49 years ago today - July 20, 1969

[slothead]

[BIG E]

Long Island is already ramping up for next year's 50th anniversary of the lunar landing.
I was just in the Cradle of Aviation museum here on Long Island last week. It's only 20 minutes away from home and I had driven my Dad there to be interviewed yet again, this time for a magazine article to celebrate the lunar event. He is a founding member and at 92 years young is still a docent at the museum. During his 45 years at Grumman Aerospace, he worked his way up from airframe/flightline mechanic to being one of the senior quality control men on the Lunar Module Project. At age 90 we retired him from working in the restoration shop, it's not climate controlled, and he's put in a few decades there already. But his specialty as a museum guide is all the Grumman aircraft on display, and of course the awesome room where the last Lunar Excursion Module built resides in it's own lunar diorama. Just to stand in that darkened room is worth the trip to the museum.
Of course, like many baby boomers on Long Island I grew up a "Grumman Kid", and was always interested in all the cool things happening there. I built many plastic kits of Grumman aircraft, especially my favorite F-11 "Tigercat" Blue Angles jet fighter. One hangs overhead in the center of the museum atrium, in full Blue Angels livery. You can't miss it, because that's the first thing you see when you enter the building! By 1961 I had completed my first AMT 3 in 1 kit and became infatuated with model/slot cars, as I am to this day. I did do a 4 year stint at Grumman as an airframe sheetmetal mechanic in the 1980s before all the defense contracts dried up. So I know a bit about the museum, and have been there so many times that I have given more than a few friends the "grand tour".
While Dad was being interviewed, I offered the writer's niece a free escorted tour of the place. She had never been there and was very interested to see it all, as evidenced by the many pictures she shot with her phone! About two hours later I got a call that the old folks were done, so we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.

One memory that I will never forget is lying on the floor in front of the living room TV at my parent's house, July 20, 1969 - watching that all unfold before my eyes, and proud to know that my Dad had a hand in the building of the craft.

Anyone visiting the area would not be disappointed in spending a good part of a day at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, escorted by one of the knowledgeable docents on their staff. You won't soon forget seeing that Lunar Module exhibit, and with the 50th anniversary coming next July, the "cool" factor goes up just a bit more. There are many aircraft on display, from early balloons and wooden craft through the jet and space age, a new Pan Am exhibit, the Mars Cafe, a well stocked gift shop, and also an IMAX theater within the comfortable, climate controlled museum walls.
Check it out online for further info. <cradleofaviation.org>

Thanks for reading. Who else on the HRW forum has some cool memories of that day back in '69? -- Ernie :>)

[waaytoomuchintothis]

I was sweating bullets, counting the days before reporting to Annapolis. I had been on the alternate list for months and months, and got the letter saying some richy-rich guy who had an appointment outright had decided to go Air Force instead. The turkey had appointments to 3 of the academies at the same time. At any rate, he finally decided and I got the benefit, even without the big money or political pull he had.

It took me about 5 minutes to be ready to go, and I had weeks to wait until making the trip to Maryland. My Army father was still pissed that I didn't try for West Point, so living at home those few weeks had been less than fun, and I had been working at a chemistry lab in the meantime, and being the young kid among PhD's all over the place, I got all the nasty and dangerous sampling jobs. Week after week, I did things like climbing a 65 foot oil storage tank, inspecting 200 foot long oil barges on the Mississippi River in pitch black darkness, which meant trudging through several inches of sticky soybean oil gum sediment which ruined my boots, and sampling catalyst in 110 degree hydrogenating oil shortening plants, not to mention drilling holes in frozen meat inside a -20F degree frozen warehouse.

Then, in my misery, this incredible thing was on TV. Sitting in my father's house, watching something happen that could not have been dreamed of when I was born some 18 years earlier, my mother, who endured the Depression as a little girl so far out in the country that several families shared livestock and vegetables to survive, sat beside me, and my father who witnessed the liberation of the death camps in Germany at age 19, in his chair across the room, a man bounced down the stairs of what could be called an interplanetary RV, and set foot on the moon, a satellite I could see from my own front yard. All my effort and spooky assignments just evaporated as unimportant trivia. My dreams of a Navy career, being a ship's surgeon, and all the patriotic hopes of service I had been living with just dropped out of sight. A man was walking on the moon. Nothing else mattered. A man was walking on the moon.

