THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 20, 1994 TAG: 9407200613
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SARAH HUNTLEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 179 lines
25 years ago today . . .
...at 10:56 p.m.:
``That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.''
Neil Armstrong's step onto the moon began with President Kennedy's challenge to Congress on May 25, 1961. Few thought America could do it, but the race against Russia was on.< It took seven astronauts' lives. It involved 21 manned flights, 60,000 NASA managers and 400,000 engineers and technicians.
In those 2,974 days, Kennedy was assassinated, as were his brother Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Thousands of Americans were killed in Vietnam.
And America put a man on the moon.
Twenty-five years ago today, they were bleary-eyed, pajama-clad tykes whose parents sat them in front of the TV to watch men walk on the moon. They were among the 100,000 NASA and military officers behind the scenes who contributed to the moon mission. A few were soon-to-be moms in labor. But all of them remember.
Dozens of Hampton Roads residents shared their recollections of the Apollo 11 mission by calling the newspapers' INFOLINE. Here are some of their stories:
Alex Burford, 35, of Virginia Beach, was a 10-year-old space enthusiast in Rhode Island. ``It was 6 o'clock in the morning when I woke up. The sun had just started coming up. That was an agonizing wait for a kid, a whole 3 1/2 hours before the launch. I sat there with my fists clenched, still in my PJs. I thought Walter Cronkite was yelling, `What a moment, a man on the moon,' but when I watched the broadcast again 20 years later, I realized he wasn't yelling at all. My friends told me I heard him yelling because I was screaming inside. I was the one yelling.''
Scott Sechrist, 41, is now a professor at Old Dominion University. ``I was a typical 16-year-old at the time and just got caught up in the moon landing and went out and bought records and first-day cover stamp things. It's embarrassing but I actually sat in the closet like over the weekend and made a space capsule. My mom would bring me dinner and I would make moonwalks to the bathroom.''
Paul F. Hollandsworth, a retired Navy captain, who lives in Virginia Beach, watched the Apollo 11 liftoff from an A-4 Seahawk at 14,000 feet. ``It really was something. It looked sort of like a fat man pushing out of a chair, very ponderous at first. A
tremendous amount of smoke and flames underneath. It comes out of that thing and builds its way up. Chug, chug, chug. It's huge, something like that coming up with no wings. We were able to watch it go out over the Atlantic and disappear.''
Marie Wells, of Virginia Beach, gave birth to her daughter Laura Wells Edwards as the astronauts left the moon. ``I just remember saying I got cheated out of watching it. My husband got to sit in the waiting room and watch the men leave the moon. It was a nice diversion for him. If the baby had been a boy, we might have named her after one of the astronauts, but she was a girl so it didn't work out that way.''
Steve Milner, of Newport News, was the official photo captioner for NASA. ``We were so busy getting ready at the Cape that we didn't have time to grasp the real significance. Sure we knew we were going to the moon, but the nuts and bolts came first. I was the guy sending out the pictures. The onboard cameras weren't nearly as sophisticated as they are today. They got these ghost-like photos, the ones they showed on TV. Then they had to wait until splashdown to get the cleared images from the astronauts' movie footage. We didn't get to the moon ourselves, but we helped send them there.''
David Meads, 30, of Norfolk, stayed up late. ``Our usual bedtime was at 8, but the broadcast was after 10. We sat around the huge black and white television in our living room. I went right up to the screen. I watched pretty much most of it. That winter, I played moon landing outside. The footprints in the snow looked to me like the footprints on the moon. I decided I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.''
Angel Kowalski, 29, of Norfolk, was in Columbia, S.C. ``I was asleep, and my parents woke me up. I was in those footie pajamas and a pink, flannel quilted bathrobe. I can't remember whether it was day or night. They propped me up on a yellow bean bag. I remember that bean bag. We couldn't have been quieter if the president walked into the room. And I watched the landing, scrubbing my eyes through most of the broadcast.''
Kathy Ecobichon of Virginia Beach was an anxious 11-year-old viewer. ``I remember watching the clock. They're going to do it, and then nothing. They're going to do it now, then they didn't. Finally they did.
``It was very surreal for me at the time to think I could stand outside and see the moon and know that we had people up there. I didn't understand the meaning of it all, but when they put the flag down, it was a moving experience to know that we got there first.''
