Author Archives: Stan Deaton

Commonplace Book, July 28, 2023

Notes from my recent reading….

“Spring and winter look ahead, autumn looks back, but summer is most at home in the here and now. It is nature’s extroverted season, seldom subtle. Air is dense and heavy. Shade becomes a hunger. Fields droop with green, and gardens lean under the weight. Heat oppresses and thunderstorms build like pressure in the body until warm rain washes the hot streets, leaving steam to rise like the memory of a fleeting passion.”

            Marv and Nancy Hiles, Almanac for the Soul


“The seasons cannot be hurried. Spring comes, the grass grows by itself. Being in a hurry usually doesn’t help, and it can create a great deal of suffering—sometimes in us, sometimes in those who have to be around us. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It’s the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or some thing for it.”

            Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are


“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. . .”

            Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction vii”


“Many people are afraid of Emptiness because it reminds them of Loneliness. Everything has to be filled in, it seems—appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots—but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins.”

            Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh


“If there is anything I like less than lending a book, it is borrowing one, and I know no greater bore than the man who insists on lending you a book which you do not intend to read. You can cure him, ultimately, by losing the volume, but the process takes time.”

Edward Newton, A Magnificent Farce: And Other Diversions of a Book-Collector


“[James] Boswell asked Voltaire was it not more ‘pleasing and noble’ to believe the soul was immortal? Of course, Voltaire replied, but what of it? ‘You have a noble desire to be King of Europe. I wish it for you and I ask your protection. But it is not probable.’”

            Robert Zaretsky, Boswell’s Enlightenment        


“Thoreau’s Walden: a rather irritating collection of inspirational puffballs by an eccentric show-off.”

            E. B. White, Essays of E.B. White


“Ten thousand engineers are busy making sure that the world shall be convenient even if it is destroyed.”

            E. B. White, Essays


“I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is. And finding facts—through reading documents or through interviewing and re-interviewing—can’t be rushed; it takes time. Truth takes time.”

            Robert Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing


“Power doesn’t always corrupt, but what power always does is reveal.”

            Robert Caro, Working


“The wet black velvet of a Southern night.”

            Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady


“She would give you half of anything she had to eat and three of everything she had to say.”

            Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady


“I never talked about Phineas and neither did anyone else; he was, however, present in every moment of every day. Finny had a vitality which could not be quenched so suddenly, even by the marrow of his bones.”

            John Knowles, A Separate Peace


“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished that, I imagined, would last forever…”

            Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1


“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!”

            Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Essays and Lectures


“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

            Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”


“All things have two handles, beware of the wrong one.”

            Ralph Waldo Emerson, “American Scholar”


“They also serve who only stand and wait.”

            John Milton, “On His Blindness”


“Shy, crumpled, middle-aged, and carrying with him the air of some unspoken defeat.”

            Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk


“A car drives past the field, and there are people in it, held securely on their way somewhere, wrapped in life like a warm coat.”

            Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk


“He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”

            Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451


“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”

            Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451


“May my course be bright, if it be but brief.”

            Sir Walter Scott, The Talisman


“Whether a man is considered a saint or a troublemaking eccentric depends largely on circumstance.”

            David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture


“Sometimes I wondered if

I had any faith.

I sat down and thought about it.

And when I had had enough

Of that I got up

And went on my way.

And that—the getting up

And going—was faith.”

            Mary Jean Irion, Yes, World

Where Wood Meets Cowhide

It’s Opening Day of the 2021 Major League Baseball season, and the first pitch is at 3:00 this afternoon, so this blog will be short, though the season won’t be, thank goodness. 

You will remember that this time last year, we didn’t get to celebrate the return of baseball because the pandemic shut down the MLB season, as it did all other major sports, at least for a time.  I lamented the loss of our national pastime and commemorated the anniversary of Henry Aaron’s 715th dinger in one of my Dispatches. Baseball eventually played a 60-game season, which was better than nothing, but it felt like the campaign ended before it even got started. This year’s season, barring an unforeseen catastrophe, will be a full 162-game swing, complete with playoffs and World Series.

