[NOTE: Ten years ago I made a blog post about the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing, which I include below with some ages/numbers updated. Back then, I had responses to this posting from the following current Facebook Boyd Gatlin, Elizabeth Moon, and Nan Strohminger.]
Fifty years ago, in July of 1969, my parents were 39 years old—twenty-seven years younger than I am today. I was sixteen, my sisters were thirteen and eleven, and my maternal grandmother was 66 (my age now). The six of us were on vacation, riding in a Rambler station wagon and pulling a small travel trailer. As Apollo 11 made its descent, we were in Arkansas, driving up into the Ozarks, on our way to Devil's Den State Park. My father had the radio tuned to a broadcast from Mission Control in Houston. From time to time, the station would fade out and one of my parents would retune the car radio to pick up a closer, stronger station. I don't think we three kids ever kept quieter in the car than that afternoon. We were in the mountains, on a narrow, twisty road of the kind that always made my mother nervous (me too!) when we heard the words "The Eagle has landed."
Sometime later we got to the campground, and set up early for the night. Ahead of time, my parents had located a state campground that had electrical hookups, because for the first time ever, we had brought a television with us on a camping trip. There was no way we were going to miss the broadcast of the first step on the moon. After we were settled in and it began to get dark, there were some anxious minutes while the tv was tuned in. I seem to recall aluminum foil on the rabbit ears antenna to augment the not-very-strong signal. I remember that I was worried that we wouldn't get to see the broadcast, that the signal would not come in. However, what I remember most was my grandmother's reaction to the historic first human step on another world. Her mother had taken her and her brother Rossman, when she was a little girl in New Orleans, to see the Wright brothers, who were touring the country with their new invention. It was amazing, she said, to think that in her own lifetime we had gone from the first flying machine to landing on the moon.
So now it has been longer since that first moon landing than my parents lived before it. All of my sisters' children and grandchildren have been born after mankind last walked on the moon in 1972. Currently (still!) orbiting the moon is the LRO, which took the picture accompanying this post, showing the landing site of that first landing in 1969. (So much for the conspiracy theory that it was all a special effects show!)
I'd like to say my own lifetime spanned from the first man orbiting the Earth to the first permanent occupation of the moon. Here's hoping that mankind's next visit will lead to a permanent outpost on our closest neighbor, before another century draws to a close!
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| Photo: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State |
