...
I was creating the above crayon masterpiece.
Caption:
1969 July 20
1st man on moon
Finished at exact time man landed on moon.
Posted on 07/20/2019 7:06:19 AM PDT by Skooz
My dad was USAF, stationed at Minot AFB, ND.
I was a 9 year-old space nerd. Most of my friends were also space nerds and we followed the Apollo program closely.
During the summer, the housing area was crawling with kids all day until the sun set about 10:00 pm. Every house had at least one kid, and most had 2 or 4. The winters were harsh, so we took full advantage of the summers and stayed outside as much as possible. GREAT place to grow up. The best.
The evening of July 20, 1969, I was playing with some friends and one by one they headed home to watch the moon walk. I walked home and sat on my dad's Ford Falcon, head down and listening to the news cast on a transistor radio my grandma had given me.
After 30 minutes or so I looked up and was amazed. The neighborhood that a few minutes before had been overflowing with people -- kids playing, moms gathered in groups chatting, dads washing cars--- was a ghost town. Empty. Not a soul. Not even a cat. Nothing. It was still and void. I had never seen it like that. I felt like the last person on earth.
That was when I went inside and sat down in front of the TV with my family. And like everyone else, watched Aldrin and Armstrong walk on the moon.
...
I was creating the above crayon masterpiece.
Caption:
1969 July 20
1st man on moon
Finished at exact time man landed on moon.
Playing hide and seek with family and neighbors. We did come in to watch the landing.
Driving the hay baler. Running in front of a storm.
Watching AFKN feed of coverage of the landing in the Day Room at Suwon Air Base, ROK, with 9 months to go.
In San Diego, just graduated from Navy Radioman “A” school!
Hot as hell night...watching TV like several billion others.
Sinope Turkey - why?
Watching with a bunch of other kids from around the nation on a black and white TV in the basement rec room of Daniels Hall on the campus of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana between my junior year and senior years in high school, because myself and about 50 others nationwide had been chosen for a special summer NSF program of super accelerated engineering and related courses taught as regular college courses by regular college professors. we also had the full college experience, attending a Joan Baez concert, Fellini movies at the Student Union, 4th of July fireworks in the football stadium, and a host of other experiences ... probably the most influential weeks of my life ... I still have very fond memories of that campus ...
“had to watch it.”
HAD TO ... how gruesome!
ROTFLOL!
“Watched moon landing with my grandfather, who vividly recalled his excitement as the news of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk had spread.”
wow! just wow! Kitty Hawk to the moon landing during a single lifetime!
yours is possibly the most eventful account on this thread!
I was in Yankee Stadium madly waving the Jake Gibbs bat I got for Bat Day after Bob Sheppard announced that we landed on the Moon.
“A few days before the landing, dad snuck off to Sears and charged a big color t.v. especially for the event. Mom was furious because they really couldn’t afford it. We were all glued to the new set, but years later I realized there really wasn’t much “color” to see...lol.”
awesome story. i think my dad bought our first color TV to watch a big NFL playoff series ... he and my younger brother just went down to the local TV store one Saturday and brought one back ... it was a VERY big deal for us ... those things were expensive and not everybody had them yet ...
and he had one practically that old and crapped out just a couple of years before he died, but i insisted he buy an HD flatscreen TV and HD cable, so he got to watch NFL football on a good screen the last two years of his life (even though he objected that the old one still worked) ...
Thanks. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in awhile. :-)
I was a kid.....I remember Walter Cronkite.... “They’re on the moon”......I still today watch the launches....cranked....And I still love the space program.....
I was 7. I remember all the local gas stations were giving away these assemble-it-yourself lunar landers made out of punched card stock. They were kinda tricky to get together, but I got really good at it after about fifty of ‘em. I had a whole bookcase shelf full of ‘em in my room.
remembering when kids did more interesting things than just stare at their screens or build legos.
Good times.......
I recall watching a moon landing, but not sure it would have been this one. My entire summers were spent at the small family cabin. Grandma, grandpa, mom and four kids. Dad would come up on Thursday night for a long weekend.
20’ x 20’ shack. No running water, no TV. I suppose we had a radio back then (I was 9) but I don’t recall it.
****My dad and I likely hunted on or near your farm at some point.****
Very possible. Lots of airmen hunted our land. We had good numbers of Hungarian Partridge, Sharptail Grouse and pheasants.
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