captainsblog | Jul. 21st, 2023

I know that’s not the exact quote-

but it fits July 20th, because the most recent of three important events in my life occurring on that date was in 1969.

It was fairly late at night, and the 'rents and I were huddled around what was probably a newish color TV set by then in our East Meadow living room. Not that color would’ve helped with this broadcast, because it was in living Black and White, coming from the moon for the very first time.

I had already become a serious NASA nerd by the age of 9 and would continue through the next and final six Apollo lunar missions, five of which actually made it all the way to their destination. I ordered crew photos from the Manned Spacecraft Center; I had geegaws from our trip to the Kennedy one in 1974; and I had a 45 RPM recording of the audio from the landing of the lunar module, followed by Neil Armstrong‘s first steps. It is still burned into my brain so vividly that I can tell, anytime a film depicts it, whether it’s the real thing or not. It took me decades to realize what the ground crew meant on that audio about “we’re breathing once again.“ The telemetry failed in the final seconds and Armstrong had to pilot the module, little more than a plastic bag with rocket fuel, on manual controls.

Still, he made it, and they made it home with their moonrocks, leaving him as the first of only 12 humans to have set foot on that distant globe.

Allegedly.

So yesterday brought the usual run of memes about the event. My favorite was this one:

That, in turn, got me posting my own Yelp about it:

Commander John Koenig: “Our GPS failed and we’ve been out here way too long! Do not recommend!”

Dr. Helena Russell: “Oh sure, blame the GPS! We’ve been out here since 1999 because YOU wouldn’t stop and ask directions!”

Don't recognize the names or the year?

With the annual summer return of the Mission: Impossible film franchise, how could we forget how Rollin and Cinnamon from the original MI series got shot into space 30 years after that first moon landing? I was a regular viewer of that series in the mid-70s, on I think channel 11 in New York, where it came along right before the Star Wars revival of sci-fi. Former Impossiblers Martin Landau and Barbara Bain headed the cast, along with the Barry Morse I homaged for no particular reason a few weeks back. I got reading some of the IMDB trivia about the show, but stopped when I saw this one, realizing it could never get any better:

At a recent Space:1999 convention (Breakaway 2019), Barbara Bain recounted how she had asked to have a bar installed in her dressing room for her to limber up before each day's shooting. She walked in to find major construction being conducted, discovering that an alcoholic beverage bar was being installed instead of the ballet-type post along the wall that she had asked for.

Good thing she didn't tell them she wanted to see Klingons around Uranus.

----

That's my "where were you when" moment for 7/20/69. I have another of those still in my memory, probably one of under a dozen for the entire decade (11/22/63, our oldest sister Sandy's wedding day of 10/21/67 and my first niece's birth 10/23/69), that fell on that exact same day two years earlier:

Wow, I never realized, until I was Today Years Old, that my first Shea Stadium game was a rescheduled rainout. It went by in a brisk (for now) 2:37, and despite having in my head for decades that the Mets had lost 8-0 to their 1962 expansion cousins, it was actually 7-0. On the Houston side of the box score, there's future Met Rusty Staub early in his career, future Hall of Famer Eddie Matthews near the end of his, several future Ball Four characters from two years later, and pitcher Don Wilson who would take his own life several years after all this.

For the good guys: no runs, two hits, one error (only one?); no Tom Seaver in his rookie year, but a few other pieces of the Miracle Mets of two years hence were in place. Phil Linz, Tommy Davis and Greg Goossen, also characters in Bouton's book, were on the field in blue pinstripes. The bullpen called on that night included a pair of Shaws and a Taylor. No Tommie Agee, but Tommie Reynolds. Bud Harrelson got hit by two pitches. I remembered absolutely none of this, other than the majesty and atmosphere of being in that ballpark, and being there with my father for the first of more than a few times over the next decade, which amounted to about 90 percent of the father-son bonding moments we ever had.

I really don't remember dates of any of the other Shea games I would attend, with him or Scouts or friends over the next decades, except for this one:

I found that memento among the stash of tickets I managed to keep from the past half century or so. The Mets also lost that one, in the major league debut of an Atlanta Braves pitcher who would torment them for the next 22 years as both a starter and reliever. John Smoltz would make it to the Hall of Fame in 2015, but that game was more important to me than even for that:

for July 23, 1988 was Eleanor's first time coming with me to the sanctuary of my lifelong religion, three days after her July 20th anniversary of going around the sun,

We'd been married less than a year. This trip was the last time we would see Sandy, on her 49th and final birthday, who would pass a few months later. That loss was way bigger than the first of the dozens the Mets would endure to Smoltz after that.

I've now shared 35 more birthdays with Eleanor. We've had plenty of ups, occasional downs. A week or so after getting back from that road trip, we adopted our first kitty Esmeralda from Eleanor's then best friend who's since ghosted her. (I may be experiencing that myself with somebody right now and would love to hear it's not the case...) That began a continuous parade that has included Nine Lives of cats, three of dog, the occasional kettle of fish, and even a tumbler pigeon for one strange summer.

For the first time since I can remember, we went out for one of our birthdays last night- to a place specializing in the cuisine of the chef’s native Mexican city of Oaxaca. Great and HUUUGE meals, mine using a mole sauce that was invented in that region. We had a helpful server and staff, and while there were plenty of music opportunities last night, several of them were outdoors and it POURED as we were driving home from the restaurant.

She got many greetings from friends near and far, as well as hearing from Emily, who unfortunately got skunked during the day. Not quite the same as seeing the Mets lose with a future Hall of Famer on the field against them, but not too far off.

Tonight will be our first visit to the Albright Knox Art Gallery, now known as the "AKG" after the major donation from an Amherst resident that opened a third building on the grounds. They are reinstalling an exhibition that was down by the silos last summer, and a famed Buffalo poet will be reading his associated work there.

And then we splash down. Houston, we've got a problem, and it's your damned baseball team:P