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50 years ago this week, I wanted to be an astronaut. That is not very remarkable, since just about every 8 year old boy back then wanted to be an astronaut. [1/?]
The Apollo program was the pinnacle of the space race, and on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon and took a walk around. They did all of this on live TV, which was incredible. [2/?]
Space and the moon-shot program were a big deal in our family. My maternal grandfather, Clarence Cleminshaw, had given up his Harvard law school education and a promising career as a lawyer in the late 1920s to pursue a PhD in astronomy. [3/?]
He'd risen to be the director of the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles, and was recruited by NASA to help train Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts in celestial navigation. It was necessary in order to make sure the Apollo ship was on the right course to the moon. [4/?]
Because of my grandfather, I once got to meet Alan Shepard (the first American in space, and later commander of Apollo 14 who hit golf balls on the moon). [5/?]
My grandfather was invited to Cape Kennedy as a VIP to watch the July 16th launch of Apollo 11. He related that 100s of people who had been involved with that program were there with him in the temporary grandstands that NASA set up, all yelling things like, “Go, baby, go!” [6/?]
4 days later, Grampa Clem was back home to Los Angeles, and attending a party at my parents’ house. A large group of cousins and friends gathered at our house to watch the July 20th landing of the Lunar Module. [7/?]
We watched on my parents’ 19-inch black and white TV with rabbit ear antennae. Other guests also brought their TVs, and so there were probably 3 or 4 black and white TVs around the house, tuned into the different networks’ coverage. [8/?]
There was a lot of cheering, and smiles on all of the faces, as everyone was proud and amazed at what we were witnessing. It was such a big deal that trading was suspended at the NYSE on Monday, July 21, 1969. [9/?]
Having just that year bought a Kodak 126 cartridge style “Instamatic” camera with my own money, I wanted to have a record of what we were seeing on TV. Remember that this was a day when home VCRs were still more than 10 years away from becoming a common appliance. [10/?]
I knew that the Instamatic camera instructions stated that I should use a “flash cube” at night. A flash cube was a disposable square attachment which plugged into my camera and burned magnesium inside a plastic housing to create a flash to illuminate dark objects. [11/?]
There were four flash bulb chambers in each flash cube, and it automatically rotated with each shot of the camera. [12/?]
My Uncle Dick explained to me that I would not really need to use a flashbulb to take a picture of the television, since the screen itself was projecting light and thus did not need to be illuminated with a flash. [13/?]
I had my doubts about what he was saying, and so just to be sure, I took one picture with a flash and one without. [14/?]
It was many years later before I fully appreciated that Uncle Dick’s PhD in physics from Stanford University should have trumped the instruction book for my Instamatic camera when it came to the optics involved with taking photographs of a television. [15/?]
I have tried to explain to my own children the fascination we all had for the space race back in the 1960s, but I sensed that my words come up short of conveying the full feelings of wonder and accomplishment that we all felt back then. [16/17]
It is probably the same as the difficulty felt by people of my parents’ generation, trying to explain what it was like to have blackouts, block captains, gas-rationing, and victory gardens during World War II. [17/17]
