Armstrong’s Ohio hometown set to celebrate

Festival to mark lunar landing anniversary

WAPAKONETA, Ohio — A small Ohio city is shooting for the moon in celebrating its native son’s history-making walk 50 years ago this month.

The hometown of Neil Armstrong has expanded its usual weekend “summer moon festival” to 10 days of Apollo 11 commemorations.

Tens of thousands of visitors — the biggest crowds here since Armstrong’s post-mission homecoming — are expected.

There will be hot air balloons, ’60s-themed evenings, concerts, rocket launches and a visit from five other Ohio astronauts. And “the world’s largest moon pie,” all 50 pounds of it.

Event planning began two years ago in a city of about 10,000 that has added nearly 3,000 residents since 1969 but retains that everybody-knows-everybody rural town feel. Jackie Martell of the chamber of commerce calls the moon landing anniversary an event that “just resonates for the entire world,” and a continuing source of local pride.

Dave Tangeman turned 12 on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 took Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon, and he and his family gathered around the black-and-white TV in their living room that evening to watch their neighbor.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world were watching with them as Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface to take “one giant leap for mankind.”

“It was just so unbelievable that somebody from this little town could accomplish something like that,” said Tangeman, now transportation director for the local schools. He likes to joke that the town puts on a big birthday party for him every July.

Though Tangeman doesn’t remember much else about his 12th birthday, he has vivid memories of Armstrong’s triumphant welcome-home parade that Sept. 6.

Most of the city of some 7,000 people joined tens of thousands of visitors to line the streets or climb onto roofs to see Armstrong, celebrities including entertainer Bob Hope, and the marching band from Purdue University, Armstrong’s alma mater.

“History will always record that the first person to set foot on the moon was Neil Armstrong from Wapakoneta, Ohio,” said Dante Centuori, executive director of the Armstrong Air and Space Museum. “That’s not going to change.”

Celebrations got started last October with a red-carpet gala for a special showing of “First Man,” starring Ryan Gosling and based on historian James R. Hansen’s Armstrong biography, in the historic downtown Wapa Theatre.

Downtown shops are well-supplied with T-shirts, coffee mugs, moon artwork and moon landing memorabilia to sell in the coming days. But the museum — with its moon base-shaped top visible from Interstate 75 — will be the centerpiece for activities around the anniversary, including a NASA livestream broadcast on July 19.

The museum, which opened in 1972, also will unveil two of three new statues in town honoring Armstrong.

John Minchillo The Associated Press The spacesuit worn by Neil Armstrong on his Gemini VIII mission is among the artifacts on display at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio.