A Man Walks on the Moon

July 20, 1969, and America is waiting for the Apollo 11 crew to land on the moon. I’ll always remember that day. The astronauts had departed on this space mission on July 16th, but it took them four days to reach the moon.

It was a hot and sunny Saturday in Mountain View, California, and we were off to spend the day at a Cub Scout family picnic. Little boys were running all over the Mountain View Recreational Center Park, and having the wonderful time that little boys have at a picnic. The adults were all gathered around the picnic tables listening to a portable radio as the lunar module landed and Neil Armstrong prepared to become the first man to step on the moon. There was no other topic of conversation that I can remember, and it certainly took most of the day for them to accomplish the landing. We listened to all the conversations between their control station on earth and the astronauts, and found it endlessly fascinating. We ate, we watched the children at their play, but mostly we listened to the radio.

Later in the afternoon, we drove our children home, and Jerry and I went over to our friends, the Magyars, to watch, with them, the actual moon walk on television. We spent the early evening there, but decided it would be best not to leave the boys to their own devices for too long, so returned home. What I so vividly remember, is the empty roads we encountered at about 7 o’clock in the evening. We drove the usually very busy expressway from Sunnyvale to Mountain View with almost no other traffic. I had driven that road numerous times, at almost all hours of the day and night, and I never saw it without heavy traffic. It was an eerie feeling. We felt as if the whole community must have been glued to their television sets that night.