Part of the reason for this blog was to keep in touch with family, as we have family members spread out all across the country. We also thought it could be a great place to record family stories. We are going to start featuring stories about various cultural and personal events written by family members. Our first family story is from Peter’s dad, Doug Brittin.
Photo Credit: National Geographic
1969:
I was 19 years old and living in Long Beach (Lakewood) CA, still at my parent’s house. I had only been in living in California since May, and was taking summer classes at City College (Philosophy and California History as I recall) while working full-time at a carpet store. I needed to be enrolled in school as my draft board back in IL was trying very (very) hard to classify me 1-A after I had left Kings Point, certainly not a good classification at the time.
On that Sunday, July 20th, when they finally landed, I had spent the morning at Huntington Beach (Bolsa Chica), as it was my only day off. I know I wasn’t surfing because I had already proven that I wasn’t very good at that. I was driving my 1931 Model A Ford, which was a pretty fun car that I had bought when I got to CA. My parents had planned to cook hamburgers that afternoon while we watched all of the action. Their TV was a 19″ black-and-white portable Setchell-Carlson (now there is a name for you) that could be rolled around on a cart. After I got back from the beach, we kind of settled into the family room (Mom, Dad and Keith) and watched all of the excitement on CBS, with good old Uncle Walter (Cronkite) narrating the events, holding up his little models of the various components of the spacecraft.
Watching the descent, listening to the voice transmissions, was without a doubt a very nerve-wracking time. Then those landing leg shadows showed up on the moon’s surface, slowed down, and kicked up the dust and finally stopped, there was a momentary silence, and we heard those immortal words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed!” Everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief, and then I think we all started talking at once. My mom was definitely in need of a kleenex. Despite all that was going on at the time (Vietnam, the Manson murders), the event provided an amazing feeling of relief, pride and euphoria. I think we were all just absolutely amazed (a) that it worked, and (b) we had beaten the Russkies!!
I had been following the space race since my parents took us up to the top of the hill by my grade school in 1957 to watch the Sputnik go overhead, and I remember the fear and concern that everyone had. So every event in the US space program was something that I followed very closely…from Shepherd to Glenn (with good old Yuri Gagarin beating us to orbit), to the first docking in space, to the tragedy of Grissom, Young and Chaffee (which, by the way, are the names of the 3 man-made islands in Long Beach harbor), to that amazing Apollo 8 Christmas lunar orbit only 8 months earlier. This landing was the culmination of all that effort and you couldn’t help but be both proud and amazed.
The excitement of the moon walk was yet to come, and underneath that was the gnawing fear that something might go wrong with the lunar take-off, leaving Armstrong and Aldrin stranded there. I still have a pretty good collection of newspapers from all those space milestones, including the LA Times front page “MOON LANDING!”, but unfortunately they are all in a storage unit in Half Moon Bay! The other part of this milestone for me is that it was still 7 long weeks until I met Lorrie (but that’s another topic)…
The Great Brittins 