Plan B Forum

Anyone who was alive then remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing.

"Anyone who was alive then remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing."

I guess that makes me an oblivion, but I don't remember. [later edit. I tried but autocorrect fought me. OBLIVIOT ]

snailgate.

I was alive then and I don’t have a fecking clue where I was and what I was doing. You’d have to ask my Mother and I’m not sure she would remember either (for different reasons).

I did, however, read First Man this spring. Soon to be released as the first Oscar-potential movie of the awards season: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co ... s-44884023

Anyone who was alive then remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing.

I don't agree -- at least not 'exactly' where I was. I just started working the 2nd shift at Westinghouse Computer Center on that day. (Double time and a half.) There were no televisions anywhere in the building and very few people had radios available. Later, when I got off a break, I went back to the CDC3600 I was operating and I saw on one of the CRT monitors a message sent from a remote terminal that the lunar module had landed.

It wasn't until I went to my cubicle for lunch that I turned on my radio to hear more about it.

I don't know where I was but I was thinking about the assassination of JFK.

Joe Guy wrote:I don't know where I was but I was thinking about the assassination of JFK.

Ah, yes... now that I remember.

I was a freshman in high school, Mr. McGrath's World History class. Very surreal -- a mix of disbelief and dopey kid sick humor. School let out early and it wasn't until I got home and started watching the TV that it finally impacted me.

Very sad, even Republicans were upset.

Same for me and the attempt on Reagan - I remember walking home from school then glued to CNN for hours.

There used to be some rock solid values that knitted us together, regardless of partisan politics. One of them was our universal recognition of the USSR as an unfriendly regime and a threat to our democracy; there is no end to my dumbfoundedness as I watch Putin going up in the GOP polls alongside his puppet American President.

We are way beyond twilight zone.

Sorry...I guess I should've made my comment on that meme into a question rather than a statement.

We watched a lot of the mission on a tv set they brought into class, but the lunar descent and Armstrong's steps were on a Sunday, so must have watched home. You would think it would be a defining memory of being 9, but like everyone else it is blurred with later viewings. It is all a mirage anyway:

Econoline wrote:Anyone who was alive then remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing.

At 18? I was either working or downing scotch in the UPW bar for 2s & 6d a tot. Post Office Overseas Telegrams was a 24/7 service, so working and drinking were the two operative modes, though there tended to be overlap. I probably saw it on a TV news report at some time but... as the Zulu king said when he was taken up in an aeroplane for the first time and was asked if he wasn't nervous... "You mean it's not supposed to do this?"

We were on a picnic in a state park and listening to it on the radio, and when the landing was announced, you could hear a cheer from all around (apparently a lot of people were listening). Later that evening we watched the moon walk on TV in beautiful black and white ( that's all we had, I don't know if it was broadcast in color). I was in a supermarket when the lunar module lifted off, and I recall they broadcast it over the store's PA system from liftoff until orbit was achieved (only a few minutes as I recall), and a lot of people stopped shopping and just stood in the aisles listening. It was something that brought people together, even though there were big issues dividing us.

I was at boy scout camp in Goshen NY...

A couple of our assistant scout masters had brought little black and white TVs that they plugged into the cigarette lighters in their cars and they gathered us together to watch the landing, and then woke us all up to watch again when Armstrong took those famous steps...

ETA:

That was also the week that Teddy Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick. To give you an idea of what a weird kid I was, even at that age I was so interested in politics my parents sent me newspaper clippings about it in one of the letters they sent...

We were having a barbecue out back and running in to watch inside on the teevee. We were all super excited because it was our Brush With Greatness By Proxy, in that my dad's best friend was one of the RCA engineers who designed the Apollo communications systems, including the radio gear in the astronauts' backpacks. I got a pen from him that commemorated the event (they must have made thousands of them, but it always seemed unique to me.) At that time it seemed that human possibilities were limitless and science would bring us a dazzling future.

Just under a dozen years later, when Reagan was shot, I was standing in line at the unemployment office wondering where my future had gone.

Big RR wrote:We were on a picnic in a state park and listening to it on the radio, and when the landing was announced, you could hear a cheer from all around (apparently a lot of people were listening). Later that evening we watched the moon walk on TV in beautiful black and white ( that's all we had, I don't know if it was broadcast in color).

It wasn't. And the resolution of the actual live transmission was so fuzzy that if it hadn't have been for Walter Cronkite's commentary, we wouldn't have known for sure what we were seeing. Most if not all the stills we see of the descent down the ladder and the first step off of the LEM's landing pad have been digitally enhanced.
So far as I know, any color pictures we have are from the conventional cameras shooting actual color film; film that couldn't be developed until after the three astronauts returned to Earth.

-"BB"-

At that time it seemed that human possibilities were limitless and science would bring us a dazzling future.

I recall that feeling as well; indeed, I actually believed we were going to have orbiting hotels and regular trips to the moon in the near future (just like in 2001). That we haven't seen anything near that makes me realize how significant an achievement moon landing was, as well as how silly/misplaced that hope was.

BB--that's what I thought; I believe later landings had color TV cameras. And I'll always recall the one where the astronaut burned out the camera by aiming it at the sun (that was the one where they landed near the surveyor craft, but we had to wait until the films were developed to see it.

That weekend my wife and I were at a somewhat rustic campground in Michigan, and neither the couple we were with, Bruce and Carol, nor anyone else at the campground was particularly interested in this sort of thing, and we had gone swimming and lost track of the time, so I didn't hear about the descent and landing until after it had happened. (I, on the other hand, had been a devoted reader of science fiction for a dozen years and was disappointed to have missed it...though of course I subsequently heard the audio replayed many many times.)

A little later, it being late Sunday afternoon, we packed up the tents etc. and started the drive back to Chicago. My car at the time was a bare-bones International Harvester Scout without any options, not even an AM radio. Bruce took the wheel and Carol rode shotgun, and we were in the back while I fiddled with a transistor radio to hear the news. When Armstrong made that first step onto the lunar surface I gave a little whoop of joy, which startled Bruce and Carol. After we got home we turned on the TV and watched the reruns and the still, ghostly, black-and-white image of the American flag standing there on the Sea of Tranquility.

Gee, I thought this was a fairly representative group but y'all remember the 60s? You obviously were not part of it though

I don’t remember them.

Remember what?

Ah! The Trump Effect!