I was nine years old and living at Wheelus AFB, in Tripoli, Libya on July 19th-20th, 1969. We had been there since the spring, so we were pretty well established in our house and neighborhood by the summer. I was playing baseball at the fields across the street. The pool was open, and so was the base beach, since the base was right on the coast.
We lived in base housing right across from the High School, though I don’t remember even thinking about High School kids, other than the girls who came over to babysit.
We had some form of television in the house. Must have been an Armed Forces Network (AFN) station on base, though I don’t remember watching much TV as a rule. In any event. I DO remember quite vividly Dad waking us (Dave and I, the girls were still less than two years old) in the middle of the night to watch the moon landing. It was planned for Prime Time on the east coast, which would have made it about 2 am in Libya. That, in an of itself, made it exciting. Something LIVE that we were watching at exactly the same time with everyone else in the world.
News had been building it up for weeks. and of course we watched the launch on the news the day after it happened. The aviation community seemed pretty small back then, especially jet fighters. Dad had been in a squadron in England with Chuck Yeager as his Commander, and flew with a bunch of guys at George AFB, in California. I remember him talking about friends at Edwards, so he was well aware of the Test Pilot track, and how it led to guys getting selected for the astronaut program. I am pretty confident he wanted nothing to do with rockets and such, but he did pay attention to all the advances in aviation as they came out.
The moon landing was fascinating. the grainy black and white pictures, Neil Armstrong coming down the ladder, the final hop to the surface… the beeps and tweets every time someone talked on the radio. The news reporters beside themselves in wonder. The yelling and clapping in Mission Control when he was finally on the surface and hopping around. I’m sure pretty much everyone in the housing area was up watching that night.
I know all the rest of the summer it was THE big thing. In Cub Scouts we made paper mache hats of the moon landing… we would play space ships at school during recess, taking over the monkey bars and turning it into a Command Module, four or five boys flying the next mission to the Moon, or better yet, Mars. Anything was possible after you’ve traveled several days, landed on the moon, and come back to earth, safe and sound.
We all just expected things to take off from there: flying cars, Space Stations, Space colonies. It was going to be glorious!
News had been building it up for weeks. and of course we watched the launch on the news the day after it happened. The aviation community seemed pretty small back then, especially jet fighters. Dad had been in a squadron in England with Chuck Yeager as his Commander, and flew with a bunch of guys at George AFB, in California. I remember him talking about friends at Edwards, so he was well aware of the Test Pilot track, and how it led to guys getting selected for the astronaut program. I am pretty confident he wanted nothing to do with rockets and such, but he did pay attention to all the advances in aviation as they came out.
The moon landing was fascinating. the grainy black and white pictures, Neil Armstrong coming down the ladder, the final hop to the surface… the beeps and tweets every time someone talked on the radio. The news reporters beside themselves in wonder. The yelling and clapping in Mission Control when he was finally on the surface and hopping around. I’m sure pretty much everyone in the housing area was up watching that night.
I know all the rest of the summer it was THE big thing. In Cub Scouts we made paper mache hats of the moon landing… we would play space ships at school during recess, taking over the monkey bars and turning it into a Command Module, four or five boys flying the next mission to the Moon, or better yet, Mars. Anything was possible after you’ve traveled several days, landed on the moon, and come back to earth, safe and sound.
We all just expected things to take off from there: flying cars, Space Stations, Space colonies. It was going to be glorious!
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