Commemorative Event: 40th Anniversary of the First Moon Landing
First Lunar Landing - July 20, 1969
The U.S. Mission will host a Commemorative Event on the Occasion of the 40th Anniversary of the First Landing on the Moon at the U.S. Mission on Monday evening, July 20, 2009.
For this event, and for future display on this website, we will create a digital slide show based on some of YOUR reminiscences of the first Lunar landing.
Where were you on July 20, 1969 and how did you experience the first landing on the Moon?
Share your reminiscences with us in the space provided below!
Please tell us where you were when you watched the landing – in our slide animation, a star will light up on a map for your location as your words display.
Comments may be signed with your name or posted anonymously.
The U.S. Mission will create a digital slide show based on your memories which will be shown at a commemorative event of the First Lunar Landing on Monday, June 20 at the U.S. Mission. You can post your reminiscence below, or share it on the U.S. Mission Geneva Facebook page.
Note: Discussion posts on this site are submitted to a monitor, so there may be a slight delay before you see your contribution on our site.
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I was staying in a log cabin at a girl’s summer camp in a pine forest in New Hampshire. We were asleep and the camp counselors came and woke all us all up saying “Moon Landing, Moon Landing in 15 minutes.” I was so deeply asleep I’d forgotten all about the Lunar landing, and was a little confused at first. What on earth were they talking about?
We had to walk quickly along a pine needle covered trail up a hill to the camps main cabin where we watched the historic event on a single grainy black and white TV. Space exploration now has a Proustian association in my mind with the smell of pine needles.
My wife and I viewed the landing on TV in Switzerland during our first assignment to the U.S. Mission in Geneva. Watching with Indonesian/Swiss neighbors, we all sensed that we were living through a historic moment.
A very young girl sits in the parlor of a summer cottage of a beautiful summer resort near Athens, Greece. The deep blue sea is only meters away, yet she remains speachless before the “stone-age” black and white TV set to watch some different men with different clothes, sporting different hats (?) and big gloves… They are moonwalking! There is also a flag over there… This is not the greek flag!
Dad and mum are extausted, her older and toddler sisters…hmm…she cannot remember!
It was 40 years ago, the memory of the astronauts is still vivid, but what were my sisters doing at the time?
Beach vacation in the South of France. Everybody gathered around my grandparents’ TV, the only one in the neighborhood. Staying up late at that age was enough of an excitement. Having recently read Tintin’s adventures in “On a marché sur la lune”, watching the first steps was like walking into a dream…
For days before and after the event, my cousins and I were “playing astronauts” on the salty, cracked up surface of the marsh behind our cottage. Today the trepidation of that night is still intact as one of the best in my childhood memories.
I was a kid at the time, living in southern New Jersey. It was hot and humid, which added to the excitement – even an 8 yr old knew this was special – and it wasn’t just because we got to stay up late to watch! Like most, we had a black and white TV set we all gathered around – the family dog and cats, too. I remember wondering how in the world NASA and the astronauts could remain in communications so many thousands of miles away when our telephone routinely had problems on stormy days… I also really liked the “phssht” and beeps that was part of the conversation. And when were we going to see pictures of “the man in the moon”??
The summer of 1969 I was working in a factory warehouse in downtown Baltimore, the night shift. I remember hurrying home from work in the middle of the night, camping out on the living room rug in front of the TV screen, and not taking my eyes off it for hours. Ended up not going to sleep that night (which made for a rough day the next day), but I was so proud.
I was in middle school in Dover, Delaware and the moon landing had special meaning for the whole town as the space suits used in the US Space Program were made in Dover. We were lucky that every astronaut came to our town to get fitted for a space suit. On that particular day, the entire school assembled to watch the landing on a single black-and-white television. We were very proud that our little town had a very visible part of the day’s exciting event. The whole world saw the bright white space suit made in Dover. My most vivid memory is the calming and fatherly voice of Walter Cronkite. From his voice alone, we knew that this was one of the most important events in American history.
I was with my parents in Cauterets, in the French Pyrénées Mountains, we were sitting in the lounge of the hotel, surrounded by other guests and watching TV…
I was a baby sleeping in the arms of my mother.
I was 11 years old watching this incredible event on our black and white television surrounded by my family – a mother born in 1918 when installation of a telephone was a big deal when she was 9 years old – was gasping with awe! How far we had developed as the human race – and how much further we have gone since then!
It was a steamy, hot night in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had waited all day to see the moon landing. Throughout the flight, in the preceding days, Jules Bergman had reported what was happening — and what could go wrong. My excitement, though, overwhelmed any worry a ten-year old might have had.
By the time the lunar module set down, it was almost 11 p.m. For the next 2 or 3 hours, my mother and I watched men in space suits walk and jump on the moon’s surface through the lens of a black and white television. I remember wondering whether they would fall into the nearby crater or jump with such force they would escape the moon’s meager gravity. It was riveting.
