Moon Shot Residents shared thrill of landmark moon landing
At 10:56 p.m. EDT on July 20, 1969, Neil Amstrong put the first footprint on the moon, an event witnessed by a worldwide audience of an estimated 600 million people, including Nancy and Al Hammer, Concordia Haven residents.
In 1969, the Hammers were newly married and living in an apartment in Bellview.
They stayed up watching the grainy black-and-white images being beamed live from the moon.
“I don't remember what network, but more than likely it was CBS because (Walter) Cronkite was the guy to watch back then,” Nancy Hammer said.
“We watched the whole thing until the very end as far as I know,” said Al Hammer.
“I was totally mesmerized. I had been into astronomy since I got my first telescope at 13,” he added.
Bud Sears, another Concordia Haven resident, also stayed up watching.“I was quite interested in the astronauts,” Sears said.He was recently discharged from the U.S. Army's 16th Field Artillery Regiment, where he had been an electronics engineer on the Honest John rocket, the first nuclear-capable surface-to-surface rocket in the United States arsenal.He also was a new dad.“My wife and I had adopted a baby girl, and we were changing diapers so we had no problems staying up,” he said.Sears said since 1969, he has collected items that commemorated the moon landing, such as the 1976 Eisenhower Bicentennial dollar coin with the image of the Liberty Bell and the full moon on the reverse side.Others weren't part of that huge television audience.Norma Laughner, another Concordia retirement living resident, was an assistant professor of speech and English at Slippery Rock University in 1969.“I had no TV. I listened to it on the radio which had a very good description of what was happening,” Lockyer said.“I had an 8 a.m. class the next day. Everybody was talking about it. It was quite a morning.”She remembered after the class let out as she walking outside that the moon was still visible in the morning sky.“I looked up then and thought, 'Imagine man on the moon up there.' It boggled the mind. I had to stop and think about it,” Lockner said.
Chris Barker of Treesdale in Adams Township also missed the televised moon walk because he was in a jetliner crossing the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Rome and a delayed honeymoon with his wife, Mary.“That night they announced in the cabin that they had landed,” Barker said.“When we landed in Rome, the people were all watching it on TVs in storefront windows,” he said.“I bought some Italian newspapers and tried translating the story from Italian via Spanish,” said Barker, who knew Spanish but not Italian.For Ruth Purcell, executive director of the Butler County Community College Education Foundation, the moon landing paled in comparison to actually meeting Neil Armstrong a few years later.“By 1972, he had left NASA,” Purcell said. “He's an Ohio native and was on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati in engineering.“I was a senior in political science, but a sorority sister who was a home economics major was going to interview him about the food they ate in space,” she said.Purcell, an avid fan of all space-related things “because my dad was into it,” begged to come along to the interview.“I remember it was cold and when we got to his office all I remember is when that man took my coat all I could think was 'These were the hands that were on the moon,'” she said.Purcell wasn't impressed by Armstrong's 5 foot 11 inch frame but was struck by how “down to earth” the astronaut was.“I think I said something like 'Oh, Mr. Armstrong,'” Purcell said.“My head was spinning, it was like an out-of-body experience. My friend was so mad at me. 'You are just such a goofball,' she said.”
Purcell remembered Armstrong as a gentleman.“Fifty years later, I still get goose bumps talking about it. It was just an incredible experience,” she said.Mars Mayor Gregg Hartung also has a memory of Armstrong. Hartung said he was 11 years old watching the moon landing, staying up late with his 9-year-old brother.“The most vivid thing I remember was Neil Armstrong and the sort of jump he did coming off the lunar lander. What impressed me was the difference between Earth gravity and lunar gravity,” Hartung said.The mayor said Mars has been working with NASA to put on the town's Martian New Year celebrations that occur every 22 months to mimic the length of the Martian year.Hartung said the moon is not so much in NASA's past as looming in its future.“We'll be returning to the moon to use it as a launching pad to get to Mars,” he said.Hartung said NASA plans call for a return of humans to the moon by 2024 and perhaps a first human mission to Mars as soon as 2033.