Long-suffering readers of this blog well know that I’ve been a life-long baseball fan and have shared that love here many times, dating back to the blog’s earliest days. I swooned over watching Hank Aaron hit home run #713 at the very first Braves game I attended in 1973; lamented the retirement of Yankee great Derek Jeter, who exemplified the way the game is played; and celebrated the heroic Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier in 1947. What memories await us this season?

Last year our beloved hometown team made it all the way to Game 7 of the National League Championship Series (blowing a 3-1 series lead along the way) before losing to the eventual champion and much-hated Dodgers.

This year’s version of the Atlanta National League Baseball Team Known As the Braves should be even better. Ian Anderson, last year’s rookie phenom will be pitching a full season. Mike Soroka will soon return from a gruesome Achilles heel injury and join young Max Fried and veteran Charlie Morton in a solid starting pitching rotation that will be backed up by one of the best bullpens in the majors (even if it does still include Luke “Serve ‘Em Up” Jackson, who is singlehandedly the cause of more airborne TV remotes than the entire Atlanta Falcons team combined, no small feat).

National League MVP Freddie Freeman anchors the infield, and with the re-signing of Marcell “Ledbetter” Ozuna, the Braves’ offense is solid and loaded with young talent all over the diamond—including Christian Pache, Ronald Acuna, Jr., Dansby Swanson, Austin Riley, and Ozzie Albies. And though the Braves will miss the retired Nick Markakis, they should get some much-needed veteran leadership off the bench with the addition of the Kung Fu Panda, the three-time World Series champion Pablo Sandoval.

We’ll never take Opening Day for granted again. It’s an old cliché, but it’s still true: Wherever you are and whatever the weather, it’s a beautiful day for baseball.

Reading in Place: May 6, 2020

Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Doubleday, 2019, 450pp.)

During the last month to six weeks, as we’ve been sheltering in place, have you had more or less time to read? To watch and read the news, you’d think people had nothing but time on their hands.

I’ve been fortunate to be able to work from home, but that certainly hasn’t translated into more time to read. Like a lot of people, I find that I work longer hours now without the natural distance barrier between work and home.

Nevertheless, I have kept up the same reading schedule during this time. I read in the pre-dawn hours, and for me, those are still the best minutes of the day for focused, steady reading. It’s still and quiet, inside and out, and nothing else distracts me.

I just finished reading Bill Bryson’s new book, The Body. I first met Bryson, like a lot of other people, through his 1998 book, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. I was in the midst of hiking Georgia’s portion of the AT at that time, and Bryson’s book was just what I needed.

Naturally I had to go out and buy and read nearly everything else Bryson had written, before and since, which include:

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way (1990)

Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe (1992)

Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994)

Notes from a Small Island (1995, an American living in England)

I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty-Five Years Away (1999)

In a Sunburned Country (2000, about Australia)

Bill Bryson’s African Diary (2002)

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: Travels Through My Childhood (2006)

Shakespeare: The World as Stage (2007)

Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors (2008)

At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010)

One Summer: America, 1927 (2013)

The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain (2015)

Bryson holds dual American & British citizenship, giving him unique insight into both cultures, which he frequently shares with his readers. He has a very singular gift as a writer, the ability to be hilariously funny one moment and deadly serious the next, sometimes in the same book. And when he’s funny, he’s really funny.

For those keeping score, his travel books tend to be humorous (I’ve never forgotten his descriptions of “shitty-shoed rednecks” in The Lost Continent), while his explorations of language and science are usually serious, though not without their own comic asides.

His memoir of growing up in Iowa, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend it. Among autobiographies, it may not rank with, say, The Education of Henry Adams, or The Confessions of St. Augustine, but neither of those two, so far as we know, ever trained a white-hot beam of sunlight on their Uncle Dick’s bald spot with a magnifying glass while he was napping, as Bryson did in his youth.

[For the record, in 1989’s The Lost Continent, Bryson visited Savannah, pre-Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and found it charming, if hot.]

