human space mission.
  
Once Gagarin wrote in his diary: “I read those articles about me, and I feel shy. I made a lot of mistakes, as any human. No need to idealize me. Any person shall be taken the way he is in reality”…