Neil Armstrong Dies; Two Takes On His 'Giant Leap For Mankind' - Forbes

After walking on the moon, Neil Armstrong radios back to Houston from Apollo 11. Photo: AP/NASA

Neil Armstrong, who made the "giant leap for mankind" as the first person to walk on the moon, died yesterday at the age of 82. Today, in commemoration, I fished out my copy of the original New York Times reporting Armstrong's historic lifetime achievement.

Back in 1969, I went to a lot of trouble to get that newspaper. At the time, I was an athletically challenged city kid not fitting in to0 well at a Vermont summer camp called Aloha. It was (and still is) a beautiful, very rustic place where kids spend the summer living in tents, and where I felt miserably isolated from the world I knew.

Each morning one copy of The New York Times materialized in the main office and I used to go there after breakfast to read it. When I learned about the upcoming moon landing, I asked someone in a position of authority if it would be possible for me to order my own copy of The Times (which cost 10 cents) covering this piece of history and have the money debited from my candy account at the camp store.

Apparently I made a good case that staying connected with world events at this particular moment was worth the compromise in our Thoreauvian existence. The camp elders (or so the grownsups seemed) arranged to set up a rented television in the recreation hall, so we could all gather round the evening of Sunday, July 20 and watch the Apollo 11 spacecraft, commanded by Armstrong, achieve its mission. In addition they not only honored my request to get a copy of the next day's New York Times, but extended the same privilege to everybody else at camp, and put me in charge of collecting the names of campers and counselors who wanted one.

I hadn't looked at this piece of history in many years. But this morning, after reading Neil Armstrong's obituary, I took apart a closet in my house where I've stashed the remnants of a well-lived life and there it was in a cardboard box: folded in fourths, very yellowed, with no acid-free preservation, but still intact and very readable.

Of course in 2012 we would have been tweeting and blogging about the moon landing in real time. But in those days we waited until the next morning to read the printed word. Armstrong's very quotable radio message to NASA Mission Control in Houston, after touching down their lunar landing craft, Eagle, "The Eagle has landed," was captured in a headline. It has since become such a part of popular parlance that it is defined in the Urban Dictionary.

Today I viewed this piece of memorabilia with a journalist's eye. The first thing I noticed was the difference between the front page of the newspaper I had saved from 1969 and the one pictured in Armstrong's obituary in today's New York Times. Here's a photo of mine:

This copy of The New York Times came home in my camp trunk in 1969 and has survived multiple moves since then.

What made it to Vermont was an early edition of the paper—identifiable by four dots to the right of the volume number in the upper left-hand area of the front page. As the paper issues subsequent editions, it subtracts a dot (a convention it still uses). The paper reproduced in the obituary came later–it has just one dot in the same spot.

By that time both the main headline and the subhead had been revised to read:

MEN WALK ON MOON

ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN;

COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG

The photos had also been changed. Instead of the headshots of Armstrong and his copilot, Col. Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., known as Buzz,  and a picture of the Houston space Center, there was a photo of Armstrong stepping on the surface of the moon, and one of Aldrin climbing down the ladder of the spacecraft.

The lead story, running down the right-hand side of the paper, had been changed as well. In the updated edition, "Bleak, Rocky World Seen From Module," had been replaced with "A Powdery Surface Closely Explored."  Both articles were written by John Noble Wilford, who went on to become a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times science writer and the author of many books, including We Reach The Moon (Bantam Books 1969).

That big day in Armstrong's career became a big one for Wilford, too. He's now 78 and retired. But today, 43 years after the moon landing, The Times' front-page obituary of Armstrong carries his byline.

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Deborah L. Jacobs, a lawyer and journalist, is the author of Estate Planning Smarts: A Practical, User-Friendly, Action-Oriented Guide. You can follow her articles on Forbes by clicking the red plus sign or the blue Facebook "subscribe" button to the right of her picture above any post. She is also on Twitter