‘Oh, What a Proud Moment It Was’ : Space: Rockwell employees celebrate the anniversary of the moon landing and their contribution to history.

It was a Sunday afternoon, but Earl Theaker was at work when he and a group of Rockwell employees stood spellbound around a television to witness an event unfolding a world away.

When Neil Armstrong radioed to NASA’s Mission Control, “The Eagle has landed,” Theaker and the others exhaled. Later, when Armstrong stepped on the sandy surface of the moon and offered the poetic words, “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” Theaker and his co-workers broke into thunderous applause.

The shouts of jubilation were accompanied by church bells ringing throughout a proud nation that day 25 years ago. Around the world, more than 500 million people sat in front of television sets, watching grainy images of two men in white bulky spacesuits planting a U.S. flag on the lunar landscape with its black horizon.

On Wednesday, a quarter century to the day after the world’s attention was riveted on Armstrong and the Apollo 11 astronauts, Theaker, now 67 and retired, returned to Rockwell International to celebrate the anniversary of the moon landing.

Rockwell, which was the prime contractor for the Apollo spacecraft and the second stage of the Saturn V launch rocket, threw a party for about 2,000 employees and retirees at its world headquarters here to celebrate the success of the first lunar landing.

The festivities were held outdoors, complete with a band and giant television screen that showed films of the memorable landing and the U.S. space program. Gov. Pete Wilson and astronaut Edward G. Gibson, who completed 84 days in the Skylab space station in 1974, were the featured speakers.

For Theaker, who lives in Lomita, the giddy years between 1961 and 1971 when he worked in the infant space program were some of the best in his life.

“I spent 40 years in aerospace, but those 10 were the most exciting,” said Theaker, who was assistant to the director of aerospace sciences at Rockwell before he retired 10 years ago.

However, nothing before or since compares to the day when two U.S. astronauts, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, walked on the moon on July 20, 1969, Theaker said. The third Apollo 11 astronaut, Michael Collins, piloted the command module around the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin romped on the lunar surface.

For many Americans, the landing was a brief respite from the turbulence of the time. The country was bitterly divided by the Vietnam War and racial strife in the cities. But for a single day, the sight of two Americans on the moon briefly united the nation in patriotic fervor.

“Oh, what a proud moment it was,” said John Burnett of Torrance. Burnett, 64, and a Rockwell employee for 34 years, worked on both the Saturn rocket and Apollo spacecraft more than 25 years ago. “It was such an unbelievable sight. Many of us here could hardly contain our pride over what we had accomplished.”

“You cannot understand the feeling we had. To actually see something you worked on going to the moon. It was such a good feeling to see this, and knowing that my hands touched the rocket and spacecraft. It was the best project I ever worked on.”

While most Americans were able to see the moon landing live, Henry Phan, then a child in Vietnam, didn’t see the footage until two years later. Phan, now 27 and an aerospace engineer at Rockwell, remembered when the moon landing finally was shown on television in Saigon.

“I remember it very well. I was a little boy and my family was watching it on television. It was cool.”

Despite the decline of the aerospace and defense industries in Southern California, Wilson told Rockwell workers that the exploration of space will continue to provide jobs for the state.

California will be converted from “the arsenal of democracy into the launching pad of space discovery,” Wilson said. “I am convinced that space exploration is our destiny.”

The crew of Apollo 11 was honored in the White House on Wednesday and could not make the Rockwell celebration. But Gibson, who also was an astronaut on the Apollo 12 moon mission, recalled the first time he viewed the Earth from space.

“The Earth appears seamless and without boundaries,” he said.