Bryson’s new book, The Body, is equal parts enlightening, eye opening, and, at times, downright scary. For this liberal arts major that did abysmally in science and biology, it’s quite an education. What follows are some of its more fascinating factoids:

You blink 14,000 times a day, so much that your eyes are shut for 23 minutes every day.

Since you started reading this sentence, your body has produced a million red blood cells.

DNA is extremely stable and lasts for tens of thousand of years: “Probably nothing you own right now—no letter or piece of jewelry or treasured heirloom—will still exist a thousand years from now, but your DNA will almost certainly still be around and recoverable, if only someone could be bothered to look for it.”

“Even when you do nearly everything wrong, your body maintains and preserves you. Five out of every six smokers won’t get lung cancer. Most of the people who are prime candidates for heart attacks don’t get heart attacks. Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them. Think of that.”

“No one has ever come close to explaining why our fingers wrinkle when we have long baths.”

Viruses bide their time. In 2014 French scientists found a previously unknown virus in Siberia that had been locked in permafrost for 30,000 years but “when injected into an amoeba, it sprang into action with the lustiness of youth.”

Every bit of penicillin manufactured since 1943 has descended from mold growing on a single random cantaloupe bought by a lab assistant named Mary Hunt in Peoria, Illinois.

Because antibiotics have been overprescribed, the death rate for infectious diseases has been climbing and is now back to the level of the 1970s.

In 1848 in rural Vermont, a young railroad builder named Phineas Gage was packing dynamite into a rock when it exploded prematurely, shooting a 2-foot tamping rod through his left cheek and out the top of his head and landed 50 feet away. The rod removed a perfect core of his brain an inch in diameter. Gage survived and did not lose consciousness, though he lost his left eye and a suffered a changed personality. This was the first proof that physical damage to the brain could transform a person’s personality.

There is no end to conditions caused by brain disorders. Anton-Babinski syndrome is a condition in which people are blind but don’t believe it. Riddoch syndrome victims cannot see objects unless they are in motion. Capgras syndrome causes sufferers to be convinced that close friends and relatives are imposters. And with Cotard delusion, the victim believes they are dead and nothing can convince them otherwise.

There are people who have completely lost the ability to smell, known as anosmia. Even worse, some people suffer from something called cacosmia, where everything—everything—smells like feces. “It is, by all accounts, as horrible as you would imagine.”

You swallow about 2,000 times a day. Reading that probably made you swallow.

Choking is the fourth-most common cause of accidental death in America today.

The amount of heat in chilies is measured in units called Scovilles, named for Wilbur Scoville (1865-1942), who wrote an academic paper entitled “Some Observations on Glycerin Suppositories.”

“An easy way to experience the limitations of your taste buds is to close your eyes, pinch shut your nostrils, and eat a flavored jelly bean collected blindly from a bowl. You will instantly apprehend its sweetness, but you almost certainly won’t be able to identify its flavor.” You need your sense of smell to help you do that.

“The current generation of young people is forecast to be the first in recorded history not to live as long as their parents because of weight-related health issues.”

Just by standing, you can burn an extra 107 calories an hour.

Nicholas Alkemade, a British airman during World War II, leapt without a parachute from a burning plane that was 3 miles in the air. Pine tree branches broke his fall, and he landed unharmed in a snow bank, with only minor abrasions and a sore kneecap. He died peacefully in bed 43 years later. But the world’s record is a flight attendant who in 1972 fell 33,000 feet—6.1 miles—without a parachute when the plane she was in was blown apart in midair. She survived. “The human body, in short, can be a wonderfully resilient thing.”

The longest any human has held their breath is 24 minutes and 3 seconds.

Charles Osborn, an Iowa farmer, hiccupped continuously for 68 years. They started in 1922 when he tried to pick up a 350-pound hog and stopped in 1990, a year before he died.

Sleeping is the most mysterious thing we do. All parts of the body benefit from it. If you are deprived of it for long enough you will die, but why you die is a medical mystery. “As far as can be told, sleep does nothing for us that couldn’t equally be done while we were awake but resting.”

