"One small step for man..."

We were gathered in the living room around the TV, watching a grainy image, and listening to a raspy, hard-to-understand voice. In a slow-motion, it seemed, descent from the ladder, followed by a hop down to the last rung, Neil Armstrong carefully stepped onto the surface of the moon. "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

We grew up in the space-age.

I can remember going to the auditorium at Judson, when I was in first grade in 1964, for the whole school to watch an earlier Gemini mission. We watched it on one television, and it was really hard to make anything out, but it was exciting, and we knew it was important.

We heard sonic booms (when a jet flies faster than the speed of sound, and breaks the sound barrier) during school days. Everyone always jumped, it was such a big sound.

When we went to the base (Barksdale AFB) to shop at the commissary for groceries, or to the BX (base exchange) where we got our school supplies, we entered the front gate and were met with the site of a huge missile (in my estimate, at least 30 feet tall, if not taller) towering over us in the middle of the boulevard.

NASA had the "right stuff". We watched every mission from the countdown to the splashdown. The astronauts were all our heroes.

We drank TANG (the powdered orange drink "designed by scientists for NASA").

We watched the Jetsons and imagined that in the year 2000 (so far off, it was nearly unimaginable) we would live like they did, with moving sidewalks, flying cars and ultra-modern conveniences.

John F. Kennedy had said in a speech in 1962, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade..."
Amazingly enough, only seven short years later, we were there!

We knew as we sat around the TV that night that we were witnessing history. We were proud to be Americans.. Heck! we were proud to be human! What an amazing accomplishment! I still marvel at it today.