Happy MOON LANDING Day, Everyone

Sleeping in my baby carrier on a bench in a pub, where my parents were watching the landing. I was six months old then.

i was only 6, so i really don't remember it that well, according to tai chi our family was camping, and somebody had a portable black and white tv and everybody gathered around to watch

I was 3 months into a 15 month stint in VN. I was up near Hue. I have no recollection of the moon landing. We had no access to Armed Forces Radio and Stars and Stripes (newspaper) rarely, very rarely, reached us. It was probably just another day.
On Christmas day, the Bob Hope USO show appeared at our 101st Airborne base camp. And he brought along Neil Armstrong. I was struck by how incredibly shy and nervous he was. He kept wringing his baseball cap like a dishrag and giving very short answers to Hope's questions.
A few years later I got itchy feet and went hitchhiking for awhile (well, about 4 years, actually). I spent a lot of time in rural Africa and can't even estimate how many times I was asked "You are American? Do your know Armstrong, the moon man? Is he a member of your tribe?"

i was 4, watching it with the fambly in front of our brand-spanking new trinitron...



google is celebrating in style today --

I don't remember it, but gram has an old scrap book that I pasted clippings in, and it has 4 pages dedicated to it as only a 4 year old can pay tribute...(i was into the footprints apparently)

I was a summer camp counsellor in Barrington NH.

I remember being in the camp's dining hall watching on a small TV.
It all seemed so unreal.

I was working on an anthropological site in the arizona desert west of tucson and discovered an apparently abandoned warehouse with several trucks, vans and limos parked around its south side. After observing the building for a few moments a large sliding door opened and a mobile camera crew came rolling out into the desert landscape quickly followed by several figures in what appeared to be space suits. They seemed to frolic about for awhile and then all retreated back into the warehouse. I walked back to our camp site and got a cold beer from the cooler, rolled a joint and put a pot on beans over the coals.

WOULD YOU ALL BE QUIET, PLEASE!! Be too loud about this and we'll attract gungasnakkke's attention, and he'll show up with voluminous pseudodocumentation about how we never landed on the moon and it was all actually filmed in dys's warehouse in the Arizona desert and how NASA has been covering it up for forty years. And how somehow it's all tied up with scientific plots to conceal the fact that American Indians rode dinosaurs and big science is concealing that because it would prove that evolution doesn't happen. I don't know how he'll make that connection, but he will.

I was working for the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals that summer, and we were listening to the radio (no TV) in the command trailer at the backstage entrance.

lyrics to "Armstrong" by John Stewart (longtime member of the Kingston Trio, campaign band for Bobby Kennedy, wrote the Monkees' "Daydream Believer", guest songwriter for NASA).

Black boy in Chicago, playing in the street
Hasn't many clothes to wear, hasn't much to eat
Don't you know he saw it on a July afternoon
He saw a man named Armstrong who walked upon the moon

Young girl in Calcutta, she's barely eight years old
The flies that swarm the market place will see she don't grow old
But don't you know she heard it on a July afternoon
She heard a man named Armstrong had walked upon the moon

Our rivers are getting dirty and the air is getting bad
Sometimes it seems like war and hate are the only things we've had
Yet all the world stopped to watch on a July afternoon
To watch a man named Armstrong who walked upon the moon

And I wonder if somewhere long ago in this universe
Did they watch a man named Adam who walked upon the earth

I still remember what may have been the climactic scene in the original "Battlestar Galactica" TV series. The Galactica led a fleet of the last starships of some far distant humanity, almost wiped out by the intelligent robots they'd created, who had rebelled. They were desparately seeking a legendary lost planet called "Earth", as a refuge. The search hadn't found anything, they were discouraged, everyone had gone off watch, leaving a computer monitor on their communications gear on, and this faint, staticy, snowy bad picture, with a lot of interference, appeared on the monitor, the videocast radiating out faintly into the universe, of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. With no one on the bridge of the Galactica to see it.

All history is divided by what happened before
and after our landing on the Moon.

seems the moon is trying to get attention this week --

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090720-solar-eclipse-july-22-missions.html

no david, all history is divided by what happened before and after the government fluoridated the water supply.

Yeah, I tried to to stop it,
but that did not work.

I was a teenager, on vacation in Washington D.C. with my family. We heard it was about to happen, so we went straight to the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum. All the networks were broadcasting from there that day. We watched it on huge screens set up near the Wright Brothers' plane and John Glenn's capsule. When Armstrong took his first steps on the moon's surface, a huge shout went up and rang throughout the halls. Everyone began cheering and jumping for joy...that lasted for a good while. It was an unforgettable moment.

I remember my brother and I coming home from school (my grandparents had come to visit), watching it on TV. Snowy picture but I do recall hearing Armstrong. I was 6 years old; my brother was 10.

(I've learned how young so many of yall are compared to me).

I LOVE the Space Program, dearly,
but I 've come to know that we r now occupying
the best bit of real estate in this solar system.





David