Strolling Through Moonwalk Memories

It was a moment when all of humanity seemed linked, when national pride edged aside just enough to share the spotlight with derring-do. The landing of the Eagle on the moon was a Cold War triumph and a victory of the imagination.

It united a raucous auditorium of college students in Hawaii with a party under way on Balboa Island; it joined a mother whose husband and three children had fallen asleep in San Pedro with a family of six who crowded around a television in a den in Orange, Tex.

Those reminiscences, as well as strong emotions, came flooding back Wednesday for visitors to Griffith Observatory, 25 years to the day after technology and political will put man on the moon.

For some, the only memory was of staying up a little late--the moonwalk occurred at 11 p.m. EDT. For many others, the sensation of those moments is still sharply etched.

“I was overjoyed, just like the rest of the people,” said Albert Medina, a 76-year-old retired linen supply deliveryman. “It was something. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw they were landing on the moon and walking, after all these centuries, and for something like that to come true in your lifetime.”

Medina watched the now familiar scenes of the landing at 1:17 p.m. PDT in Hollywood and then watched the moonwalk with his two children, who broke into whoops of joy as soon as the Eagle’s metal feet settled several inches into the moon dust.

Allen Yost, 72, watched it with his brother, who insisted that they stay up to watch Neil Armstrong take his giant leap for mankind on his snowy-screened TV on a remote Saskatchewan ranch.

“I guess it was a big deal for all of us,” said Yost, who lives in Los Feliz. The hoopla over the 25th anniversary reminded him that 1969 also marked another achievement of American technology: that was the year he bought the Chevrolet Camaro he has driven for 276,000 miles, enough to get him to the moon and a bit beyond.

“It doesn’t seem that long ago,” he said.

But it is long enough to blur most of the details of the event for Greg McNair, who was 9 years old and living in the Mar Vista Gardens housing project with his family when the moon was brought into the realm of human exploration. “I do remember that everyone . . . did sit down and watch intently,” he said.

Now a 34-year-old attorney, he took the day off Wednesday to take his three daughters to the daylong celebration of the historic spaceflight at the observatory, hoping to stir in them a sense of awe and curiosity.

“I don’t think at the time that I could appreciate the enormity of what was happening,” he said. “As I’ve gotten older and realized man’s limitations, it’s amazing to me that it happened 25 years ago.”

Pierina Beck was studying English literature in Hawaii 25 years ago when she and fellow students gathered in a large auditorium to watch the events. “Everybody was screaming and yelling” at the touchdown, said Beck, who is visiting Los Angeles from Switzerland.

“It seemed like ‘Mission Impossible,’ ” said Simone Dennewill, 72, who was riveted to the TV screen in San Pedro while her insurance adjuster husband, Bob, and their three children slept.

Mark Mitchell, who stopped off at the observatory as part of a family visit to Los Angeles from their home outside Houston in Orange, Tex., remembered that the moon mission was part of the daily lesson plan in his school. When the day came, finally, his parents and four brothers and sisters were there to watch.

“In our part of the country it was a major, major deal,” said Mitchell, who was 9 at the time. “But I remember my grandmother didn’t believe they were actually going to the moon . . . so I still had this doubt a person could go that far and that high.”

West Hollywood artist Rita Blum said she was having a one-woman show on Balboa Island when the Eagle, the name given to the lunar module, touched down; she and her husband, Marvin, were invited to a posh party given by the gallery owner to watch the event.

They had a personal connection to the achievement because Marvin Blum, a mathematician, had worked on calculations that were related to the $30-billion effort.

“It was very exciting when we thought of the millions of things that had to go right to make it work,” she said. “It was magic.”

Gerry and Alice Bucci had an even more personal connection to the events surrounding the landing and the astronauts’ return four days later. Gerry Bucci was a technical director for ABC News and, like everyone else, was home watching Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin Jr. cavort across the moon’s cratered face.

Then he got a call asking him to go to Hawaii to work on the broadcast of the astronauts’ re-entry and return. Alice went along and for both of them the memories of that trip remain fresh.

The three astronauts, who were to remain quarantined for 18 days to ensure that they would not contaminate others with unknown diseases, were driven close to a crowd of greeters in an Airstream travel trailer. Gerry Bucci said he got close enough to see that astronaut Michael Collins was playing the banjo and then Collins stopped long enough to wave out the window.

“These guys had gone to the moon, and they had come back all that way, and it just seemed they were in awe that all these people were gathered there,” Alice Bucci said.

As a measure of how things have changed, Gerry Bucci said, “there’s a shuttle up there today and I don’t even think people know it.”

Shouldering a video camera, Bucci taped his wife standing in front of a model of the landing craft set up on the observatory lawn. And standing in front of a display on the mission technology. And in front of a mock-up of a lunar rover used in a later mission.

“It brings back a lot of memories,” she said.