The Far Call: 40 Years Ago Today
Jul. 16th, 2009 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
athelindIt was a Wednesday. I was 5.
This was the fourth time I'd watched one of those impossibly immense Saturn Vs lift off from Cape Kennedy. My mother insisted on watching every televised moment she could of those flights, and I was right there beside her, as much as I could. During 9 and 10, the school was dutifully notified that I was staying home, sick; I suspect that "Moon Flu" was a common strain in 1969.
I remember -- or I think I remember -- Walter Cronkite's deep, reassuring voice; I've heard it so many times since that I can't really be sure if I remember it from the broadcast, or from the LP record that CBS released and I played regularly through the '70s. I do remember, vividly, the NASA animations that played over his descriptions of the various stages of the launch and the space flight, precise and technically detailed cut-outs that would nonetheless seem crude by today's standards.
I remember the official NASA release images my father, a newspaperman, brought home, the flimsy thermal paper just off the facsimile machine, already browning. Somewhere, I may still have a notebook full of them, mostly from Apollo 13's ill-fated flight; they were in my possession as recently as my days at Cal State Monterey Bay.
I remember the excitement, the tension. I knew, even at the age of 5, that I was witnessing the single most important event of the century, the single most important event of human history.
Forty years ago today, three men leapt off the edge of the world into the Black.
I was watching.
This was the fourth time I'd watched one of those impossibly immense Saturn Vs lift off from Cape Kennedy. My mother insisted on watching every televised moment she could of those flights, and I was right there beside her, as much as I could. During 9 and 10, the school was dutifully notified that I was staying home, sick; I suspect that "Moon Flu" was a common strain in 1969.
I remember -- or I think I remember -- Walter Cronkite's deep, reassuring voice; I've heard it so many times since that I can't really be sure if I remember it from the broadcast, or from the LP record that CBS released and I played regularly through the '70s. I do remember, vividly, the NASA animations that played over his descriptions of the various stages of the launch and the space flight, precise and technically detailed cut-outs that would nonetheless seem crude by today's standards.
I remember the official NASA release images my father, a newspaperman, brought home, the flimsy thermal paper just off the facsimile machine, already browning. Somewhere, I may still have a notebook full of them, mostly from Apollo 13's ill-fated flight; they were in my possession as recently as my days at Cal State Monterey Bay.
I remember the excitement, the tension. I knew, even at the age of 5, that I was witnessing the single most important event of the century, the single most important event of human history.
Forty years ago today, three men leapt off the edge of the world into the Black.
I was watching.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 08:04 pm (UTC)And thank you for sharing. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 08:26 pm (UTC)If Dad hadn't sold the business when I was in high school, I probably would have gone into the field myself.
(Considering our *ahem* divergent political viewpoints, that would have been... amusing.)
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 02:03 am (UTC)The Daily News?? The one still being sold out there in kiosks and newstands today??
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 05:05 am (UTC)It's been almost thirty years since we owned the paper, and I have no idea how many times it changed hands after the original sale -- or even if it survived what my father always growled was massive incompetence on the parts of the first buyers.
Heck, I think that by the time he sold the chain, the Inglewood News had shifted to a weekly.