Man on the Moon

So it has been 40 years. My God. I was a little kid, but I remember that Sunday so well. Our family was on a Sunday pool party in Rio Grande and everyone was talking about what was going to happen that night. Man was going to walk on the moon. The excitement was so huge. I couldn't wait for the party to end so we could go home and watch the event on tv. And it was Via satellite which was a big deal those days. Only BIG events were shown via satellite in Puerto Rico. And this one was the biggest of them all. One of the biggest of all time. And I had a chance to see it!

Well, there was something of a letdown. The tv image was extremely poor. One couldn't see much. It was blurry and dark. We were not sure what we were seeing...was that Neil Armstrong? Is he walking on the moon? I expected the transmission to be all clear and crisp. Here was the biggest event in my lifetime and I could only see ghostly images!

But I didn't care. I was watching it. And days later, I rushed to the newsstands to get the Life magazine full of great photos. Photos that showed clearly what we didn't see on television. My lifelong love affair with all things NASA had just begun.