@ApolloPlus40 - Profiles of the crew, and a nation
The day before the launch, newspapers carried profiles of the Apollo 11 crew and commentary on the scene near at the launch site.
In an article about Neil Armstrong AP writer Paul Recer revealed that as a teenager Armstrong had worked in a drugstore for $0.40 an hour in order to save up enough money for flying lessons that cost $9 an hour, the equivalent of about $110 today. His father told the AP that he had taken the boy for flights in an old Ford Trimotor instead of Sunday school, because morning flights were cheaper. Armstrong, Collin, and Aldrin and their contemporaries had trained their whole lives to prepare for the challenges of space flight, the article implied.
In another, less adulatory, article a journalist asked whether the rest of the nation was quite so well prepared for the lunar landing. A selection:
Tomorrow, men will be going to the moon. At a dock at Port Canaveral, a black, sinister-looking British submarine called the Renown waited to take on a cargo of Polaris nuclear missiles, and a few miles south a blond bronzed young god browsed, with sensual touch, through the merchandise at "Soul Surfboards," and men drank at the "Ali Bar" and "The Satellite Lounge," it being too early for the topless girls at the "Missile Lounge," and in the black ghetto of Cocoa, Fla., an old man stared wordlessly through the window of the tiny "Working Man Friend Cafe" on Magnolia Street. Tomorrow, men will be going to the moon.
Another:
"At the 'Wooden Nickel Saloon,' a man noted that all the government people coming here represent the biggest exodus of brass from Washington since the gentlemen and their ladies rode buggies out to witness the first Battle of Bull Run."
Finally:
"...tomorrow, they will be going to the moon. They seem ready. Are we?"
This blog post is part of the @ApolloPlus40 series, which accompanies the ApolloPlus40 Twitter project by Nature News, a re-telling of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, 40 years later.
