On the Fiftieth anniversary of the Moon Landing, Revisit What It Was Like to Watch the Event from New York City
East Nineties
In the ground-floor apartment of a brownstone in the East Nineties, at around eight-thirty, guests began to arrive for a moon-watching party that was being given by two young men just out of law school. The male guests, most of whom were young lawyers, like their hosts, were dressed informally but expensively, some in light-colored summer suits and some in richly colored shirts. The ties in the room were wide but not flowery. The women, who seemed a few years younger than the men, were also expensively dressed, many in silky, boldly patterned bell-bottom trouser suits. The arriving guests sat down on a sofa, on chairs, or on a mattress on the floor which had been brought in from a bedroom. The political temper of the group soon established itself as liberalism-taken-for-granted. Some of the young men had spent time in the last few years working for liberal political candidates. Although so recently out of law school, many of them had already acquired the self-assured, forceful handshakes of successful lawyers, and had already adopted the lawyerish mannerisms of fixing their listeners with a frank gaze and speaking to them in carefully measured tones. On the television screen, Walter Cronkite was waiting for the astronauts to finish checking their spacecraft in preparation for their walk on the moon’s surface. The people in the living room were a loosely connected collection of friends, and many of them were catching up on each other’s recent past. There was a hubbub of many conversations.
“I think I met you at a skating party.”
“If you have all your defense mechanisms up . . .”
“Shall we introduce them now or later?”
Conversation about the moon landing was restricted to jokes or brief comments. Many people seemed to want something to happen that was more exciting than what could really happen.
“It would be great if they found an animal,” one man said.
“We’ve seen everything in simulation. They might as well do it all in simulation,” a girl said.
Several people said they were not sure whether the C.B.S. simulation of the LM being shown at that moment was real or not.
“Hey, these furry claws coming down the ladder!” someone said.
“No. Coming out of a crater,” said a girl.
The moment when C.B.S. expected Armstrong to emerge from the LM arrived. When the exit was delayed for ten minutes while the astronauts continued to check their equipment, a hush finally fell over the group. After several minutes, a man said, “They’re having one more hand of poker.” Then the voices of the astronauts began to announce Armstrong’ emergence onto the porch at the top of the ladder. The hush continued. Suddenly, a telephone in the next room rang, and a young man went to answer it. When he returned, Walter Cronkite was saying, “Commander Armstrong is about to pull the ring that will give us our first live television coverage from the moon.” The telephone rang again, and someone said, “Let it ring,” but another man, after hesitating, went to answer it. The landscape of the moon appeared on the screen. At the top of the screen was the jet black of space. In the middle was the brilliant streak of whiteness that was the lunar landscape. At the bottom was the blackness of the LM’s shadow. The ladder to the ground cut vertically across the screen. Armstrong’s foot appeared. The young man returned from answering the phone and announced, “There’s a girl up at the corner who can’t find the party.”
The group was riveted to the screen in silence during Armstrong’s descent to the ground, during his first steps and his first words, and during Colonel Aldrin’s descent. Then there was some more joking. “When we find the first moon men, we’ll have to decide which ones to support—the ones from the South or the ones from the North. We’ll have to send military advisers.” Conversations about other matters started again.
Aldrin, after taking a few steps, began to jump up and down on the moon. “Magnificent!” he said.
On the sofa, a couple began talking about a girl named Margie.
Suddenly, Armstrong emerged with amazing speed from the black shadow of the LM into the brilliant sunlight. There was a sigh from the group; then it fell silent again for a moment. As Armstrong set up the television camera to look back on the LM, conversation resumed.
“There’s something interesting in a crater here!” Armstrong called out as he moved away from the LM.
A girl who was sitting on the floor began to tell about a friend of hers who had married a nun. “The nun was in the lecture course he was giving,” she said. “He had her out of her robes and married in two weeks, and a year later she had twins.”
On the screen, Aldrin was loping in a circle on the surface of the moon in front of the LM. The girl looked up at the screen and cried out, “I just don’t believe it!”
“I’m used to it already,” a young man next to her said.
“When you get blasé about people going to the moon, you know you’ve changed,” she said.
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Various Authors, BruceDayne
