DaysVille
I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon with the two Wally's, Schirra and Cronkite, on the TV at my Grandmother's house in the summer of 1969.
At the time, I was nine years old.
And, besides being awestruck, I distinctly remember being struck dumb by the realization that I would get to live until the year 2001 when all of that space-aged future that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had imagined would arrive on the scene.
And then I realized that, when the century changed, I would be ridiculously old at the age of 40.
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I went to spring convocation this morning.
When the graduate who spent the past few years toiling away in my lab walked across the stage I broke protocol and ducked in behind the dignitaries so that I could shake her hand immediately after the president was done congratulating her.
I must confess that I was a little verklempt for her and all that her future holds.
But I was also struck dumb by two new realizations...
First, it finally really and truly hit me that, while I will get to work with students, on and off, for a little while longer, today's newly minted graduate is the last PhD student that I will fully train and send out into the wider life science-type world.
As for that second realization?
It is very clear that 1969's nine year old me couldn't have possibly imagined being as old as I am now.
Selah.
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Sure it's cheese, but today's first sentence-of-the-post ear worm was once local Vallance-churned cheese.
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17 comments:
ditto...
Isn,t that the truth. I was 17 . Time seems to take a different form as we age?
I was 7 and I remember my parents waking me up to come and watch it on the b&w tv. I was crazy for all things space and astronauts at the time. It’s still really cool to me that we got some people on the moon.
As for time, isn’t it supposed to slow down as we go faster? That’s what Albert E. said anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever gone fast enough to slow time down but it seems like the day is longer the more you pack can pack into it.
Exactly.
I played rugby until I was 57, some 12 years ago and at 57, you stepped onto the pitch feeling 21 again, and only after 60 seconds, I felt like I was 70 and aging fast with every whistle.
I remember too well laying on the parent's orange shag carpet in the living room as the rabbit ears and the box full of tubes brought us the event I was half expecting to go as wrong as Evel Knievel's worst landings. Despite my low expectations of NASA I had high expectations of my world then even as the Vietnam raged thousands of miles away. The moon landing was not exactly a societal high water mark. That high water mark would be experienced a short 5 years later.
GF--
Ditto, indeed.
Although, just to be clear, I'm pretty sure nobody within a 20 mile radius of Monterey Elementary was more obsessed than me given that I converted my bedroom closet into a replica of the command module cabin so that I could spend hours and hours and hours in there going over mission checklists and pushing crayon on paper buttons.
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Chuck--
You win!
Heckfire, you probably have really memories of Wally Schirra's own spaceflights.
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Graham--
Ya - in point of fact, from an age-based participation point of view at least, I think us olds are pretty much disproving all that Einstein stuff.
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EE--
Does this mean you quit too early to get to wear the gold shorts?!
My Dad stopped at 62, I think...Me, I quit at the age of 14 because I hated being forced to play hooker. Took up basketball instead...Luckily I grew a little in the intervening years.
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Jeebuz Beer!
Re: the real high water mark....Don't leave us hanging.
(can't be the formation of Motorhead because, if I've got it right, that was 1975)
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Funnily enough the formation of Motörhead came just after the price of oil went up higher than prices at Christmas whereupon we were already past the high water mark and did not even know it.
To Beer’s comment of 5 years later, I’m going with the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle or the resignation of Nixon.
Graham...
I was thinking of that also...But then I realized he'd given us a clue... the ill-fated Snake River Canyon Extravaganza.
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Beer--
My favourite quote from Mr. Kilmister...
"(The music) will be so loud that if we move in next door to you, your lawn will die."
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Ahhh, I had forgotten about the Knievel Snake river jump attempt. That guy inspired me to seek out airtime on my bicycle many many times.
Mr. Ross, was your dad a "Legend" or an "Evergreen", as I was just a "SOB". Yes i missed my Red Shorts by 3 years but both my sons played with my younger one still playing.
We watched the moon landing with our old Fleetwood black and white and with the 'fuzz' from KVOS and the 'fuzz' from our Fleetwood, there wasn't much to see.
What the moon landing did do was to have my dad get Cable Vision and a colour TV and we had 12 channels instead of 4 in fuzzy colour!
Try to explain that to your kids.
Recall the SnakeRiver event and the moon landing and the Democratic convention in Chicago and Walter Chronkite bbeing hit on the head and the slide on the Hope Princeton where a number of people are buried under all that rock. Going through there the first summer after the slide was something else. At 74, it still stuns me.
The most shocking things I can recall on T.V. were the Civil Rights marches in the U.S.A. and the
violence and murders which came with them.
During the years while in elementary school and jr. high never thought about the future, just tried to get through the current life and by 20 never thought I'd live beyond 45, so it is with great surprise I am 74.
The Vietnam war, when I watched it on t.v. with Walter Chronkite on the nightly news, it seemed very odd to me that the war just kept going and after they reported on the war, they would list the dead, American and Viet Cong. Don't recall mention of Vietnamese soliders death. That war, at the time struck me as a waste of time and lives because I was well aware of the Holocaust and WW II and all that went with it.
The Beetles weren't a big deal to me, but the Rolling Stones, oh ya. Remember the art teacher at the high schools would play their L.P. in his class and if you went into the hall way you could hear it. some of the songs were not played on the radio--banned. The first time I heard the House of the Rising Sun was amazing and to this day it still is.
We have all aged a tad and have defining moments regarding it. You accomplished a great deal when I think about the "newly minted graduate is the last PhD student". Not many people can say that nor assist young people to enter the world of science to change our world.
In 1976 Harlan County U.S.A. won the Academy Award for best documentary. It covers the 1973 strike in the county. Have watched the documentary several times. When I think about it to day, it still amazes me what went on in what was supposed to be an advanced democracy.
Life has been interesting in the past 74 years., Saw a whole lot of changes and a whole lot of no changes. Now with some things appearing to run backwards who knows what the world holds for all the two year olds in neighbourhood.
EE--
Fuzzy KVOS, indeed!
I'll have to ask my Pops about his 'category' - not sure about that.
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e.a.f.--
Oh boy, you sure are right about Harlan County, USA.
I wonder though...If it was made today?
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RossK,
You may be wrong there. there was at least one other kid within a 20 mile radius of that school that was obsessed with the moon landing. As I tell all the Elon Musk fan boys out there; "already been done before, this is what we did when we could barely do it" When I look at stuff like the Apollo Guidance Computer, even a smart phone has tens of thousands times more processing power. I suspect all this emergent technology was a factor in where I am now, designing and building weird electronic shit for chemists and physicists.
These days though, I think we are all Neil Armstrong. We are flying over rocky terrain, low on fuel, looking for place to land. The guidance computer is throwing distracting alarms every few seconds, but you fly on. Finally, mission control tells you "ignore the computer, you are go for landing". The moral of the story is, sometimes you just have to ignore the computer!
Gar--
Sometimes you do, indeed, need to ignore the computer - especially if their name is Hal.
Re: the Apollo Guidance stuff...Did you have those little flip pad check-lists so that you could run ship commands in your own 'real' time?
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RossK
I did not have my Nasa approved Checklists. For me, the real heroes were always the boys in Mission Control, and the tech required to get there. I remember that great movie Apollo 13 got it about right!
I don't think the movie could be made today and if it were made, it would not be as "raw" as it is. Too many "documentaries" today are slick, fairly one sided, created to make money. Harlan County allows the people themselves to tell their story. I have always considered the documentary as one of the great film works the U.S.A. has produced. It been almost 50 years since I've watched the documentary but I can still remember some of the scenes.
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