I thought of Ralph Kramdem (“To the moon, Alice!”)
I thought of black and white television amid the first lunar landing’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Almost as astonishing as the technological marvel of having sent humans 238,900 miles through space to walk on Earth’s natural satellite was the realization that a half-century has elapsed since the big event.
Listen, kiddies: In 1969, there were no cell phones, laptops, digital camera, DVDs, hybrid cars. There was no email, Google, GPS, global warming. (There was no #MeToo movement, either, which helps explain how the fictional Brooklyn bus driver, Kramden, got away with regularly threatening to send his wife into orbit.)
Anyway, I was there, vicariously taking in another startling happening during that remarkable year when the Amazin’ Mets won the World Series and almost a half-million of my generation went to Woodstock, even as relentless bad news wouldn’t go away. The Vietnam War. Student protests. Chappaquiddick. The Manson family murders. Civil rights unrest.
I was 22, a couple months out of college. The operative counsel among my age group was not to trust anyone over 30. We grew our hair and wore terribly gaudy clothes. (Bellbottoms!) There was reason to wonder if the country was coming completely apart along generational and racial lines. (Hmmm.)
Still, I don’t recall being especially pessimistic about the future, and possibly the Apollo 11 story had something to do with that—an awesome development long before the word “awesome” came to be such a threadbare adjective. At the time, the equivalent hyperbolic expression—likewise so overused that it was rendered devoid of real impact—was “far out.” Except the moon landing really was far out.
I was working at the New York City offices of the United Press International wire service, mostly taking Major League baseball results by phone and re-writing game summaries. It was a Sunday. Shortly after 4:15 p.m. on July 20, the bank of teletype machines that brought in UPI dispatches began emitting alarm bells to signal major news, attracting a stampede of folks from around the building. The lunar module had landed.
At the time, though I obviously didn’t know it then, my future wife was at Newsday’s Long Island headquarters, transcribing moon musings from the newspaper’ columnists—putting her far closer than I to what several of my journalism colleagues have called the biggest story of our lifetime.
It certainly was beyond me—still is—how rocket scientists, audacious visionaries and hundreds of thousands of worker bees could fashion such a project. All the more mystifying, as I drove home from work that evening, was how the astronauts’ voices could be beamed from the moon’s surface to my car radio—but were lost as I drove from Manhattan through the Queens Midtown Tunnel. As if I suddenly were on the dark side of the moon.
I got to my rented room in time to see Neil Armstrong’s first steps around 11 p.m. On a black-and-white TV. He, and minutes later, Buzz Aldrin were alone. No Alice.