Summer of '69

Neil Armstrong descending from the Lunar Excursion Module on 20 July 1969 (from NASA by way of Wikimedia Commons)

In July of 1969 I was a 14-year-old on vacation in the BC interior with my family, staying on the lakefront acreage of some family friends. I’d been following the US space program slavishly since I could remember*; I had a scrapbook of colour photos from Life magazine, and I had hand-drawn crew patches for all of the Apollo missions to that point. And I was incredibly frustrated at having to be on holiday in the middle of nowhere when the most important event in human history† was happening.

Image from Wikimedia Commons
(creator unidentified)

Our hosts weren’t exactly primitives. They did have a television. But it was a tiny black-and-white (with tubes probably manufactured by De Forest) with the sort of terrible reception you can only really manage in a place surrounded by mountains. So when the Eagle’s hatch finally opened and Armstrong sort of hopped down the ladder, I was practically screaming with frustration, because I could hardly make out what was going on and his first words were all garbled. It was awful in a way that only adolescents would really understand.

It wasn’t until we got back home that I discovered there’d been nothing wrong with our hosts’ TV, and reception had been terrible for everyone. And to this day I can't determine to my satisfaction whether or not Armstrong's first words involved a small step for man, or for a man.

*During the countdown to the launch of the Apollo 10 mission I tried to persuade my parents to allow me to demonstrate my sympathy with the astronauts by living in our tent trailer, inside our garage, for the duration of the flight. What I was going to do about expelling bodily waste does not seem to have occurred to me as an issue to consider.

†That was my opinion. Your mileage may vary.