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Where I was, forty years ago

I know only two locations with accuracy in my life’s experience. One is where and when I was when I found out that John Lennon had been murdered, and the other was where I saw the Moon walk.

I was mad keen on the space program. I have model rockets, facts and figures, and I even wrote to every Soviet embassy I could locate as well as every NASA PR hack to get as much as I could. Which was a lot. I’m fairly sure that the Australian intelligence agency ASIO had a file on me. You wanted to know which academy a Cosmonaut went to and their rank in the army, etc.? I had index cards with that information. What the thrusters of the Gemini capsules generated? I could find it.

Sure, I was a geek. Why do you ask? Anyway, I recall in a piece of irony I couldn’t invent going across the road from my school around lunchtime to my Religious Instruction teacher’s home, where I am 30 or so of my classmates watched Neil and Buzz dancing about on another world. It still resonates. I have the LP of the mission, released a year or so later, and one day I will get it digitised.

Of course, I also expected that by now we’d be sending crews to Jupiter.

8 Comments

  1. I really enjoy your blog, so i’m leaving this comment just to say that and to say that i’ve added your blog to my blog’s recommended blogs list. I suppose there is no problem in doing that, but if you disagree please let me know. Sadly in my blog I will write only in brazillian portuguese, therefore, I don’t think you will be able to understand what is going on there, but I can say that I write mostly about philosophy and science (the title of the blog means ‘Between silence and finitude’), so it’s somehow related to the topics you discuss in your blog. Anyway, sorry for my bad english and congratulations!

  2. What about when John F. Kennedy was shot? I was very young (as were you), but I still remember my parents’ reponse. Or when Ali knocked out Foreman?

  3. Allen Hazen Allen Hazen

    The next autumn, I was a first-year philosophy grad student, enrolled in a Modal Logic course. One day I was going over an exercise with one of my fellow students, and– as happens when modal logic is being talked about, a couple of circles , labelled “World 1” and “World 2,” got drawn on the blackboard. Having a short attention span, I proceeded to draw outlines of continents on World 1 and a white crescent around the edge of World 2: my fellow student laughed. But then I sketched an Apollo capsule, labelling it “Accessibility,” and he was suddenly embarrassed: as a politically liberal American, he found anything that smacked so much of patriotic boasting offensive. (He went on to become a well-known ethicist.)

  4. Of course, I also expected that by now we’d be sending crews to Jupiter

    That’s what I expected as well.

    Do you think the Americans have actually done it but they’re covering it up because of what they discovered?

  5. ….and I don’t recall about Lennon, but do about JFK (In school, in grade 1. They came on the PA system and announced it. In Canada.)

    For Apollo, I was here.

  6. The moon landings were still a serious deal for us Gen Yers, although I think they are now starting to sadly fade in significance with subsequent generations.

    The problem with false memories generated by the media, though, is that they can get mixed up. Now I have a strong mental association between the moon landings and Sam Neil playing cricket on Parkes radio telescope.

  7. GaryB, FCD GaryB, FCD

    At the time of the Gemini program, when I was just a kid of 11 with big plans, I wanted to become an RCAF pilot so I could enter whatever astronaut program was around when I was old enough. I really thought I could be the first man to walk on Mars.

    Those hopes were dashed in 1969 when my eyesight got bad enough to need glasses. Luckily, in 1975 when the Apollo program ended, I was too involved with drugs and alcohol to even notice.

    It seemed like a good idea at the time.

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