By FRED KRONER
fred@mahometnews.com
Mahomet, Ill. – Anniversaries can be a time to celebrate or a time to commiserate.
There are events we want to remember fondly and others we feel obliged to recall because of their historical significance.
Many of us can recount where we were for the memorable moments, including one that took place nearly 50 years ago, on July 20, 1969.
That afternoon, at 2:17 p.m. CST, the first manned space flight – Apollo 11 — landed on the moon. About seven hours later, two Americans, commander Neil Armstrong, followed by crew member Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin, were the first two people to set foot on the lunar surface.
Mahomet’s Peter Patton was a teen-ager at the time. He was 14 years old.
“My dad, sister and I were watching it (on television),” Patton said. “Dad made an event out of it. We had popcorn and Coke while we waited.”
There was excitement and anxiety in the family.
“He had talked about it for weeks in advance to make sure we’d be home, and had set the stage that it would be a special event,” Patton said.
Meanwhile, at another area residence, Mike Tilford was also watching the production.
He was 21 years old and “ready to start my job at Mahomet-Seymour the next month,” he said.
Tilford was hired as a history teacher, a position he held at M-S for 34 years.
On that summer afternoon, he was watching history as it was occurring.
“Like about everyone in the country, I had my eyes glued to the TV,” Tilford said. “I remember watching the first step (on the lunar surface) and being in awe.
“It’s one of those events you remember where you were when it happened.”
Mahomet’s Brad Stipp can relate. He was at home, joined by classmate Walter Pierce. They were a month away from entering their freshman year at Mahomet-Seymour High School.
It was a riveting occasion, a happy day, a time for rejoicing.
“I needed that,” Stipp said.
The country needed something to feel good about as well, he speculated.
“1968 was a year full of turmoil,” Stipp recalled. “Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were (fatally) shot. There were riots protesting the (Vietnam) war. Things were a mess.”
A year later, there was a new national story as the United States came in first in what was described at the time as the Space Race. The United States wasn’t the first country to have a person in orbit around the earth, but it was the first country to make the four-day trek and successfully land on the moon.
“We had a 19-inch black-and-white TV,” Stipp said. “It wasn’t a very big screen and the images were not the best quality, but it was exciting and unbelievable that we could send a man to the moon.
“That was one thing in the news that was really interesting and something to hang onto that was positive.”
Patton’s passion for history enabled him to put the mid-July date in perspective.
He harkened back to the time when brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright were the first to fly, at Kitty Hawk (in North Carolina).
“It was on Dec. 17, 1903,” Patton said. “They were in the air for 12 seconds and went 120 feet.
“I wonder if the Wright brothers ever thought that 66 years later, we’d be landing on the moon?”
And yet, a three-member crew (which also included astronaut Michael Collins, who stayed in orbit around the moon) made the historical moon landing a reality.
The Vietnam war was still ongoing – and would worsen – but it didn’t garner all of the headlines in the summer of 1969. The landing and moonwalk was top-of-the-page news throughout the United States and Canada.
One newspaper – the Vancouver Sun, in British Columbia – went as far as to change its masthead for its Monday, July 21 editions. Fittingly, it read: “The Moon!” instead of “The Sun.”
“This seemed to be something that, for at least one night, drew America together,” Patton said.
The events that unfolded, the planting of an American flag on the Moon, the process of the astronauts collecting lunar rocks and Armstrong’s words as he exited the space capsule – “One small step for man, one giant step for mankind” – would eventually become a part of Tilford’s lesson plans.
“You can’t teach American history unless you teach about the Space Race,” he said. “Because it was so fresh in our minds, I’m sure I made reference to it (in his first year of teaching).
“This was a time in history when people were engaged with what was happening with NASA. The whole country was pretty engaged.”
Patton’s father, Wilbur, was no exception.
“I remember he made the comment, ‘We beat the Russians,’ “ Peter Patton said.
Where the Moon landing and walk would rank on the list of historical American milestones is subjective, but Tilford offered this view: “It would certainly be in the top 10 as one of the more important ones.
“It was important for national pride. I remember hearing JFK say (in May, 1961) that we would accomplish that by the end of the decade. It proved national will was great enough to accomplish great things.”
The accomplishments of Armstrong and Aldrin showed that one of the greatest barriers, one that had previously been talked about only as a fantasy, was more than a dream.
How many future technological advances were possible because of people who weren’t shackled by limits in their thinking?
“Cell phones now have more computing power than when we landed on the moon,” Patton said.
“To me, maybe it was the start of the technological explosion,” Stipp added.
And yet, Patton said the momentum from space travel in the 1960s was not utilized to the extent he might have expected.
“After Apollo, NASA didn’t seem to push ahead,” Patton said. “It was like we’d accomplished a goal and stalled out.
“We did a space station and learned what it was like to live in space, but to me, if we had continued at that pace, we could have (sent humans) to Mars by now.”
There were more space flights, but none were as ballyhooed as Apollo 11.
“Subsequent missions were more effective.” Tilford said, “but were less of an event.”
Though the calendar says the first moonwalk was almost a half-century ago, Tilford said there are reasons it doesn’t seem like that many years have passed.
“Anytime you live through an event like that, it tends to stay in your mind like you were there,” he said. “I remember sitting in my friend’s living room like it was yesterday.”
In a sense, Patton’s own childhood dreams were fulfilled when Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on the moon.
“As a kid, I looked up and wondered what it would be like to walk there,” Patton said. “Everybody seemed glued to the history that we were seeing on TV.
“And then it hit me, mankind was really standing on the moon.”
As enamored as he is with history and the space program, Patton recognizes other areas where advances still need to be made 50 years later.
“We’re very primitive in a lot of ways,” he said. “We still don’t know how the brain works.”
