Enthralled in turbulent time
Apollo 11 mission in 1969 gave Americans a reason to look forward ... and up
As a spaceship headed for the moon 50 years ago, Jeannie Kotalga, 9, reflected on the approaching rendezvous of reality and science fiction. “Dear God, I will be glad if you help the astronauts to come (through),” she wrote in a Bible left out for special messages at the Chicago Bible Society’s Michigan Avenue offices in mid-July 1969.
Like Kotalga, many of the 1,500 people who signed that Bible invoked the Almighty. Two years earlier, a fire killed three American astronauts while they were aboard a spacecraft that never left Earth.
Apollo 11’s ambitious (and risky) mission in the summer of 1969 was to put the first person on the moon.
Such was “the dream of the century,” an Italian woman noted in the Bible Society’s Bible, four days before Neil Armstrong, Apollo 11’s commander, left his footprints on the Earth’s natural satellite.
Before advancements in technology made such a voyage possible, creators of fiction offered their fanciful visions of lunar and space exploration. In his 1865 novel, “From the Earth to the Moon,” the French writer Jules Verne imagined astronauts reaching their goal by being shot out of a powerful cannon.
In a 1930s comic strip, space cowboy Buck Rogers zoomed through space on a ship propelled by a rocket.
By contrast, the Apollo 11 craft was more like a baby kangaroo initially carried in its mother’s pouch. Upon reaching outer space, Apollo ditched the rocket that got it there. In lunar orbit, it became the marsupial mother and detached its offspring, the Eagle module, which landed Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon’s surface while Michael Collins stayed with the mother ship. Twenty-one hours later, Collins’ traveling companions rejoined him for the return to Earth.
All of Apollo’s comings and goings proved to be a gripping televised drama. Tribune photographers found little knots of people gathered around television sets in firehouses and in front of shop windows.
Maury Lieber, 73, and his wife were glued to the TV in their Hyde Park apartment. “I am continually amazed by the progress that has been made during my lifetime,” he told the Tribune. “Why, the sight of an airplane in the sky is still a source of wonder to me.”
“The shrimp soufflé got cold and the melon salad got warm,” the Tribune reported of a moon-watching party in a Near North high-rise apartment. Mesmerized by fuzzy images of Armstrong preparing to set foot on the moon, guests ignored the food.
“I am glad it’s us up there and not the Russians,” said Myra Stromberg, who came in from Palatine for the party. “And, there is nothing wrong with (pride).”
The U.S. had been playing catch-up ball, having come late to the space race that began when the Soviet Union put an astronaut into orbit around the Earth in 1961. That was a blow to the collective ego of Americans who reflexively assumed that their country was the mother of invention. Proclaiming space as the new frontier, President John F. Kennedy announced in 1962, “We choose to go to the moon.”
But seeing is believing, especially in those Cold War years. The Soviet Union had a man-made satellite in orbit around the moon when the Apollo 11 mission was launched from Florida on July 16, 1969.
So a storehouse of pent-up anxiety and joy awaited the astronauts in Chicago. The city needed something to celebrate. The previous year, there had been rioting after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, and the police clashed with anti-war protesters drawn to Chicago by the Democratic Party’s convention.
Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins came to Chicago on Aug. 13, 1969. Their admirers stood four and five rows deep along the route that took the astronauts through the Loop to the plaza outside the Chicago Civic Center, where Mayor Richard J. Daley welcomed them. To a fanfare of trumpets, 5,000 balloons and 500 carrier pigeons were released.
Ernst Oberth tried to reach the convertible where the three American heroes stood in confetti up to their ankles. He wanted to give them a photograph of his uncle, Hermann Oberth, a German physicist. Hermann Oberth’s 1923 book, “The Rocket Into Planetary Space,” offered the first mathematical proof of the feasibility of space flight.
The photograph was signed, “In appreciation of your historic deed, H. Oberth.”
He left it with his nephew when passing through Chicago the week before. But the cops repeatedly stymied Ernst Oberth’s efforts to get through their lines. Finally, he gave up and went home.
Still, 2 million people had gathered in Chicago to honor the astronauts who had proved Hermann Oberth right when he calculated that humankind would reach the moon before the year 2000.
A storehouse of pent-up anxiety and joy awaited the astronauts in Chicago. The city needed something to celebrate.