40 YEARS AGO TODAY...

(Let me thank Walt for reminding me!)

40 years ago today, I was 9 years old. I had finished the 4th grade, and was very excited to be entering the 5th grade in the Fall. I would be one of the "old kids" at Kerr Elementary School, and me and my buddies were gonna rule the school.

It was, as all Louisiana Summers are, real hot. We had a big old place with about 3 acres to mow, a big old vegetable garden to tend, bushels of peas to shell, peaches to pick, and about a dozen cows that Daddy kept in the back pasture. Yep, those were the days when you could have cows in town.

The boredom of Summer would have set in if it had not been for the fact that I was getting to watch history unfold before my eyes.

On July 16, 1969, these three fellows climbed into a little bitty spacecraft set up on top of a big old rocket down in Florida, and blasted off to do something that not many folks really thought was possible only a few years before.

Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin

Apollo 11 Crew

At 9 years old, I really didn't understand all the significance of man's first trip to the surface of the moon. It was a time of turmoil in our nation (well, when hasn't it been?). The Cold War was cranked up in full cold mode. Boys were being drafted into the Service, and a bunch of them didn't want to go. We were fighting what was becoming a VERY unpopular war in Southeast Asia. There were protests, and riots.

And it was still almost two months before football started.

But as I grew older, I have learned just how significant this mission was to our nation. It put an exclamation point on the technology that can be developed by a free people, and the great things that a free people can accomplish.

It was also just really way, way cool to a 9-year-old boy.

I can only remember a few times since then that the entire US (and quite possibly the world) was so riveted by unfolding events. Apollo 13. The US withdrawal from Vietnam. The Munich Olympics massacre. The Miracle On Ice (that was mostly just us, probably). The fall of the Berlin Wall. 9-11.

Boston.com has a nice piece that Walt sent me a link to about the Apollo 11 flight. The photos alone are worth hitting the link.

The moon is not quite "to infinity and beyond." But when you consider what NASA did in the space of a decade, with the technology they had...it's pretty astounding stuff.