‘ JUST MY DAD’

Brothers Mark, left, and Rick Armstrong view items belonging to their father, astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon. They soon will auction about 3,000 items that had belonged to their father, who died in 2012 in Cincinnati.

DALLAS — In the summer of 1969, Rick Armstrong was 12 and whacking a baseball in the Houstonarea Little League.

He was selected to play in the All-Star Game — but he had to skip it, because he was at Cape Canaveral in Florida to watch his father, Ohio native Neil A. Armstrong, blast off to the moon.

“I wasn’t happy about that,” said Rick, now 61.

Rick and his brother Mark, 55, are auctioning about 3,000 items from their father, who died in 2012. In the process, they are revisiting their childhoods and the enduring legacy of their father as the first person to walk on the moon.

“I intellectually get it,” Rick said. “But internally I’m not sure I will ever get it. It’s sort of just my dad.”

The auction is drawing A bumper sticker promoting Wapakoneta, Ohio, where Neil Armstrong was born, will be among the items for sale.

lots of interest, with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 approaching and a movie about Armstrong, “First Man” starring Ryan Gosling, coming out this week.

The items to be auctioned include flags, medallions, stamped envelopes and other memorabilia that made the trip to the moon and back when the Apollo 11 lunar lander set down

on July 20, 1969. Others come from earlier years, such as a letter that Neil Armstrong wrote as a boy growing up in Ohio to the Easter Bunny.

Most of the material had been sitting in basements and storage lockers for decades.

“We felt like we should embark on the process of making sure we keep things in good condition and where possible conserve them,” Mark said.

They could have donated everything to a museum or a university, but then items might have sat in boxes. In an auction, each item is researched so that buyers know what they are getting. Photographs of every item will remain online.

“That means that item’s history is preserved for anyone to see and for research later on,” Mark said.

The first batch of about 800 items will be sold soon — Nov. 1-2 in Dallas. Interested buyers have been able to see some of the items online at Heritage Auctions in Dallas.

Many NASA astronauts have auctioned off items over the decades, but “Neil Armstrong never did that,” said Michael Riley, director of the space-exploration department at Heritage Auctions. “Nobody ever realized what he had, what