It was the Summer after second grade when my Mom called to me to come and watch TV. She said history was happening. Understand, there was no school and I lived in the country with a swimming hole that hardly had to beckon. Even though it was early in the morning I was already awake and no doubt ready to head outside.
Watching television was not at the top of my list of must do activities. Cartoons were on Saturdays and Captain Kangaroo had lost my attention. Being the good son I sat down in front of the Philco. It was boring. The announcer was talking and there was other noise in the background, chatter I think. Then the screen showed what looked like a tall building with smoke coming out of the bottom. Scooting a little bit closer I saw that it was a rocket ship, but not like the ones on Flash Gordon. This was tall and skinny.
I heard my first countdown and then all hell broke loose. Well, I may have thought about hell then because there was lots of fire and lots more smoke. The skinny tube started to float like a magician’s trick – slow and steady. I was hooked. Mom turned me into a space junkie.
I watched as many liftoffs as I could after that. Even in school they would pipe the radio play-by-play of the launch into the classroom intercom. I knew every astronaut and space vehicle, even built my share of Revell models. The Gemini craft was my favorite because of its shape and size – like a senior version of the Mercury capsule. Apollo just looked like an inverted ice cream cone and just didn’t have the coolness. I mean, Ed White opened the door and got out of a perfectly good spacecraft, a Gemini – lost his glove, too. I did get an Apollo model – Apollo 11, the one that went to the moon. The kit included the lunar module as well as the command module. That lunar module, wow, now that was a space ship!
It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was laying in my bed reading H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon when Dad called and said that they were getting ready to land. I jumped out of bed and watched intently as Walter Cronkite explained everything to us right up until the time he couldn’t speak anymore. No one could. We watched slack-jawed as the spaceship landed on another world and the famous phrase was uttered.
Real life intervened and the frequency of the shuttle launches made it hard to keep up, but my interest never waned just wavered. Sad to say space travel has become almost blase to the American public.
So last Wednesday night all of these memories came flooding back to me as the family waited on the front lawn looking up at the night sky for the International Space Station to pass overhead. We watched Mars for about 10 minutes asking each other “is it moving?” It was, but so slowly that we couldn’t tell. It was bright, but it wasn’t the ISS. I ran back inside to check the schedule and came running out saying we were about 20 minutes too early. It should be here any minute now.
We walked down the street a bit to get a wider view away from the trees in the side yard, but we needn’t have bothered. I don’t really remember who spotted it first, but there it was coming in from the southwest traveling steadily 220 miles above us. I was as giddy as I was 47 years ago watching that round screen black and white TV. There were people above us, free from gravity, and passing directly over my house.
Of course Pamela and I were excited, and I think Spencer, 15, thought that there was a certain coolness factor to it. But I was unsure that Graham, 8, could appreciate what was happening. The ISS was launched a year before he was born, so as far as he’s concerned, it’s always been up there. Like my Mom, I told him that he was watching history, but kids are smarter and more connected today. Twenty-four hour broadband, 72 cable channels and wireless video games beckon like the old swimming hole. But Bayou Mallet could only get us wet; Graham’s Mac can let him watch the ISS live and even see Grissom’s launch reenacted in The Right Stuff.
But I hope that when he brings his grandchildren out on the front lawn to see the half-dozen or so space stations orbiting overhead that he can tell them “I remember when I saw the first one.”
Categories: What was I thinking?
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