Sleep didn’t come that night. I was too busy staring out the window at the waxing light of the moon.
Frontenac, Kansas is right at the intersection of Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Expansive vistas dotted by cows and corn and roads. My dad slept while my mom and my two younger sisters watched the TV in the den. The flag. The kangaroo hops. Then, to bed. The next day was my 14th birthday.
Jackson Michigan is a small midwest town featuring an ice cream parlor and a large state penitentiary. There was not much going on there in 1969, except for the fact that we had, for some reason, the highest number of astronauts per capita than any other place in the U.S. I guess when people wanted to leave town, they wanted to go far.
My memory of the moon landing is of an old dusty Sylvania black & white TV the teachers would roll into the classroom for us to watch the various events (launch, orbit, landing, splash down,…). They had to turn it on about half an hour beforehand, to get it warmed up. I swear I watched every bit of that screen as it came into view. I did not want to miss a thing. I can still hear the “beep…beep…beep” in the background, as the astronauts talked. That evening, my brother and I sat upside down on our living room chairs, pretending to blast off. I still do that, when nobody is looking…
I was 12, an American living in England. I had been sent home early that summer from my boarding school due to mononucleosis.
I was totally into the space race, and followed all the missions in as much detail is I could in those pre-internet days.
The 19th I heard ‘The Eagle has landed’ on TV, and in the middle of the night my parents got me up to watch Armstrong step out. I had a lot of trouble interpreting the grainy image of him coming down the ladder: Was that all of him, or just a closeup of his foot?
After about half an hour, my parents went back to bed, but I stayed up as long as the BBC continued coverage, unwilling to miss a second of this marvel that humanity had accomplished….
After a long day of work in the stables… feeding the chicken, cutting alfafa, milking the cows… we sat around on my grandfather’s porch listening to one of the very few radios available in my small town in Mexico. We were all so excited of what was being broadcasted, everyone yelling and screaming in such thrill. Although we did not have more than sound effects, we could visual every single detail…. It was extraordinary. I was 9 years old, and still remember the thrill, when I think back to that day.
I was 19 years old in my native country: CHILE. My friends and I spent the day at a local tennis club for some games. Afterward, we decided to head downtown for the broadcast everyone was waiting for. We were nervous and skeptical…in the midst of everything people got so nervous they drank more and more, a few yelled dismissive comments, betting that it couldn’t be done. Others bit their nails in anxiety, some jumped in excitement, while others sat transfixed on the screen, overwhelmed with feeling. Nevertheless everyone watched attentively and when we finally heard the first words spoken by an astronaut on the moon…we were all swept up in a sense of awe and started applauding simultaneously.
Iowa, hot and steamy, my dad with a Scotch on the rocks, my mother with a cup of tea and me, age 18, with a diet Coke, spending an unusual evening together. I was on the verge of leaving home to go to university to study journalism, and I had a summer job rating hail crop insurance around the Midwest for National Farmers Union. The job bored me stiff, so I spent my spare time noting curious names of clients (IP Rainwater, Folger Hogg and Holger Fogg, Ima Hogg and Iva Grand). My parents and I, with my mother fussing more than usual and my dad talking about his time in the Navy in the Mariana Islands, a volunteer for WW2 with 2 small children and a track
record with the Burlington Ralway line. He rarely spoke war, but here was pride surfacing 25 years later.
We ate popcorn from Vinton, Iowa, salted, the world’s best. The wall-to-wall carpet in the house, just 4 years old, was a fashionable gold, textured. The sofa was American maple colonial, with rusty orange patterned upholstery. Offwhite curtains sat comfortably at each end of the bay window, And on TV, ahhh, there was Walter Cronkite, CBS News. In the air, a sense of expectation and unbelievability that you could almost touch. And then there they were, those two men on the moon, Buzz? Neil? sports team names! And there was dependable, reassuring Walter C. saying “Oh, gosh.” Walter, what?
A line that was so clear, so very clear! A line that was suddenly drawn between the past, where we had hopes and dreams and the certainty of the golf-playing, country-building sentiments of an Ike as president, but the anxiety that the Soviets were ahead in some odd race, and the future: anything and everything, but Kennedy and Johnson, who had built the dream, were gone, and Nixon, president, was loved abroad but not at home, and Vietnam was lurking, creeping up on us.
I fell in love with journalism that day, with that “oh gosh” of Cronkite, and I suddenly knew I wanted to be a journalist, to help people understand what it means to be a citizen. Oh! the pride, the excitement, the sense of belonging, but the urge to know more, to understand, to push past given boundaries.
Last night, at the US Mission in Geneva I was astonished to hear a very successful historian say she watched the moon landing that day back in 1969, and she decided to study history, and to hear a man who is one of the world’s top physicists at Cern say he watched the moon landing and said, “I’m going to become a physicist.”
Small steps, giant steps, no steps: a moment when we were simply awestruck, and grateful to be part of the human race. No, not grateful: immensely proud and excited.