Ukulele Tonya

In light of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing this week, I have a photo to link up ukuleles and lunar exploration (yes, it can be done!). But first, the story…

Growing up in Southern California in the 1960s, our neighbor was the aerospace industry. My father—and the fathers of many of my friends—worked on various aspects of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and later, the space shuttles. For us, space exploration wasn’t just a Walter Cronkite soundclip on CBS—it was something that was spoken of at the dinner table and the subject of playground talk.

Many of our fathers had worked directly with some of the astronauts—and they regaled us with accounts of what these space heroes were “really” like–which had short tempers and which enjoyed raucous practical jokes interspersed with the seriousness of their work. My father (who worked at Autonetics in Anaheim, shown above left) would bring home color NASA photographs (this in the days of black and white everything) of space capsules, lunar modules and early morning rocket lift-offs in Florida. It was great stuff—and I shared it proudly at “show and tell” the next day at school.

The delight in being part of our nation’s space exploration efforts was very real to us as kids—we were proud of our aerospace engineer dads, who headed off to work every morning, their security badges clipped to white shirts complemented with thin, dark neckties. Our fathers’ bristly crewcuts were a badge of another sort, the hair trimmed just as precise and sharp as the work our dads did to design the rockets that were launching our country’s dreams into the mystery of space.

I’d joyfully visited Cape Canaveral in Florida as a kindergartner (before it was Cape Kennedy and later the Kennedy Space Center) and I remember well John Glenn’s orbit in space. When a fire in the capsule of Apollo 1 killed Astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee in 1967, we grade schoolers mourned the loss—and we hoped that its cause had nothing to do with our dads. The dramatic image of the famous 1968 photo taken by Apollo 8’s crew of the earth “rising” from behind the moon ended up on more than one youngster’s bedroom wall on my block.

In short, the heady days of America’s space race were halcyon years for kids of my generation growing up in Orange County, California. “Space talk” was our language and we could discuss the various Apollo missions as well as we could digress on which rides were E tickets and which were D tickets at Disneyland, which was just down the road.

Hence, this week’s uber-media blitz about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s landing on the moon touches me at my core, recalling those rich childhood memories and a time that’s decades away in years and eons away from today’s adult life. I’ll bet this week, with one foot on the moon’s surface and the other in the land of Twitter, is similar for all of you who grew up in that time and place.

But a photo I found this morning of Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, helped me to bridge the intervening decades. It shows Armstrong in the days just after his moon walk, pensively plucking the strings of his ukulele while in the quarantine (who knows what those spacemen would bring back to earth?) unit of the USS Hornet, which had recovered the astronauts from their splashdown in the sea.

As an ukulele player (albeit not a famous one!), I look at that photo and fancy that I can see a bit of the man—not just the overnight hero—that Neil Armstrong had become. He holds his ukulele (a Martin?) gently in his arms and he strums (a C7) seemingly with no attention to the instrument or the well-practiced movement of his fingers. I look at the image and see a man who’s quietly pondering how his life has suddenly changed—and yet secure that some things, like the comfort of gently creating music, don’t change.

For more about the photographer, read the full story here.