I remember this call very, very faintly. It was my mother.
And it was around midnight, Eastern Standard Time.
And it was July 21, 1969.
Blinking and shielding our eyes from the light, we padded down the hall to my parents bedroom, where the TV was.
And on the screen was a fuzzy, blurry, black-and-white image of ... I wasn't really sure. I was, after all, only six years old.
But what really struck me -- and what remains memorable these 50 years later -- is what my mother said to me and my brothers: "I want you to see this. I want you to be able to tell your grandchildren you saw man land on the moon."
I'm not sure what drove my mom to be such a fan of the space program. I can only guess that it was her fandom of President Kennedy, who kicked this effort up big time before his assassination.
My dad was equally as interested, working in Naval Aeronautics his entire career. He was wowed by the engineering of it all.
He was also pretty conversant on the nighttime sky. He liked pointing out the constellations to us, whose shapes he learned at sea. Topside on a ship at night, he claimed, enabled even the most faint of faraway stars to stand out like a diamond on a black cloth.
He also told me to look for the man in the moon by imagining it was like the logo for the Jackie Gleason Show. I took him literally, and was trying to see Ralph Kramden in a surface of vague pits and crevasses.
Can't tell you how old I was before I finally discerned the man in the moon.
As the following years unspooled, man in space, man on moon became more common. I remember the advertising associated with it, specifically Tang (even though the stuff had been around since the late 1950s). And I remember things like the lunar rover.
CBS on Saturday Mornings ran a show called In the News, which was a two-minute recap of national stories that the producers thought would be interesting to kids. Christopher Glenn was the host, and the show would be nestled into the lineup of cartoons. Many of these reports centered on the space program into the 1970s (lots of coverage on Skylab), and I well remember waiting for them to be over to get back to "Archie" and "The Groovy Ghoulies."
When we went as a family to Walt Disney World in 1973, Dad worked in a side-trip to Cape Kennedy. And in all honesty -- after a handful of days of audio animatronic attractions, stellar fireworks, elaborate parades, amazing restaurants, and character interactions -- I was bored to death looking at rocket towers and gigantic warehouses.
(Always thought we should have flipped those trips, done the space stuff first, then gone to Disney. Eh. Hindsight.)
The space program faded somewhat from my consciousness after that, until the Challenger disaster in 1986.
Since then, I've hoped we could recapture the technological oomph (and the budgetary resources) to get back into space. It's currently resurfacing as an idea in Washington (Space Force. Yes!! Even if it sounds like a cheesy Sci-Fi TV series), but I doubt it has the public support to find funding, especially under the current administration.
Still, I'm grateful for that midnight call to come and stand in front of the TV set. I may not remember every detail to tell my grandkids.
But I remember some.
And I look upward a the full moon often.
And somehow see Jackie Gleason.
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