A little more than a week ago Neil Armstrong passed away. I was very sad to hear this. I considered Armstrong and the other astronauts of his time, brave and courageous people. His death however, marks the loss of another major player in one of the most vivid memories of my childhood and/or my entire life, and has caused for me, a time of reflection.
I have been a fan of the space program both manned and unmanned for as long as I can remember, longer than before the moon landings, though it is tough to say for how long before. I remember having a cheap plastic bank (a Savings Bank giveaway) as a child which was shaped like a replica of the "Friendship 7", the Mercury space capsule that John Glenn rode when he orbited the earth 3 times in 1962.
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| Cheap Plastic Bank identical to mine, for sale on eBay for $60.00 |
I however do not remember that particular mission as I would have been far too young. I also recall a globe which my family owned, that showed the orbital path of Glenn's spacecraft, and 4 cent first class postage stamps from that era from my father's stamp collection.
All that being said, I started off this post with recollections of the first moon landing and moon walk. It was the summer of 1969. Thanks to the Internet I now know that the date was July 20th.
It was the summer and as such that ment packing up a great deal of things and temporarily moving away from our house from late June until late August. My father worked for a youth organization [B*y Sc**ts of America] and like most summers we would be spending it away at some distant Sc**t camp. Our destination that year (and the previous summer) was a camp in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state.
This was not just any summer camp but was actually one of the historic "Great Camps" of the Adirondacks, namely Camp Uncas which had been donated to this youth organization and was converted into a B*y Sc**t summer camp. In some future posting I will go into Uncas' history further, but for the curious, check out the pictures below and the following
link.
This was a fun place to spend a summer with lots of kids to play with , a lake (swimming, boating), woods, old time crank telephones, an old slate pool table, and as many taxidermy animals as you could count. There was even a real bear skin rug. It was rather spooky however in the dim light with all those dead animals around.
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| Dinning Hall where we watched the moon walk. |
One unique thing about being in the Adirondack mountains was the almost total isolation from civilization. We were 3 miles down a dirt road on a peninsula with Mohegan Lake surrounding us on 3 sides. The closest town was that of Raquette Lake about 5 miles away. Once a week someone from the camp would venture out to pick up the camp's mail from the post office in Raquette Lake. Once in a while for a "treat", my father would take a bunch of us on a garbage run to the local dump to watch (at a distance) the black bears root through the trash at the dump.
There was only one television in the whole camp and it was located in the main dining hall. There was no such thing as cable or satellite TV, no MSNBC, CNN or Foxnews. The big 3, ABC, CBS and NBC were our only choices. This black and white television was old, probably dating back to the late 50's and had a pair of "rabbit ears" antenna. Also the closest television station was located in Utica NY which was a two hour drive away, and because of the distance and the mountains in between, the picture was at best snowy.
On this particular Sunday night in July everybody at the camp, families, staff and kids [not the campers however] crowded around the 19" TV to watch the coverage of the moon walk, there was probably 20 to 30 people. The coverage started maybe at 9:00 pm and it wasn't until nearly 11 pm when the first steps on the moon occurred. Two and half hours later the astronauts (Armstrong and Aldrin) were back in their lander (almost 1:30 AM EDT) with Mike Collins circling above them in the command module.
I can't say that I stayed awake for the entire moonwalk, but I know it was a big deal. First, to be able to watch television at all, and second to be allowed to stay up to that late hour. I have vivid memories of all the people there, of the small black and white TV and the snowy picture, the ghost like images from the moon, and the fact that my parents felt it was important enough to keep all of us up until well after midnight.
I followed every Apollo mission with a passion after that, up to and including Apollo 17 in December of 1972. I still have newspaper clippings preserved in a scapbook from these later missions. I even followed the Skylab missions after the moon landings had ended, and followed the landing on Mars of the
Curiosity Rover earlier this summer. I have never lost my interest in the space program even though (it seems) many in our country have.
Because of this passion and interest in the space program I have done much reading. On the bookshelf in my office I see the following titles:
A Man On The Moon;
Flying To The Moon;
Cosmos; and
Pioneer Odyssey. Through this reading (and watching of documentaries) I discovered that many of the astronauts of that era, were not the type of people you may have wanted to have over for Thanksgiving dinner as they were a little "rough" around the edges. They were binge drinkers (boarderline alcholics), serial womanizers, and quite frankly vulgar, with a stream of profanities emanating from their mouths (see this
Book and this
Mini Series). Armstrong, however from what I can gather, was very humble man and most likely would not be counted in the "fast and lose" astronaut group.
As an epilogue, My Father purchased the Life Magazine commemorative issue on the moon landing later that summer. I have crisp memories of reading it over and over and over again, to the point that the magazine cover came off and some of the pages developed creases and rips. I also remembered that I got in trouble because of this and shortly thereafter the magazine disappeared, not to be seen by me again. I was sad to see the magazine disappear and was also sad that I damaged (through frequent reading) a magazine that my father felt was important. In another era I could have purchased for him a new copy off of eBay. Sadly time travel would not be invented for another 16
years, and no replacement was ever purchased.
All and all, it was a very memorable time for both our country, my family and myself. I will never forget watching the whole thing unfold on a snowy television screen, isolated in the mountains of New York state on a hot July night so many years ago. We have all lost a little bit of ourselves with the passing of Neil Armstrong.
