Here is an excerpt from a classic article written by E.B. White for The New Yorker (July 26, 1969). To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
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The moon, it turns out, is a great place for men. One-sixth gravity must be a lot of fun, and when Armstrong and Aldrin went into their bouncy little dance, like two happy children, it was a moment not only of triumph but of gaiety. The moon, on the other hand, is a poor place for flags. Ours looked stiff and awkward, trying to float on the breeze that does not blow. (There must be a lesson here somewhere.) It is traditional, of course, for explorers to plant the flag, but it struck us, as we watched with awe and admiration and pride, that our two fellows were universal men, not national men, and should have been equipped accordingly. Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.
The Moon Hours
(The following pieces were written by various reporters.)
By 10 P.M. Sunday, twelve hundred people had gathered at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, between Radio City Music Hall and the Time-Life Plaza. Rain had been falling since 7:30, and umbrellas shifted from side to side and poke up above heads, obscuring some people’s view of the thing everyone was trying to watch—a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot screen, on which NBC’s coverage of the moon landing was being shown in color. A large sign read “Life and nasa Present Apollo: Man to the Moon,” and huge photographs of the three Apollo astronauts stood in windows of the Time & Life Building. To the north of the television screen, a full-scale model of the lunar module was shielded from the rain by a plastic canopy, and other equipment had been given protective covers. The intersection was brightly lighted—two searchlights played on nearby buildings—and at this hour the area was extremely noisy. The noise was a constant, high-level mixture of automobile engines, horns, police whistles (twenty policemen were patrolling the area), the shouts of benders (they moved through the crowd selling pennants, souvenir buttons, pretzels, and ice cream), the voices and beeps from the TV audio system, and the chatter of the people crowded on the sidewalks behind police barricades. But as the time for the astronauts’ exit from the LM drew near, the crowd began to grow quiet. Anticipation was obvious in people’s faces, and the talk became a sort of nervous undertone. At ten-fifteen, a newcomer—a young man carrying a pack on his back—approached a man in a blue jacket and said, “I presume they’ve got to the moon.”
“You don’t know?” the man in blue asked. “Where have you been all day.”
“Just flown in. English,” said the young man,
“Well, they’re about ready to step out any second now,” the man in blue said.
The young man said, “Stone me! They must be way ahead of schedule. Oh, great! This is fantastic!”
At 10:54, when the first shot of the LM—the lower part—appeared on the screen, in black-and-white, a cheer went up. When Neil Armstrong’s foot was seen to touch the lunar surface, another cheer went up. When he stood with both feet on the moon, the people cheered and applauded a third time. Meanwhile, cars continued to roll by and the police moved incessantly in their attempt to keep the crowd behind the sidewalk barricades.
At 12:33 a.m. Monday, a No. 6 bus, without passengers, rolled silently down Seventh Avenue. A good number of people were walking west on Fiftieth Street—away from the Time-Life Plaza—and by this time only about three hundred people were left watching the big screen. The screen still showed the LM, whose legs looked bright in the sunlight. The rain, which had stopped for a while, had begun again, and people stood beneath umbrellas or improvised shelters of paper or plastic. At 12:41, a voice from Mission Control said, “This is Houston. You’ve got about ten minutes left now prior to commencing your E.V.A. termination activities. Over.” A young couple turned to each other and kissed. Working among the people, a man in coveralls began to sweep the plaza with a broom.
In the Eighteenth Precinct, on Fifty-fourth Street west of Eighth Avenue, two patrolmen brought in a young man and a young woman in handcuffs. The couple were booked on suspicion of having mugged a man on West Forty-fourth Street at about eleven o’clock—or at just about the time Armstrong was setting foot on the moon. Both suspects looked frightened and tired. Four police officers sat or stood in the main room. In an adjoining office, nine policemen—some in uniform and some in civilian clothes—sat relaxed in front of a television set that showed the lunar module. One man sat back with his feet on a desk, and others lounged on chairs or desks, watching the screen. They talked little, but from time to time someone spoke or laughed, and one young officer made a joke about having seen the whole thing before on “The Late Show.”
Inside the Chess & Checker Club of New York, which is upstairs at 212 West Forty-second Street, eighteen men sat at small tables over game boards in a silence that was broken only occasionally, by desultory remarks. The Times Square Bowling Lanes, upstairs at 1482 Broadway, were similarly devoted to recreation—twenty-five people were bowling—but four people sat in the establishment’s bar watching a television set, from which an announcer’s voice was saying, “Heart rates of the crewmen are averaging between ninety and one hundred. The flight surgeon reports they’re right on the predicted number of the B.T.U. units expended. . . .And he thinks they’re in great shape.”
To the customers in the Lincoln Bar, at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, in Harlem, man’s first step onto the face of the moon was greeted more with a whimper than a bang. Scarcely anyone was looking or listening when Armstrong placed his foot on the moon. A jukebox, in a dark corner, was blaring “What the World Needs Now,” by the Sweet Inspirations, and a man with his back to the television set and a highball in his hand was telling a group of his friends about a girl he had just treated to a huge Chinese dinner who had declared on their way out of the restaurant that she now wanted a barbecue supper. “Man, I had to unload her,” he said. “I didn’t have enough left to put gas in my car.” One of the customer reached out, touched him, and said, “Hey, buddy, they walking on the moon.” The man with the highball put down his drink and walked out of the bar.
When Colonel Edwin Aldrin climbed down to join Armstrong, the conversations along the bar were louder than the conversation between moon and earth coming from the television set, and the jukebox in the corner had shifted to “I’m Going to Chicago, Sorry I can’t Take You.” The bartender—a short, amiable white man with a bald head and a clip-on bow tie, who took care of one end of the bar while a black barmaid took care of the other—went and turned off the jukebox.
“Hey, leave that thing on, man!” a male voice yelled. “We ain’t care nothin’ ’bout no moon.”
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E.B. White, the author of twenty books of prose and poetry, was awarded the 1970 Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his children’s books, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. This award is now given every three years “to an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have, over a period of years, make a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children.” The year 1970 also marked the publication of Mr. White’s third book for children, The Trumpet of the Swan, honored by The International Board on Books for Young People as an outstanding example of literature with international importance. In 1973, it received the Sequoyah Award (Oklahoma) and the William Allen White Award (Kansas), voted by the school children of those states as their “favorite book” of the year.
Born in Mount Vernon, New York, Mr. White attended public schools there. He was graduated from Cornell University in 1921, worked in New York for a year, then traveled about. After five or six years of trying many sorts of jobs, he joined the staff of The New Yorker magazine, then in its infancy. The connection proved a happy one and resulted in a steady output of satirical sketches, poems, essays, and editorials. His essays have also appeared in Harper’s Magazine, and his books include One Man’s Meat, The Second Tree from the Corner, Letters of E.B. White, The Essays of E.B. White and Poems and Sketches of E.B. White. In 1938 Mr. White moved to the country. On his farm in Maine he kept animals, and some of these creatures got into his stories and books. Mr. White said he found writing difficult and bad for one’s disposition, but he kept at it. He began Stuart Little in the hope of amusing a six-year-old niece of his, but before he finished it, she had grown up.