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July 21, 2009

Viewing the moon landing through a 40-year-old lens

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — One of the best aspects of remembering Apollo 11 is the opportunity to do a where-were-you around an event that is not about death.

Usually, when the nation collectively remembers a big anniversary — and most adults think back, back to where (and who) they were on that momentous day in history — sudden death is at the center. Assassination. Terrorism. A declaration of war. A space shuttle exploding or tearing apart before our television-tuned eyes.

But July 20, 1969, is free of that as a national day of remembering.

In the trainloads of print, broadcast and Internet pieces that have been churned out for the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, the negative trips have been pretty much confined to hoax theorists — the Eagle never really landed — and long-running arguments over public money and NASA’s right to it.

The rest of us have been given unfettered access to mine the recesses of our memory vaults, not only for the lunar module landing and “one small step” moments, but also for our personal moments in that extraordinary summer. Apollo 11 in retrospect invites us to affix our own little dot-and-arrow on the stunning color photo of Earth taken by the astronauts, and label the emotional spot as well as the geographical: You were here.

A few days ago, I read a simple observation by Tennessee Congressman Bart Gordon that has shaped my Apollo recollecting. He was talking about the Cold War and the geopolitical implications of the space race in 1969, but his assessment got me to thinking about life as a whole in the United States.

America, said Gordon, “is a different place” today than it was when Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins touched down on the moon. Peering through the customized lens of my own experience, I’ve asked, “How so?”

Headed into my junior year at Purdue, I had scrapped my plan to work at Columbia Records for the summer when my boyfriend, on a fellowship in Washington, D.C., asked me to come stay with him. My mother knew the terrible truth, but she and I “protected” my dad, telling him I was rooming with some Purdue girls.

So frowned upon was unmarried cohabitation at the time, my boyfriend told his landlord I was his wife; we added a hyphen and his last name to mine on our mailbox plate.

Richard Nixon was in the White House and Vietnam was raging in the Summer of ’69. In two years at Purdue, I had gone from being a knee-jerk conservative to a knee-jerk liberal. The sexual revolution and the credo, “Question authority,” had begun to sweep out of big cities and through what Purdue philosophy professor Bill Gass dubbed, “the heart of the heart of the country.”

Washington was a terrific place to be that summer. From the hippies and African drummers of DuPont Circle to the easy access to government buildings for protests, the city was a microcosm of the divisions and contrasts forming in the entire country — and the changes yet to come. Only 19, I was particularly happy to be there because, unlike in Indiana, I was of legal age in D.C. to buy and drink wine and beer.

My boyfriend, Bill, was even further left than I, and dogmatically anti-establishment, which made the sponsor of his fellowship especially ironic — NASA. But that connection gave us the friendship of a married (for real) couple who were just a few years older than we.

The husband worked for NASA. Both he and his wife, a secretary, leaned politically left lots more than they let on in their jobs. (Many people had things to hide in those days.) It was in their spacious apartment, not far from a complex called Watergate, that we watched the events of July 20 on their TV.

This past week, I have had to go back and verify that I saw what I’ve always remembered seeing. (As psychology research scientists will tell you, our memories can be as much fiction as fact.) With today’s communication technology as their only reference, younger people have no idea how big a deal it was that NASA and network television could live-broadcast Apollo’s landing and Armstrong’s first steps.

Passing a color TV Monday, as grainy black-and-white footage of the descending lunar module played several times, I felt — just for an instant — the acute anxiety that gripped me 40 years ago. Ignorant of the science that got the Apollo crew to the moon, I couldn’t believe then that they wouldn’t crash. And there was that low fuel issue.

As the surface of the moon came ever faster, and the screen then went dark, I remember an eternity of fear. No one had ever been so far away from help. They were on the moon.

But the silence was broken. The Eagle had landed — “Houston, Tranquility Base here” — at 4:17 p.m. EDT. More than six hours later, we followed Armstrong’s feet down the lunar ladder and heard him deliver his “one small step” proclamation.

I had gone into that day a smart aleck about Armstrong, our “fellow Boilermaker” (and first Phi Delt on the moon), but that attitude dissolved. He hadn’t become a hero to me — I still thought the money spent for Apollo would have been better spent on social welfare programs — but he had become something our Students vs. Nixon and The Establishment mentality tended to obscure: a likable, admirable human being of unique achievement.

The next day, it was over. Despite the fact no one had ever come back from the moon, I remember nothing about Apollo 11’s return except hearing they had landed safely.

My attention turned back to Washington’s oppressive heat and humidity, my search for a temporary job, and a three-day rock concert in mid-August for which Bill, his former Purdue roommate and I had bought tickets. It was in an upstate New York place called Woodstock and we thought it might be worth the drive.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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