A half century ago this month I was spending my summer working for some oil company subsidiary. The father of a guy I had become friends with during my freshman year at the University of Oklahoma landed us the gig. Most of our time was spent traipsing around south central Oklahoma on the eastern side of a bunch of rocky hills known as the Arbuckle Mountains.
We were on a survey team. Our job was marking the trail for a crew of guys who would drill holes in the ground, stick dynamite down them, explode it, then, through a system of listening devices, analyze the resulting vibrations in the hopes of finding deep pools of crude.
We worked out of a town called Madill which was and still is, as the local Chamber of Commerce liked to say, "nestled in the arms of Lake Texoma." At the time the burg had a population of not quite 3,000 souls, one main drag, which was a section of state highway leading straight to the aforementioned lake, two gas stations, one drive-in restaurant with car hops, a national guard armory, and two coffee shops/diners located at the north and south ends of town.
The second biggest thing that happened in Madill during the summer of 1969 was someone lit off a tear gas canister in the middle of the armory. At the time the building was crowded with high school kids dancing away during a, "sock hop." When the fire department arrived most of them were outside the building puking their guts out. The biggest thing, on the other hand, was far different in nature. Like just about everyone else in the nation, if not the world, Madill was transfixed by three Americans headed to the moon.
Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong lifted off Wednesday, July 16 at 8:32am central time. Our team's chief surveyor had let us hang around one of those diners longer than usual because of the launch. We were grateful for the gesture, but none of us actually saw the first moments of it.
This was long before the days of televisions in restaurants, high on the walls, or any place else. The diner's owner had put a portable TV on a spare table so customers could see some serious history with their coffee. Unfortunately the table was near the front door.
At the very instant the Saturn V's massive engines burst to life a woman walked in, saw the screen, exclaimed, "Oh look, they're taking off!" then planted her fat ass directly between the TV and everyone else. The room erupted, demanding her to move. She turned and looked at us, utterly puzzled by the uproar for a few precious seconds. By the time the reason for all the yelling dawned on her and she stepped aside, Apollo 11 was soaring high above the launch pad.
The Apollo 11 mission lasted eight days and some change. That summer if you had asked the 19 year old history major temporarily living in Madill, OK what things would be like in 50 years, he would have told you, with complete certainty, there would be a manned base, or bases on the Moon. He would have even speculated about the possibility of full blown mining operations. He also wouldn't have had any doubt that at least one American flag was planted firmly on Mars.
Man, was that naive fucker wrong.
Barely two weeks after Apollo 11 returned to earth, Charles Manson sent Tex Watson and three other members of his deadly posse to a house on Cielo Dr. in Los Angeles. The war in Vietnam was still chewing up casualties and Richard Nixon's, "peace plan," was to, bomb the North Vietnamese back to the stone age. Protests against the whole bloody experience in Southeast Asia were growing in number and intensity. In other words, the good news was we made it to the Sea of Tranquility and back. The bad news was, when it came to everything else, we had gone bat shit crazy.
Within a scant few years going to the Moon was deemed not only too expensive, but even worse, boring. In the death throes of the Apollo program it became clear to even the most ardent proponent of the space program the nation had no taste for true exploration, we just wanted to say we beat the Russians there.
On December 7, 1972 Apollo 17 lifted off for the Moon. Six days after the launch, right before he climbed back into the landing module, Gene Cernan told the world, "I'm on the surface and as I take man's last step from the surface back home for some time to come--but we believe not too long into the future--I'd like to just say what I believe history will record--that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind."
What history has actually recorded is Gene Cernan remains the last human to walk on the surface of the moon. And, he was wrong too.
7-18-19
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