This week’s launch of the Artemis I flight, which is a step toward putting astronauts back on the moon in a few years, brought back memories of the night I watched non-stop television coverage of astronauts landing on the moon on July 20, 1969. I was two days away from turning 15 and approaching tenth grade at Bishop Gorman High School in Tyler, Texas.
I just happen to have in my home a July 21, 1969, copy of the Tyler Morning Telegraph, which is filled with stories covering every possible angle of the moon landing. The big red headline across the front of my hometown Texas newspaper reads: “July 20, 1969, 9:57 p.m. Man Walks On Moon.” Subheads read: “Armstrong Takes First Lunar Steps” and “New Era Dawns As U.S. Spacemen Plant Old Glory.”
I spent some time reading the newspaper while listening to Herb Alpert Radio on Pandora, which appropriately features much music from the 1960s. I did not realize that the moon landing occurred as much of our country was also focused on Sen. Ted Kennedy’s car wreck in which a young woman passenger died. The newspaper story, just below the huge moon landing headline, reports that Kennedy was in seclusion at the Kennedy Family’s “compound” in Massachusetts and suffering from a slight concussion. That was a sad and tragic incident that stayed in the news for a long time.
Returning to the moon landing coverage, here’s what I learned. The astronaut’s space suits cost $300,000 each. And, there’s plenty of stories about the “astrowives.” That is what journalists called the wives of the astronauts.
Folks around Tyler were being quoted about the landing. One 83-year-old local woman declared that she believed the landing was a hoax and that “those men are up walking around in the air somewhere. They’re not on the moon.”
Another story reported that scientists will be looking for germs and more when they examine the astronauts upon their return to earth. “They’ll be alert also for alien chemicals which, like many earth materials, could cause inflammations, allergies, perhaps even cancer.”
In sports news in that same newspaper, I read that golfer Dave Hill won the Philadelphia Golf Classic and took home the $30,000 top prize money. Other famous golfers like Lee Trevino and Chi Chi Rodriguez received $2,175 each. (I am fond of the name Chi Chi because my three-year-old grandson Archer refers to himself as Chi Chi. His four-year-old brother usually calls him Chi.)
This single edition of the Tyler Morning Telegraph offers an interesting and, at times, funny look back to that time. At the movie theaters in town, moviegoers could see the Disney film “The Love Bug,” a movie called “The Maltese Bippy” featuring “Laugh-In” stars Rowan and Martin, and one of the biggest movies of the time, “Oliver.” At a drive-in theater, Brigitte Bardot was starring in “Please, Not Now!”
A simple TV guide offers the schedule for the five TV stations we could watch. To get good reception often required paying for cable. Tyler’s one TV station, two Dallas stations and two Fort Worth stations are listed.
The newspaper ads are fascinating. Everything was CHEAP compared to today’s prices. Monterey House was advertising an awesome price for the Fiesta Dinner for July 22, only. I should have gone for my birthday (if I could have caught a ride from an older fried with a driver’s license). For $1.29, I could have enjoyed the meal featuring guacamole salad, a beef taco, two enchiladas, a tamale with chili, beans, rice, tortillas, hot sauce and candy. Any other day, that meal would have set me back $1.65.
A trip to local grocery stores offered great deals. My favorite store in Tyler was Safeway. Some specials included a half-gallon of Snow Star ice cream for 49 cents, Safeway bacon for 67 cents a pound, quart bottles of Cragmont soft drinks for 10 cents each, peaches for 19 cents a pound and canned biscuits for eight cents. In September, Candace and I drove past the dilapidated building that once housed my neighborhood Safeway.
Over at the competition, local grocery chain Brookshire’s offered a six-bottle carton of Pepsi for a quarter, but buyers had to bring six empty glass bottles to get that price. Mellorine, which was a type of ice cream made with animal and vegetable fats (not butterfat), sold for a quarter a half gallon. I can tell you that I never liked Mellorine, even at half the price of real ice cream. Genuine Pecos cantaloupes were selling for five cents a pound. I still like canned tuna and would like to pay the 25 cents a can price offered in those days.
Some great prices were offered for clothes, too. Dorrity’s, a local store, was selling several styles of shoes for six dollars. Apparently, they were trying to get rid of some inventory that usually sold for $16.99.
Looking back at all these prices, I am thinking that the next trip to the moon will cost far more than it did in 1969. I have no idea what space suits cost these days. Maybe, some store will be offering a sale on old space suits that the new generation astronauts can wear.
This time around, astrowives can be astronauts. Women have been demonstrating for many years that they are just as good as men at flying spaceships. If they had been given a decent chance back in 1969, they could have flown to the moon, too.
I look forward to the next flight that takes men AND women to the moon. If it is on TV too late at night, though, I might have to catch it the next morning on the Today Show.
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