Mike Ferguson, 41, of Virginia Beach, decided to surf instead of watch the moon walk - but ended up in the emergency room. ``I was always a science fiction fan, so I was excited about the moon landing, but as a teen, I was excited about surfing too. The board hit me right across the bridge of the nose. I guess seeing stars would have been appropriate, but I wasn't unconscious. Here I got to watch the landing and surf too.''
Roy Kaplan, 42, is now an anesthesiologist. ``No one else was up with me at the time. The whole episode 25 years ago seems like it wasn't 25 years ago. I'm sure the Polaroid picture I took of the TV set is still around. It fueled a fascination in me. If NASA is willing, I'm still able at 42 and I know they need anesthesiologists in space. They just have to call me.''
Richard Fox, 48, of Virginia Beach, was stationed on a Japanese destroyer in the Sea of Japan. ``We were in a joint exercise, my whole squadron, with a squadron of Japanese ships. I was put aboard a Japanese destroyer as a liaison. The Japanese guys all knew that we'd landed on the moon. A couple of the officers would talk to me and said they didn't speak English very well. Within a day they'd warmed up. It was like old home week. Overall they were happy that somebody was on the moon. Better us than the Russians.''
Frances Knudson, 71, of Norfolk, was on vacation in Kill Devil Hills, near the site of the Wright Brothers' first flight. ``We went down sometime in the summer and we usually stayed at the same place. At that time in the '60s you could see the monument to the first flight. That night, the full moon was just over the monument. It seemed real symbolic.''
Marva Stein, 46, was a 21-year-old skeptic in Cleveland, Ohio. ``I know this sounds crazy, but they (the astronauts) were funny. How could aluminum foil land on the moon? I know that sounds nuts. I saw these two little legs landing on the moon - two little tin foil legs landing on the moon. I said oh no, they are making this up.
``When they started bouncing around up there, it dawned on me that this was real.''
Dick Taylor, 49, of Chesapeake, was aboard the USS Hornet, the ship that recovered the astronauts when their module plummeted back to earth. He remembered their return. ``It was cloudy that day, but we did see the module shoot overhead. It landed about eight miles from the ship, which was right on target. No one was allowed to see the astronauts. They walked through the door and went through this man-made plastic, air-tight tunnel and went right over to the quarantine unit. It was exciting because the president landed aboard that carrier. The entire crew and everybody gathered in the hangar base to see the president speak to the astronauts in the quarantine unit. The recovery ship isn't mentioned when they talk about the lunar landing, but it was one of the most important elements of their return to Earth. They had to be recovered.''
Gail Bernick, 51, of Portsmouth, watched the landing in a bar in Switzerland. She was working in the country as a dental hygienist. ``There was a group of Americans - many of them hygienists, probably about 20 of us. The eyes of all people were on the television set. The Americans had a lot of confidence that we could do it right. There were cheers from all sides. The Swiss were just as happy as we were. They were congratulating us, patting us on the back.''
Deborah A. Buschert, 43, of Virginia Beach, was celebrating her 18th birthday at her home on Long Island. ``I kept telling everyone to be sure to watch them because they would be saying from the moon, `Happy Birthday Debbi!' I had convinced all my friends they were going to do this, but I had not written ahead of time to try and get the astronauts to say something like that. They didn't know me. But that's how I remember.''
J. Owen Hudgins, 40, of Portsmouth, was traveling with a family when they stopped for dinner at the Wagon Wheel Restaurant outside Petersburg on U.S. 460. ``They were about a half-hour from jumping out of the lunar lander, so we decided to wait and watch Neil Armstrong get out of the thing. It was fantastic. Later, we went outside and looked at the moon and we kept saying, `Where are they?' '' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
JIM WALKER/Staff
Dick Taylor, with memorabilia from the carrier Hornet, which
recovered the astronauts' capsule after the splashdown.
Photo
JIM WALKER/Staff
Dick Taylor, who served with the Navy Recovery Force on the carrier
Hornet during the moon voyage, mailed this letter home. The envelope
carries a ``Manned Lunar Landing'' imprint.
Graphic
INTERNET ACCESS
For more information: Computer users with access to the Internet
can learn more about the Apollo 11 mission in NASA's computer
archives.
Astronaut quotes and photos can be found on the World Wide Web at
http://www.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo. Picture and text files are
extremely large, however, and may take several minutes to download.
NASA also offers updates about the comet collision with Jupiter.
The Web address is http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jplnews.html. Again, NASA
files are slow to download.
In Hampton Roads, access to the Internet is offered through
InfiNet. For details, call 622-4289.
by CNB