The longest anyone has intentionally gone without sleep is 11 days and 24 minutes.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed on through mothers alone: “A woman endows all her children with her mitochondria, but only her daughters have the mechanism to pass it onward to future generations.” Thus “the mitochondrial pool shrinks a little with every generation” and “we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor—a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.”

“Between 1485 and 1551, Britain was repeatedly ravaged by a terrifying malady called the sweating sickness, which killed untold thousands. Then it abruptly stopped and was never seen there again. Two hundred years later, a very similar illness appeared in France. Then it too vanished. We have no idea where and how it incubated, why it disappeared when it did, or where it might be now.”

Smallpox was the most devastating infectious disease ever. The last person on Earth to be killed by smallpox was 1978. “Officially just two stocks of smallpox remain in the world now—in government freezers at the CDC in Atlanta, and at a Russian virology institute in Siberia.” But in 2014 “someone looking through a storage area at a FDA facility in Bethesda, Maryland, found vials of smallpox dating from the 1950s but still viable. The vials were destroyed.” Are there more? No one knows.

It is estimated that 50% of men over age 60 and 75% of men over 70 have prostate cancer at death without being aware that they have it. Some scientists have suggested that if all men lived long enough, they would all get prostate cancer.

Life expectancy on Earth improved by as much in the 20th century as in the whole preceding 8,000 years. The average life span for an American female improved from 48 in 1900 to 80 by century’s end, and for men from 46 to 74.

The longest-lived person was a woman in France who was born in 1875 and died 122 years later in 1997.

This list barely scratches the surface of the wisdom in this book. It is chock full of fascinating information about the bodies we inhabit, from skin to brains to skeleton.  The notes above are meant simply to give you a bit of its flavor, not to suggest that the book is nothing more than a list of interesting factoids and stories. There’s a lot of good hard science and medicine packed into it, and to Bryson’s credit that it’s all accessible to the average reader, even if you’re confirmed in your right-brain-ness. As always, Bryson makes for a most agreeable and jovial host. In these difficult days of COVID-19, his chapters on viruses and infectious diseases make for especially compelling reading.

Bryson’s book is not the only one I’ve read while sheltering in place. I’m currently working through Rolfe Humphries’ translation of The Aeneid, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire always beckons.

In the meantime, as we ride out the current public health cris, take care of your body. As the old saying goes (and as Bryson reminds us):

 Exercise regularly.

 Eat sensibly.

Die anyway.

S3E4: Political Insider Jim Galloway

Stan talks to Jim Galloway, a 40-year veteran of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the lead writer and founder of the AJC’s Political Insider blog, the best-read and most influential political blog in the state. Jim talks about Georgia’s changing demographics and their effect on Georgia politics, Donald Trump in historical context, the future of newspapers and the American Republic—and Steve Oney’s influence on his career. Also this week: the ever-popular This Week in History, and a tribute to Pulitzer-Prize winning historian William S. Mcfeely.

One Giant Leap

Douglas Brinkley, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race (Harper Collins, 2019, 548 pp.)

Since humans first crawled out of the primordial soup millions of years ago, they have gazed up at the moon in the night sky and dreamed of what it was like. Only 24 people–all men–have ever been there. Twelve of them walked on it.

With the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing this summer, I thought I’d check out Douglas Brinkley’s new book on that historic event. Your favorite blogger reviewed Brinkley’s biography of Walter Cronkite a few years ago [Cronkite was a space junkie], and this new book seemed a natural with all the fuss over the moonshot anniversary. 

Despite the title, American Moonshot is not a history of the space program or of Apollo 11, but is instead a history of JFK’s leadership of the program up until his death. It is very thorough through the Mercury program, less so for Gemini or Apollo.

Still, the book is a goldmine of information and insights, as you’ll see below. And Brinkley makes clear that without JFK’s single-minded devotion to space exploration, the great events of July 1969 would never have happened.  

As I watched the commemorations of Apollo 11 this summer, I was deeply moved once again by the tremendous courage of the astronauts, from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo. They willingly placed themselves on top of rockets that could have blown them to bits; they could have been sent into orbit and never returned, or they could have been stranded on the moon to die very lonely deaths. Their country called them and they answered, in the name of science, exploration, duty, and Cold War patriotism.

