A Wondrous Hush/Oh, What A Night

 It was July 20, 1969, and this night – and into the wee hours of July 21 – big-time history would be made nowhere on earth. It would be ‘above’ us, when a man – an actually living person – would walk on the surface of the moon.

Everyone was excited, from the TV reporters, to my father (an engineer) right on down to friends, even the ones too-cool-to-care who had to admit the moon landing was ‘pretty cool’.

My family lived in a town house group of about 50 units in Ottawa’s south end, and teenage life revolved around the pool. Because most of the families were new to town, everyone, kids and adults alike, hung out together.

Which meant a ‘moon landing party’ was a pretty easy sell to my parents, even though it would last into the small hours of the next day. Which meant that on a warm July evening in Ottawa fifty years ago, 25 teenagers crammed into our basement to watch the moon landing, then a few hours later Neil Armstrong walk on the moon on our black and white TV (not that the ‘black and white TV’ mattered: the transmission from the moon was black and white).

My sister remembers the “..expectant, excited, wondrous hush in the entire neighbourhood.  Everyone had a sense of how momentous this event was”.  She also remembers our father saying that he thought maybe his children’s children would see man on the moon, but he never thought that he would see it. 

Interesting that some people still use the moon landing as yardstick for progress, saying things like  ‘if we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we fix potholes’? Yet we haven’t had the social will, or the imagination, to head back to the moon, or further, since the early seventies.

Younger people often hear about “the ’60s” and how so many things changed that decade. From pot to the pill, from fears of nuclear Armageddon to wars in the Middle East and southeast Asia, everything changed. We saw our neighbour roiled by assassinations, riots and demonstrations; there were new freedoms and new music; there was Canada’s Centennial, the FLQ and Miles for Millions. The first moon walk occurred in July of 1969, and a month later came Woodstock, closing out the decade.  

And there was that amazing arc of space exploration and discovery. You’ll find many articles online and in print about why we shouldn’t (or should) return to the moon, but one undeniable fact was how the “space race” – born out of fear and nationalistic fervour – thrilled us, and more importantly, inspired us to figuratively and literally reach for the stars.

 Tom New

(the article as it appeared in The Ottawa Citizen on the 50th anniversary of the landing)