When I was a boy, summer meant many things.
Of course, it meant no school — a fact from which all the other blessings of childhood seemed to flow.
As a child, I grew up on a lake — which was kind of like having an enormous swimming pool in a backyard that was really a rocky hillside. (When I say "rocky," I mean it. Civil War enthusiasts could have re-enacted the South's unsuccessful assaults on Devil's Den or Little Round Top on our hillside.)
(One summer, when I was a teenager, a friend of mine named Johnny got a sailboat and he kept it on our property because his family didn’t live on the lake, like mine did, and he needed a place to keep his boat.
(A perk for letting him use our property was being allowed to use the sailboat whenever we wanted, but I never really became a skillful sailor. I guess I was better at operating our fishing boat.)
There was only one movie theater in my small hometown in central Arkansas in those days. When I was a child, the merchants sponsored a weekly movie for the local kids during the summer. Kids got to see movies at no cost to them (but they still had to pay for soft drinks, popcorn and candy), and mothers got a few hours of freedom.
The mothers took turns driving the neighborhood kids to the theater each week, and that’s where I saw ”Planet of the Apes,” ”The Trouble With Angels,” ”Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and many other movies from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Summer also meant baseball cards and homemade ice cream and fireworks on the Fourth of July. It meant "camping" in a treehouse with the boys who lived across the road and playing cards by the light of a Coleman lantern into the wee hours of the morning.
And, one special summer, it meant watching a man walk on the moon for the first time.
On this day, 39 years ago, Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon. A few hours later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin emerged from the spiderlike lunar module to take man's first steps on the moon.
It was a different world in 1969. We didn’t have cable TV or fancy graphics to explain things (including a space mission).
Gas only cost 30 cents/gallon.
We didn’t have e-mail to help us keep in touch, but postage stamps only cost 6 cents. (If that sounds cheap, bear in mind that the minimum wage was $1.60/hour.) Of course, self-adhesive stamps were still a long way off in the future so if you used a stamp, you had to lick it yourself.
For kids, the neat new toys were things like "Silly String," "Nerf Ball" and "Toss Across." Traditional gender roles were still being taught, so girls were encouraged to play with dolls and "Easy-Bake Ovens."
On the radio, people were listening to the Beatles' "Get Back," the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women," and the Fifth Dimension's "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In." On TV, people were watching ”The Carol Burnett Show,” ”Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” and ”Mission: Impossible.”
And "Star Trek." (Ironically, the original incarnation of "Star Trek" — with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy — was canceled the month before Apollo 11.)
There were a lot of people who thought a trip to the moon was a mission: impossible — or, to borrow a phrase from a popular song of the era, an "impossible dream." I can only wonder what they would think of the technological advances we’ve witnessed in the last 39 years.
Apollo 11 had a lot to do with the changes that have been possible — thanks to the discoveries we’ve made as a result of our space program.
Apollo 11 was special, and everyone knew it. We had all seen rockets lift off before, but it seemed like the world held its collective breath for this one. Everyone knew where this mission was going — to the surface of the moon. The stakes had never been higher.
Four days later, the world held its breath again as Armstrong guided the lunar module to the moon’s surface and then, a few hours later, he and Aldrin left their vehicle and walked on the moon.
The day of the moon landing and walk was a Sunday, as the anniversary is today. I remember that morning, during the church service, the pastor of my church, known to all as ”Brother Ben,” invited everyone in the congregation to the parsonage next to the church to watch the moon walk that night.
It was a hot July day, but after lunch, I went out to our open-air carport. Gulf Oil was a huge sponsor of the space program in those days, and its gas station attendants had been giving away punch-out lunar module model kits in anticipation of the big event.
I had constructed one of those models and I wanted to simulate the moon landing. So I drew a circle on the carport floor with a piece of chalk, tied some string to my lunar module, climbed on top of our car and slowly lowered the model space vehicle to the circle.
I think Armstrong was a better pilot than I was! I missed on my first attempt, but it wasn't entirely my fault. A slight breeze (ordinarily welcome on a hot summer day) took my model off course just enough to miss the landing circle the first time, but I succeeded in landing in the circle on my second attempt.
It was a sobering reminder of how capricious fate can be, even if you think you've prepared for every eventuality.
Not everyone took Brother Ben up on his offer, but my family did. That afternoon, we watched the lunar module land on the moon from our own living room, but we drove into town to share the moon walk with Brother Ben and other members of the congregation a few hours later.
When we arrived at the parsonage, one of Brother Ben’s sons was avidly watching the TV coverage and getting pointers from the anchormen about how to photograph the historic moment.
In 1969, there were no private VCRs so no one could make a video tape. A photograph of the TV screen was the best anyone could do. And Brother Ben’s son wanted to get some tips for making a photograph of a TV image using his new Polaroid camera.
Later that evening, we took turns shooting photos of Armstrong and Aldrin with that Polaroid camera. My photo wasn’t bad, although, as I recall, I goofed and one of my thumbs obscured a portion of the lens. But my image was one of the clearest — not bad, considering I was 9 years old at the time.
Perhaps the moment I will always remember occurred a few weeks after the moon landing.
My family was visiting my grandparents in Texas in late July or early August. I was out walking with my grandfather in the country on a moonlit night. We were walking near a lake and came upon a pier. We walked to the end of it and looked up into the sky.
We stared at the moon for a few minutes, then my grandfather said simply, "Our flag is flying up there now." Then we turned around and began our walk back to rejoin the rest of the family.
My grandfather passed away a couple of months later. I've always been grateful that he lived to see the historic achievement of Apollo 11.
This weekend, TV Land has been showing the film "Apollo 13" every evening — which serves as an interesting tribute to those days, whether by design or coincidence, on the 39th anniversary of Apollo 11.
Apollo 13's nearly tragic flight took place less than a year after Apollo 11. Only one other moon mission had been launched between July 1969 and April 1970, but people had become spoiled. The fact that people all around the world were shocked to discover that space flight was hardly a routine thing is testimony to how well everyone involved with Apollo 11 — including the crew's support staff on the ground — did the job of sending men to the moon and returning them to the earth.
Judging from the world's reactions to the losses of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and its sister ship Columbia in 2003, the people at NASA have continued to maintain their high standards.
And, for that, we have all prospered.
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