Neil Armstrong, first man to plant a foot on the surface of the moon, died today. I got to thinking about where I was on July 20, 1969 when that event was taking place. In many ways it was the equivalent of Christopher Columbus landing in North America. An historical voyage of exploration.
That afternoon I was at a family gathering that was honouring my upcoming marriage three weeks later. I had been Best Man at the wedding of friends the day before. We were all 21 years old. So young when I think about it now. But unmarried young couples didn’t openly live together back in the sixties. If you wanted to live together and be socially accepted you were obliged to get married. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
It was a summery afternoon and we were all sitting on webbed lawn chairs in the back yard of my future wife’s Aunt Una, drinking beer and preparing a barbecue. We shared with the rest of the world as Neil Armstrong gave his “One small step for man“** sentence and later that night marvelled as we looked up at the moon and thought that there was indeed a man up there.
One of the other powerful things about that event was that it was broadcast live on television. Bear in mind this is long before the days of the Internet and even home computers. Transmission of a live TV signal from the moon so everyone could watch this historic happening was remarkable in itself.
I wrote last week about “turning” 65. Part of my reflections around that birthday were also centred on all the things that had happened in my 65 years – the first step on the moon being one of them.
What were some of the others and where was I when they happened?
November 22, 1963. That afternoon as I sat in the row next to the inner wall in the upstairs classroom of my high school, Jackie Kennedy was leaning over her assassinated husband in the back seat of a limo in Dallas.
I remember where I was when I learned that Elvis Presley had died. It was the day before my 30th birthday. I was feeling like part of my past had disappeared and I remember sharing that thought with a young woman who was in the hospital with metastatic breast cancer. “He was so young“, she said. She was less than 40 with three kids and was dead within the month.
Even earlier I remember the day that Marilyn Monroe was found dead. I know it was a Sunday. I was a teenager then, spending the summer at Bluewater Beach near Goderich, Ontario. A friend and I had a job peeling potatoes for french fries in a local restaurant (that is a story in itself) and the news happened to come on the restaurant radio as the owner of the restaurant scraped fat off the big iron grill to make fried eggs for the patrons…and for him and his wife who sat in the back booth smoking and eating between customers.
It is intriguing to me that many of the triggers for these very distinct memories are around the deaths – Elvis, Princess Diana, JFK, Martin Luther King, the Challenger Astronauts, 9-11. They all call forth distinct pictures of where I was exactly when I heard the news. Perhaps the passing of someone famous triggers a landslide of thoughts and reflections that are all bound up in one moment of information. Death events mark a finite irreversible transition point in history.
In contrast, the Moon Landing was one of celebration and achievement. And to be a witness to it with the rest of the world was pretty special.
My experience of the inauguration of Barack Obama was also influenced by memories of race riots in the U.S., Martin Luther King and segregated drinking fountains.
Do you have some moments that had so much impact that you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when they happened? Want to share them with me? Enter your significant historical moments in a comment, I’d love to hear about them.
**Apparently Neil Armstrong was supposed to say “One small step for a man” but he left the “a” out when he made his step off the ladder onto the moon surface. Imagine the excitement for him of that moment.
johnageddes 
For me, one of my most significant moments was when I learned that John Lennon had been shot. As a child growing up, the Beatles were a band that I had come to know through the teachings of my brother, who is 10 years my senior…I had come to associate them with evenings being babysat by him, where I felt so grown up and privileged to be let into his world of record albums and books that I was far too young to really understand. As I got a bit older, John Lennon became synonymous with pacifism, social justice and activism…something I respected and wanted to replicate.
When I heard that he had been killed, I was in my first year of university, living in an all female residence at Wilfred Laurier in Kitchener. Exam period had started, and there very few of us still around…most of my dorm mates had left for Christmas vacation. I was studying, sitting on my bed, when someone knocked on my door, bringing me the news….I was stunned and incredibly sad. Oddly enough, I thought of my brother, and whether he had heard….I wanted to talk with him and see if he could help me make sense of something so senseless. I thought of Yoko and their young son…and more than anything, I thought of how much I wanted to be at home. At that age, I hadn’t fully experienced the unfairness that exists in life, which I’m sure added to my feelings of shock at this death…how could a man who sang “give peace a chance” die such a violent death!?
Participating in the candlelight vigil later that week in Confederation Park is a memory that still glows brightly….I’m convinced that John Lennon would have liked it, too.
When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was on my honeymoon ( hmmm …. interesting word!). Anyhow, my then husband and I were in Tobermory planning to catch the ferry to Manitoulin Island the next day. At our motel, we had to decide on whether to have a room with a television or one with a combined sink, fridge,and stove all in one amazingly clever unit.
In a fit of misplaced domesticity, I opted for the latter, so I missed the whole event – likely because I was peeling potatoes (seriously – I can still picture the bag they came in). There was probably an inkling or two in that activity to suggest the marriage was not going to fly me to the moon, vicariously or otherwise.
I remember gazing at the moon over the parking lot – I recall it as being full (was it?). I was amazed that it was the same moon as the one someone was actually walking on. My spouse, on the other hand, was not impressed, as he knew the whole thing was a hoax, which had been deliberately staged – for reasons which escaped me then and still do now. Lunacy!
So I turned a blind eye not only to Neil Armstrong’s flag but all the red flags around my decision to marry. And as you said, John, in those days, not only if you wanted to live with someone, but also if you just wanted to leave home, marriage was the only respectable route: Lunacy of another kind!
The 911 terror attack. I was at work in my little cubicle at the woolen mill in Kingston. I got a breaking news alert from CNN saying that a plane just hit one of the world trade centre towers in NY. At first I thought it was an accident, then I got another breaking news alert saying that the second tower had just been hit by another plane. I immediately knew that it was an attack. The world has never been the same since. To me September 11, 2001 was a turning point for mankind. That act of terror engulfed the world and things have never been the same.