Still, the thing that I can’t help wondering about the moon landing of 1969 is the dramatic impact it had on everyone at the time–President Nixon called it “the greatest week in the history of the world since creation”–and how little of that effect seems to have lingered across the years. The space shuttle program gave NASA a boost in the 1980s (at least until the Challenger disaster) but when’s the last time you talked to someone who dreamed of being an astronaut when they grow up?

Has anything ever seemed so momentous at the time that has arguably had so little impact on the world now? Was all the sacrifice and billions spent to get there ultimately worth it?

I think it was, but a lot people then and now disagree, perhaps most famously Gil Scott Heron in his 1970 song, “Whitey on the Moon”:

“I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)

The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)”

To be sure, as Walter Isaacson pointed out, while working to solve the problems of manned spaceflight, NASA laid the foundations for all kinds of modern technology, to wit: satellite TV, GPS systems, microchips, virtual reality technology, solar panels, carbon monoxide detectors, cordless power tools, bar coding, even the Dustbuster.

Research into space medicine contributed to radiation therapy for treating cancer, foldable walkers, personal alert systems, CAT and MRI scans, muscle stimulant devices, advanced types of kidney dialysis machines, and many others.

What NASA didn’t invent: Teflon (developed by DuPont in 1941), Velcro (invented in 1941 by a Swiss engineer to remove burrs stuck in his dog’s fur), or Tang (1957).

Rather than reviewing Brinkley’s book in detail, I thought it might be fun to provide you with a bulleted list of some of the things I learned that I didn’t know before. What follows is another list in the ever-popular feature known as

