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.

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….

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…

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.