I never imagined writing this recollection about the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon.
20 July 1969 is one of those dates that I'll always remember where I was and what I was doing - just like 22 November 1963 (JFK's assassination) and 11 September 2001. The latter two were sad days, but not Sunday 20 July 1969. For me, that's the day geology became relevant in a way it hadn't.
At the time I was a rising senior in the Department of Geology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. I spent much of that summer in the 'Burg working on an NSF-funded project that had been secured by my advisor, Dr. Bruce K. Goodwin. I was doing some geologic mapping and other measurements along the James River in the vicinity of Richmond, VA. That work would lead to my seminal (NOT!) B.S. thesis, Jointing and Foliation in the Petersburg Granite near Richmond, Virginia. Richmond sat astride on the fall line, where the 'hard rocks' of the Piedmont met the 'soft' sediments of the coastal plain. But that's another tale.
I spent the latter part of that day - Sunday - in the basement of Bryan Complex, a large men's dormitory on the W & M campus. I was actually in the basement of Dawson Hall, one of the five wings of the complex. Dawson Hall was not only my dormitory (room 323) but its basement also housed part of the Department of Geology, whose labs and classrooms were located in a portion of the basement of Bryan Complex. Made it terribly easy for me to roll out of bed at 7:50 AM to make an 8 AM geology class in the Dawson Hall basement. Sometimes I actually did make it to class.
Televisions were rare on campus in those days, but there was a small B&W TV in the Dawson basement. I can't recall where it came from but on that day we knew what it would be doing: glued to the coverage of the Apollo 11 landing and Neil Armstrong's Moon walk. Like about half the country we tuned it to CBS and Walter Cronkite, fiddling with the rabbit ears to get the best picture possible - grainy, but that's about the best anyone could do a quarter million miles away from a 10-watt transmitter. We placed the TV atop one the cabinets so we could all see it. One of the taller guys was assigned the task of adjusting the rabbit ears to keep the picture from drifting away.
A bunch of us waited anxiously for Armstrong's Moon walk, which occurred about 10:30 PM Eastern time. The crowd was not that large - maybe 20-25 or so, mostly geology majors and assorted denizens of the Bryan Complex. At the time of the walk most of the crowd were males although I do recall a few women. We had a lot of women in the small geology degree program, but in those days W&M had a curfew for women - by 10 PM Sunday they should have been in their dorms. But that night, all bets were off.
We cheered when Armstrong walked.
I recall thinking that Apollo 11 would be a game-changer. Up until then, the space program was more about astronomy, engineering and physics than geology and rightly so. Even the ultimate mission was a remarkable feat of engineering. But geology was significant, because one of the main elements of that mission and future lunar excursions was to bring back rocks and ascertain the presence of water, moonquakes, etc. Study of Moon rocks would provide great insight into Earth, the Moon, our solar system, and beyond.
The Apollo program and its legacy turned out to be so much more than I imagined.
But on 20 July 1969 it was great to be an Earth scientist.
It still is.
Can't wait for a lunar return trip and one to Mars. Hope I will be around.
And one other thing: in those days, we were concerned with global cooling. Just waiting for those ice sheets to come sliding down from the Laurentians and points north.
"I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer." - Neil Armstrong (quoted in @Oregonian)
"Ten years ago the moon was an inspiration to poets and an opportunity for lovers. Ten years fro now it will be just another airport." - Emmanuel G. Mesthene
Sounds quite familiar! I was a graduate student at Cal spending the summer attending a NSF program (I was one of 3 grad students in a program for faculty) at Ohio State in Columbus. (My first full eastern summer!) We were housed in a dorm, and we had long days in classes and computer labs. As it was Columbus, what else was there to do? The usual form was early to bed and early to rise with sessions beginning at a proper, midwestern 8 am, but the Sunday evening moon landing was too much of a thrill to miss. I seem to remember that we even brought some beer into the supposedly dry dorm common room and celebrated when feet landed on the surface. The following day the morning sessions were well attended by many sleepy (some I suspect with slight hangovers) fellows.
Posted by: E. O. Pederson | Monday, 22 July 2019 at 06:36 AM