The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 4

Fate had other ideas. We couldn’t sell our house in a down market as hundreds of other Apollo pioneers were trying to do. My father reported that he hated Cincinnati. He took a job with NASA which still needed space accountants and returned to Daytona just in time for the new school year. School chums asked me to return their going-away present but my dog had chewed up the nice Frisbee they gifted me. I made the varsity in my junior year and started dating a girl who drove a Canary-yellow GTO but she liked driving my rusted little car so we switched up often.

Over the next two years, I attended my first rock concerts in Jacksonville and in December 1968, my buddy Rick and I took our military draft physicals downtown and his lifer Chief dad arranged for us to spend the night aboard his ship. In March of ‘69, our b-ball team went to the state tournament in the Jacksonville Coliseum where we lost in the semis. Thus ended my basketball career.

In July 1969, as I pondered an uncertain future, our family huddled around the TV watching Neil Armstrong on the moon. The day before, my girlfriend and I were making out on the beach in my little car. The rain came down as the news came on: “The Eagle has landed.”

Two weeks later, when the Apollo astronauts were back in the U.S., our house burned down. No casualties except... 

As the day faded into history, my mother went to work as a nurse and my father got a job crunching numbers with the State of Florida and commuted to the Jacksonville office. Dad still didn’t know how to swim but the rest of us did. We were water people, for now.

Bio: Michael Shay did some of his growing up in Florida but now lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with his wife and two grown children. He graduated from Daytona’s Father Lopez High School in 1969, Daytona Beach Community College in 1974 and University of Florida in 1976. He applied for reporter jobs at every newspaper in Florida but none would hire him so, like Huck Finn, he lit out for the territories. He gets to Florida as often as he can to visit family and friends. His story collection, “The Weight of a Body,” is available on Amazon. His novel, “Zeppelins over Denver,” is due out later this year.