Fun Facts Known by Few

  • Jules Verne, writing in the 1860s, predicted that the United States would beat Russia to the moon, that the voyage would be launched from Florida, and that it would take four days–all of which turned out to be true.
  • Theodore Roosevelt (no longer in office) was the first president to fly in a plane, October 11, 1910. The first sitting president to fly was FDR, January 14, 1943.
  • In a 1920 headline, the New York Times famously lampooned Robert Goddard’s idea of a rocket being able to operate in a space vacuum. After Apollo 11 landed on the moon 49 years later, the Times famously issued a public retraction.
  • Brinkley pulls no punches on former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun: “NASA was lucky to have a rocket engineer as talented as von Braun to work on Apollo. But he shouldn’t be remembered as an American hero. His direct role in the Nazi concentration camp labor programs, where thousands perished under inhumane conditions, makes him a pariah figure of sorts”
  • Following his success with the Nazi V-2, von Braun worked to design the first trans-Atlantic ballistic missile, which Hitler wanted to use to attack New York, Washington, and Boston. It was called “Projekt Amerika.”
  • A Nazi V-2 rocket launched on October 3, 1942, broke the sound barrier and traveled to an altitude of 52 miles, reaching the ionosphere and marking the first time in history that a man-made object had technically ever flown beyond Earth’s atmosphere. On June 22, 1944, another V-2 became the first man-made object to reach outer space.
  • Hitler’s commitment to the V-2 rocket meant that Nazi rocket engineers would work on and solve many of the problems of space flight that ultimately helped to speed up the moon landing by decades.
  • JFK enrolled at Embry-Riddle Seaplane Base in Miami in 1944 to learn to fly; his flight log confirming this was not discovered until 2018.
  • In 1946, the Army Signal Corps bounced radio waves off the moon and received the reflected signals back, proving that radio transmissions through space and back to Earth were possible. This would be crucial for space exploration.
  • On September 14, 1961, the Soviets unmanned Luna-2 spacecraft crash-landed on the moon, becoming the first man-made device to touch another planetary body.
  • When the first Atlas rocket that would launch the Mercury astronauts into space exploded just after liftoff during its first test, astronaut Alan Shepard quipped, “Well, I’m glad they got that out of the way.”
  • In 1961, as planning for Apollo began, NASA identified more than 10,000 separate tasks that had to be accomplished to put a man on the moon.
  • Alan Shepard was the first American in space aboard Freedom 7 in 1961 and is the oldest man to have walked on the moon, as commander of Apollo 14 in 1971. He was 47.
  • A reporter asked Shepard what his thoughts were as he sat waiting on the launch pad aboard Freedom 7. His reply: “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”
  • In 1999, the Liberty Bell 7 was discovered and recovered from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, 16,000 feet below the surface, almost 38 years to the day after Gus Grissom splash landed on July 21, 1961.
  • The Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who piloted the Vostok 2 at age 25 in August 1961, was the youngest person ever to fly in space. He died in 2000, age 65.
  • In April 1962, JFK had a 79% approval rating as president. Only 12% disapproved of his performance.
  • JFK’s favorite beer was Heineken
  • Cape Canaveral flight director Chris Kraft thought astronaut Scott Carpenter performed horribly aboard Aurora 7 in May 1962, talking to himself, peering out the porthole, and ignoring NASA requests to check his instruments: “I swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never fly again.” He didn’t. Kraft died July 22, 2019, age 95, two days after the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
  • Dr. William Lovelace II, an aeromedicine pioneer who chaired the Special Advisory Committee on Life Science, believed that women were physiologically better equipped for space travel than men. In 1959 he invited American aviator Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb to take the same tests as the Mercury astronauts, along with 18 other female aviators. They graduated with flying colors and the those at the top became known as the “Mercury 13,” ranging in age from 23 to 41. When NASA got wind of it, they shut the entire program down: “Since there is no shortage of qualified male candidates, there is no need to train women for space flight.” John Glenn came out publicly against the program as well. The next year, the Soviets did what the Americans wouldn’t, making Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space, in June 1963. She orbited the Earth 48 times and remains the only woman to have been on a solo space mission. It would take the Americans 20 more years to send Sally Ride into space aboard the Challenger in 1983.
  • During NASA’s heyday between 1964 and 1969, the space agency employed 36,000 people, hired 400,000 contractors, and operated facilities worth $3.65 billion.
  • President Dwight D. Eisenhower always derided the frantic moon-shot efforts as an unnecessary and expensive Cold-War stunt. He died on March 28, 1969, nearly 4 months before Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon.
  • Jackie Kennedy sent Wernher von Braun a note two months after JFK’s death, lamenting that her late husband was “at least given time to do some great work on this earth, which now seems such a miserable and lonely place without him.”
  • As the Apollo 11 launch approached, former LBJ Press Secretary Bill Moyers and future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan lobbied the Nixon administration to name the spacecraft the John F. Kennedy. Nixon refused and did not mention JFK in the days before or after the moon landing.
  • 528 million people around the world watched the moon landing on television.
  • Neil Armstrong took a fragment of the Wright brothers’ famous Kitty Hawk plane with him on Apollo 11, linking man’s first successful flight with the first moon landing.
  • A total of 12 men have walked on the moon, all between July 1969 and December 1972. Four of them are still alive: Buzz Aldrin, Harrison Schmidt, Charles Duke, and David Scott. NASA has pledged to put a woman on the moon as part of Artemis by 2024.

Finally, perhaps my favorite story of all: just before climbing back into the Eagle and leaving the moon for the last time, Neil Armstrong reminded Buzz Aldrin to leave behind some NASA-sanctioned mementos he had brought with him. Aldrin reached into his shoulder packet and pulled out a package containing four items: two medals honoring Soviet cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin–the first human to orbit the Earth–and Vladimir Komarov, both of whom were killed in separate 1967 accidents; an Apollo 1 patch that memorialized Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, all killed in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967.

These were fitting tributes and recognition, deep in the midst of the Cold War, of the courage and sacrifice of their American and Soviet colleagues, upon whose shoulders they stood.

The last item was an olive-branch pin, symbolizing that the Apollo 11 astronauts had “come in peace for all mankind.”

Aldrin bent down and laid the package on the lunar surface. It’s still there.

The next time you look up at the moon, think of that small bag, and reflect a moment on all that it symbolizes, and on the giant leap it took to place it there.