Musings - on the editor's mind

If you were alive then, reflect back on July 20, 1969. Were you watching NASA’s, and our, moon landing?

I was 14. My siblings and I were on the porch, our house’s TV room. My very smart older sister wanted to be an astronaut – while still in high school. She majored in physics and then earned a Ph.D.

What a different world we lived in in 1969. Most adults could not have imagined – made up – that anyone would claim the moon landing was staged.

Almost everyone, maybe even the libertarians and the communists, was in unison that landing on the moon was a good thing.

Oh, what a time it was when we could all agree on an unbridled good and could bask in a sense of shared mission.

While waxing poetic about this, I need to remember that by the summer of 1969 a majority had either turned against the Vietnam War or would soon be in that camp; we were a year out from Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and almost no straight persons had the Stonewall riot on their radar screens.

So serious divisions among us, yes. But we were also a nation that did come together under the light of the moon. We were a nation in awe of the photos of a blue and white marble planet Earth adrift in the blackness of space.

And maybe some were even then analyzing the crowning achievement, the true miracle that powered the success of NASA. It wasn’t the engineers, not the rockets, nor the space capsule or the space suits and certainly not the computer technology, which pales against today’s smart phones.

No, some figured out, the success of the missions to the moon was in getting tens of thousands of people to work together, from coast to coast to coast, to build teams and support each other and to achieve an impossible dream whose purpose wasn’t for the few, but was for all of us (even if the fear of the Soviets and the heat of the Cold War fueled our zeal).

We did it, us, one nation indivisible.

Such a world did exist on the narrow, Win one for the Gipper level.

That’s what I want to believe our world was like 50 years ago this week.