Reflections on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11

Jack Deatherage

(7/2019) When John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962, I was seven years old. That school year my second grade teacher got our class started on creating personal scrapbooks. As I recall, Glenn and NASA were my book's focus. I watched the mission launch on the TV. Later, I watched the grainy, satellite relayed "at sea" recovery of the space capsule. I filled pages of the scrapbook with newspaper clippings of the events.

The scrapbook is lost, along with most of the memories of those years. I do recall visiting The Franklin Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia, during the school year 1966-67. The museum had either a Mercury or Gemini capsule on display. Classmate, Barry Gallatin and I stood in awe of the contraption, marveling at how grown men could be crammed into such a tiny space. I think that may have been the moment I lost interest in the space program. I was sure I'd never fit in one of those things and view Earth from it.

When Commander Armstrong became the first human to set foot on Luna in July of 1969, I wasn't particularly enthralled by the event. I'd begun my first tax paying job that summer and was more interested in how I could spend the money the government allowed me to keep than someone walking on the Moon. Yes I watched the "...one small step for a man, one giant leap blah, blah, blah" thing on TV. How could I not when we could only get 3 channels and all of them were running the same coverage? In any case, the Moon landing was a non-event as I remember it fifty years later.

I have clearer memories of Apollo 13, launched in April of 1970, but only because I was bedridden with a leg swollen like a sausage due to an infection that took my temperature to 105-F for several days. I vividly recall Doc Cadle stopping by the house to inject me with penicillin while urging Mom to call an ambulance. As I had a claw hammer near to hand and no desire to be hospitalized, I suffered for two weeks at home before the ordeal ended. Much of that suffering was due to listening to the radio in my room droning on and on about the approaching doom of Apollo 13.

It was during those Apollo mission years that I took to perfecting my tomato sauce for pasta. Putting monkeymen on the Moon was beyond my ability, but getting the sauce perfect was not! NASA and I were successful in our disparate fields. Sadly, fifty years later I doubt NASA could land an ape on the Moon and bring it back safely, and I certainly haven't recreated my pasta sauce!

While NASA lacks the drive, and public goodwill, to return to the Moon (so much for the Luna colonies the science fiction authors of the 1950s and I dreamed of) I'm still chasing the pasta sauce of my teen years. Fortunately for me, I only have to discover which variety of tomato Dad grew and learn to can them as Mom did each August and September! Where NASA would spend tens, if not hundreds of billions of tax dollars trying to recreate the Moon mission, I'll likely spend a little less- possibly several hundred dollars (okay, maybe a thousand, meh, maybe two, as I trial varieties of tomatoes over the next few decades.

Unlike NASA, which has members who can actually focus on one task at a time, I tend to be scatterbrained, bobble-headed, or just confused as to where I am thinking-wise at any given moment. Consider the Emmitsburg Youth Garden I began building this year.

I want kidlets to come learn the myriad aspects of gardening, but my reason for starting the project was and is to have enough ground to grow tomatoes, and eventually, good garlic on! If kids learn anything from joining the garden group and setting up their own gardens- well good for them! I'll help as best I can, but being praised for trying to create a "community" garden is rather embarrassing when it is secondary to my purposes. Which brings to mind a lecture on bread building I agreed to give at the library.

I'd offered the same lecture some years ago, but withdrew the offer after being told I had to be sanctioned by some group with liability insurance and a certified kitchen. I planned to explain how to build bread without actually baking a loaf during the lecture. (I'd taught the younger Jack to read without a book. Teaching basic bread building without actually baking bread is even simpler.) When the topic came up again at the library I agreed to do a lecture. Why?

For selfish reasons, of course. I'm going through one of my reduction phases. Having to stand before strangers explaining the building of as simple a bread as I can manage is going to take months of experimenting with cheap flour and a minimal number of other ingredients, as well as learning the simplest of techniques, while still ending up with a flavorful product I'd actually eat. The last time I went low tech and cheap the Mad Bulgarian was nearby to dump the edible loaves on. The house hounds got to crunch the bread I didn't dare present to the Mad One. This go-round, the apprentice at the tattoo shop has agreed to dispose of my experiments.

As word of the distant lecture began to spread, a note reached me: "Imagine the betterment of the community. Fresh bread in every kitchen. Eventually we can revitalize the once vigorous wheat industry. We will erect your statue in the town square where the fountain should’ve been. And schools across the nation [will] be announcing your name across the loud speaker. You will have multiple appearances on Howard Stern. The producer of Comedy Central will find his muse in you, catapulting them into the hall of fame with SNL. Wonder bread will have to change their name. All because of you and the once struggling library system. Finally people will begin to read again- virtually eliminating illiteracy."

Sweet Mother of the gods! I'm more of a Randian Objectivist then I thought!

"The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness. This does not mean that he is indifferent to all men, that human life is of no value to him and that he has no reason to help others in an emergency. But it does mean that he does not subordinate his life to the welfare of others, that he does not sacrifice himself to their needs, that the relief of their suffering is not his primary concern, that any help he gives is an exception, not a rule, an act of generosity, not of moral duty, that it is marginal and incidental—as disasters are marginal and incidental in the course of human existence—and that values, not disasters, are the goal, the first concern and the motive power of his life." The Virtue of Selfishness - Ayn Rand

Being praised for simply following my interests makes no sense to me at all.