This posting is dedicated to my oldest and best friend, James R. Provenza.
Salud, my fellow "future astronaut" of the 1960s.
This month we click past Year 40 of The Moon, Adulterated.
From now until kingdom come, there are footprints on the moon. Lots of them. And junk. Lots of junk. Abandoned pieces of lunar module. Assorted exploratory ordnance. At least one golf ball. One American flag.
God knows what all else. Give our scientists and engineers enough time and they'll make the moon look the way they've made Antarctica look: like a gigantic KOA campground on the day after Labor Day.
But until July 20, 1969, 40 years ago this month, the moon was as pristine and untouched as any other celestial body. Now it's not. The human race has been there. Come back. Repeated the trip. Explored the lunar surface. Dug for rocks. Poked around.
Hit a golf ball.
For you under-40s, that's true. The late Alan Shepard, the Navy commander who became the first American in space in 1961, was also the first -- and so far only -- American, or for that matter citizen of this planet generally, to hit a golf ball on the moon. It was roughly 10 years after his suborbital flight in a tiny capsule perched atop a Redstone missile in May, 1961 that, as captain of the Apollo 14 flight, the third U.S. mission to land men on the moon, in February, 1971, Shepard teed up with a makeshift club and belted a golf ball over the lunar surface.
No one recorded how far Shepard's drive went, but the moon's gravity being one-sixth of the earth's, there's little question but that it probably made one of Albert Pujols' home runs look like a dry fart.
There is no need to re-hash what the space program meant to us little boys of the 1960s. Jim remembers, and so do I. When President John F. Kennedy announced in the same year that Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, and then a few weeks later Shepard became the second, that the United States would make it a goal to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the decade was out, he was by all eyewitness accounts being true to the spirit of his presidency.
"The New Frontier" was the tag-line of Kennedy's administration.
What better expression of that spirit than to soar into space?
And besides, the Russians had already gotten there. It was the cold war. We had to catch up.
We did, in style and across a decade's worth of headlines.
It was, by any definition, a heady time. Kennedy's death from an assassin's bullet, the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, urban unrest, riots in big cities, the hippie movement, drugs ... everything divisive, controversial and violent that we associate in retrospect with the 1960s, has hanging over it the image that stands above this blog posting ... an American spacecraft coasting over the lunar surface. Men preparing to touch down on the moon. Despite everything that turbulent decade hurled forth that seemed to deny or defy the spirit of The New Frontier, there was always this.
For me, the defining moment of the 1960s occurred just about six months before Neil Armstrong, captain of the Apollo 11 flight in 1969, stepped down on to the moon along with his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, as their crewmate, astronaut Michael Collins, stood watch in the command module, orbiting the moon and awaiting their return from the lunar surface.
It was when the crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo, the Navy spy ship that had been seized by North Korea in early 1968, was released to freedom in December of that year. At the very moment that the Pueblo's crew walked out of North Korea and back to freedom, the crew of Apollo 8, one of a series of space missions that set the stage for the great lunar landing mission of the following summer, was in orbit around the moon. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were the crew of Apollo 8. Their spacecraft entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, 1968.
They took one of the most transfixing and permanently epoch-defining photographs ever taken: the image of the blue earth rising over the moon. Earthrise. It has been reproduced millions of times in millions of places in the years since. Mankind's first look back at the Big Blue Marble. Home, viewed from elsewhere. At the end of a decade that had seen so much noisy and violent disunity, this simple cosmic image of the greatest unity, our unavoidable unity, caused countless moments of stunned, sometimes awestruck reflection. Earthrise was the ultimate family snapshot: there we all were...all three billion of us. Alone in the cosmos, with only each other. For one magic moment, the shouting stopped.
As America and the world watched the crew of the Pueblo walk to freedom, they also watched Earthrise. And then listened to mission commander Frank Borman read aloud, on Christmas Eve, the opening verses of the Book of Genesis.
Ask me to name a moment that defines the 1960s. It's that moment. Not Woodstock, not any image from the horrors of Vietnam or of some grisly and heartbreaking political assassination.
It's that moment: The Pueblo's crew walks to freedom after 10 months in a communist prison as the crew of Apollo 8 takes a quick snapshot from space of the silent, sorrowful earth.
The sixties.
God, I'm glad they're gone. Anyone who wants them back has to be an idiot.
But July 20, 1969 has served for many of us who were growing up during that decade as a counterbalance, if not exactly an antidote, to November 22, 1963, a date that fewer and fewer people I know, especially those under the age of 50, even seem to remember anymore.
Millions of words have been written about how that autumn afternoon in Dallas supposedly crushed the postwar generation's hopes for the future and gave rise to the spirit of cynicism and doubt that would dominate American politics in the decades to come.
I won't go along with any such pat and simplistic view of something as complex as modern history. But I would certainly go along with those who would claim that July 20, 1969 vindicated, in a very large and significant way, the optimism that underlay JFK's public announcement in 1961 that the nation should try and make it happen. For that reason alone, it serves as a historical counterbalance, if not exactly a consolation, for the nation's loss nearly six years earlier.
Many people I know, including many dear friends as I get older, remember neither Kennedy's assassination nor Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon.
We who remember both now face the thinning of our ranks.
Lucky us.
