Fox Valley residents have vivid memories of where they were on the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969.
“It brings back such wonderful memories,” said Bill Walsh of Aurora.
Walsh was with his late wife Patricia exploring the Grand Canyon and other national parks the summer astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins were launched into space.
“I am still in awe by the science behind it all,” said Walsh, 79.
It’s rather phenomenal how the spaceship got momentum from the earth’s gravity and then landed on the moon, he said.
The Aurora couple had completed their first year as teachers in West Aurora School District 129 when they decided to head west in a 1965 Ford van for what would be a memorable trip.
“We traveled from campground to campground visiting national and state parks. The downside was that we had little access to television,” Walsh said.
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Occasionally they found someone with a television at a private camp, he said.
The lifelong Auroran was age 26 in 1969, and had already served four years in the U.S. Navy. Nowadays he is a volunteer docent for the Aurora Historical Society.
“This camping trip was our first big one and I couldn’t help but think of the striking contrast of what we were doing and what the astronauts were doing,” Walsh said.
Walsh dedicated 25 years as an English teacher at Jefferson Middle School. Patricia Walsh was an elementary school teacher and one of the founders of the Early Childhood program at Todd School.
“We made preparations and thought out all of the possibilities that could happen while camping,” he said. “The astronauts couldn’t anticipate everything that might happen in space.”
Mike Philipchuck, another lifelong Auroran, was 18 years old and had just graduated from East Aurora High School the year man landed on the moon.
“I was in the Chain O’Lakes State Park near Antioch with my parents and another family of boaters,” Philipchuck said of the day of the moon landing.
“We had taken our boat to Channel Lake. It was a Sunday afternoon and everyone had their transistor radios on board tuned into the updates from Apollo 11,” Philipchuck recalled.
“When it was announced that they landed on the moon all of the boaters started tooting their horns and cheering,” Philipchuck said.
Philipchuck, a pilot with an appreciation for flight, retired 13 years ago from the city of Aurora where he served as supervisor of streets.
“It was astounding and unbelievable to think what the astronauts did. Blasting off like that, I wondered what they were thinking,” Philipchuck said. “I was old enough to remember President Kennedy talk about putting a man on the moon. It seemed quite impossible to me at the time.”
Others recalled watching the television broadcast of the historic landing.
Roger Matile, director of the Little White School Museum in Oswego, was a young father at age 23 at the time.
He was watching the broadcast on a black and white portable television.
“I was already a science fiction fan, so it was really exciting to see someone actually on the moon on live television,” Matile said.
“It was quite a technological achievement,” he said of the live broadcast.
To think there was a camera outside of the lunar module that captured Armstrong and Aldrin stepping down the ladder in real time was a marvel in itself, Matile said.
Matile spoke with his grandmother about the moon landing mission a couple of days later, he said.
“I was interested in knowing what she thought. My grandmother was a teenager when the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane and she thought that was remarkable. She was having a hard time processing that three men went off to the moon,” Matile said.
The impact of that achievement is still being felt, said William Roth of the Air Classics Museum of Aviation in Sugar Grove.
“A lot of the technology we have today is because of the moon race,” Roth said. “Computers really came along – everything was still tubes back then.”
Linda Girardi is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
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