The images on the screen were fuzzy, and sunlight bouncing off a metallic surface burned holes in the picture, rendering moot whatever grand production values the occasion seemed to demand.
Somehow, humans walking on the moon should have been big and bold and colorful and dramatic, like the spacemen on the big screen at the Emerson Theater on Saturday afternoons.
Yet, like close to a billion other people, the Hill family were glued to the agonizingly grainy pictures being beamed back from outer space, farther away than any television pictures had ever been transmitted.
It was late on the night of Sunday, July 20, 1969. At 7 a.m. on July 21, we were due to leave for our annual, torturous summer drive from Indiana to Houston to visit my grandmother and a small army of aunts and uncles and cousins. This usually meant bedtime was at 9 p.m., and here it was, almost 11, and the darn astronauts were nowhere to be seen. What was taking so long?
The Lunar Module dubbed Eagle, which looked more like a space-age tree house on stilts than a flight-worthy spacecraft, had touched down on the lunar soil seven hours earlier after a three-day voyage from Earth. Like 57 million other televisions in the country that night, ours was tuned to CBS. The great newsman Walter Cronkite, who every other night of the week that summer was talking about body counts in Vietnam, had been struck with emotion when Neil Armstrong had declared at 4:17 p.m.: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” He took off his glasses and smiled widely, and his co-anchor, the astronaut Walter Schiraa, dabbed a tear with a finger.
“The date is now indelible. It will be remembered as long as man survives,” Cronkite said.
Now, Neil Armstrong was backing down the ladder on the Eagle, each step seeming to take forever, until he bounced lightly onto the lunar surface, unaccustomed to lower gravity and clinging for dear life, it seemed, to that ladder. Everyone knows what Armstrong said next, although I don’t remember anyone saying anything. Our family room was very quiet. The moment, I think, overwhelmed us.
A few hours later, we were on the road.
I don’t remember much about that trip to Houston, except for staring at the sky as the miles rolled past and marveling at the wonder of it all. The next summer, my first telescope arrived, and the moon was the first thing I studied, staring at the waxing crescent and the deep shadows of mountains through a 60X eyepiece. I taped a star chart and a map of the moon on a bedroom wall. I drew elaborate plans for a backyard observatory.
Over the next several years, humans would visit the moon five more times. Not long after that, NASA ended the Apollo program, but that didn’t end a generation’s wonder at what had been accomplished. Astronauts were as popular as rock stars or ballplayers. There was Mickey Mantle. There were the Beatles. And there were Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.
Kindled that summer night was a love of space and its infinity in the mind of an 11-year-old, who 50 years later photographs lunar eclipses and sets up a telescope on the Courthouse Plaza to observe the moon passing between the Earth and the sun.
“How easy these words are rolling off our lips now: ‘Man on the moon’ or ‘Walk on the moon,’” Walter Cronkite said 50 years ago tonight. “Yet to say the words, and to stop a moment to think about them, sends a shiver up and down the old spine.”
It still does.
David Hill is editor of the Daily Reporter. You can write to him about this or any other story in the Daily Reporter at [email protected]
