Mountain Breeze: 50 years since the first moonwalk?

I was a young one back then in 1969 on July 20, celebrating my best friend Yvonne’s birthday. Out here west of Fincastle, life moved slow. No coyotes or bears roaming, neither. Evening traffic consisted of about five cars and one of them was my father.

All week we had been watching updates on CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Tonight, July 20th, 1969 was the night of the moon landing.

My Dad blew the horn on our Ford when he wanted us to come home. Sure enough as darkness fell, the horn blew and I jumped on my steed, a black bike with a few dents and scratches from being wrecked or dropped carelessly upon dismount. The moon was bright and the suspense great as I peddled back to our hot house to see what was happening up there in the sky.

The Eagle had landed.

I settled in beside my parents to watch the fuzzy feed on the screen. Much to our happiness and amazement, Neil Armstrong clambered laboriously down those steps. He stepped off the ladder onto the moon. He said in that typical beep and far away NASA Houston Transmission:

“That’s one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.”

The world gasped and cheered.

What a night.

Meanwhile up in Roanoke, Virginia my paternal grandfather, the guy with the bloodhounds that chased criminals, would grumpily state until he went to his grave.

“That was staged. It never happened!”

He would have loved the world of fake news claims 50 years later.

As for me, I believe.