[BIG E]

Excellent story, thanks for sharing it with us. -- Ernie :>)

[nhdungeonracer]

As a 9 year old boy, I can recall watching it on our TV in the corner of our living room.
Course, being that young, I did think it was cool. But the next day it was back to being a kid.

Nowadays, I do realize the importance of this historic event....
And thanks to Ernie's post, I hope to visit the Cradle of Aviation museum someday.

[ccobra]

Sure does look different with out the snow and not being in Black and white. Mom and Dad only had a black and white at that time with only VHF stations being available. Due to antenna rotor issues from the weather, we could only get television stations out of Indianapolis but being about a hundred miles away, there was a lot of snow on the screen. Funny part is we grew up listening to WLS and WCFL out of Chicago but we couldn't pick up the television stations even though my brother tried several times to pick up channel 9 out of Chicago so that he could watch the White Sox.

[slothead]

I too will be checking out Cradle of Aviation museum on Long Island at some point. I grew up not far from Poughkeepsie, NY and never even knew about it.

It seems a major motion picture entitled 'Apollo 11' is going to be released next year to coincide with the 50 year anniversary. As a kid who got to stay up late watching TV in the summer I saw movies about all the great events in history from Thomas Edison's inventions to 'Mutiny on the Bounty', to Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima. Even though I enjoy many of the recent major movies such as Jurassic Park and Star Wars, I hope the Apollo 11 movie retains its realism and does this historic event justice.

[BIG E]

I'll just put this out there. Anyone planning on traveling to Long Island with an eye towards visiting the Cradle of Aviation, please feel free to PM me, perhaps I can meet up with you. Then we can discuss our passion for the model/slot car hobby, as well as see some really cool aerospace exhibits! Slots-A-Lot commercial raceway, and Willis Hobbies, a multilevel hobby center, are both less than a 30 minute drive from the museum and are worth the visit, too. Always glad to meet new friends in the model/slot car world.
See ya here on The Island. -- Ernie :>)

[slothead]

That's a deal Ernie. We have plans for the rest of the summer but have already been thinking about a trip to that part of NY in September - a former student now lives on a blueberry farm in Suffolk County and another has just taken his first position as a doctor at a hospital in the area. Years ago a dear friend lived in Holbrook and my step daughter lived in Northport before moving next door to us up here in Maine. Haven't been out there in years, but now have a reason to again.

Slothead (Joe)

[viejoronnie]

I was in summer semester at university watching on an old b&w console tv with a bunch of science and engineering students. A few years later I worked for a fellow who had worked as a NASA manager all through that period and before, through most of the Apollo missions.

After he passed away, his widow called me and said that he had willed me his reversible green/orange flight jacket with all the patches for the missions he worked on.


Thanks for memory prod.

[Wobble]

I was 13yrs old and in my 1st year at high school here in New Zealand. The whole school, somewhere about 1000-1100 pupils, was sent to the school hall to watch this and if I recall correctly it was in the mid afternoon NZ time. The biggest problem was that the whole school watched it on a 26" TV on the stage as that was about the biggest we could do in NZ back then. Needless to say I didn't see very much at all and had never thought about the possibility of viewing it again until now.

[viejoronnie]

...and the computations that made this event possible were done by humans using slide rules. Pickett slide rules were even part of the astronauts' essential flight gear.

[BIG E]

[slothead]

Another very interesting tidbit about the lunar landing - statistics later showed that the worldwide suicide rate dipped leading up to the moon landing as people wondered what might be discovered. While some of them may have given way to depression and despair afterwards, others probably found help and the worst was avoided. So there must be people alive today, individuals plus children and grandchildren who would never have been except for that moment in history when the world paused in suspense.