One Small Step…

If you’re a space geek like me you know that the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is coming up next week.

July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong steps off the ladder and into history. The whole world is watching, except me. I was probably taking a nap. Hey, what do you want, I was 7 months old.

OK, flash forward to spring 1985. I’m a junior in high school and I write a report on the moon landing for US history class. It’s a decent paper, and I still have it.

Oh, how the labored teen handwriting cracks me up. Either I didn’t have a typewriter or we weren’t allowed to use them.

Kids, do you realize how much better you have it? We were writing 12-page reports in cursive. In pen. If we made a mistake at the bottom of the page, we had to re-write the whole damn page! Wite-out was for chumps.

And you gotta love those 100% manual footnotes. Forget about InDesign’s paragraph composer, this is organic copyfitting. I can still remember trying to figure out the number of lines to leave for the footnotes and using the stupid ruler to underline stuff.

Anyway, the best part about the paper was that my teacher, Dr. William Hanna, included a surprise when he returned it to me. Neil Armstrong’s autograph. Yes, that Neil Armstrong. Click for a close-up.

Dr. Hanna gave it to me just because he thought I wrote a good paper and would like to have a memento. He was an autograph collector, and I’m sure he had an amazing number of figures from American politics and popular culture. But this was beyond generous. It was a truly amazing gesture by a remarkable teacher (and published author) who instilled a love of history in me that I will have forever. Thanks again, Dr. H.

Yup, that autograph is my favorite space geek collectible, narrowly beating out my lunar module pencil sharpener.