I came of age during the JFK years. The grief is personal.

How do I tell my grown-ass children about the life and times of JFK? How I was nine when he was elected and 13 when he was assassinated? That I was the oldest son in an Irish-Catholic family in Middle America who idolized the man? That his killing tore a hole in my heart that remains. That all of the stuff that’s come out about Kennedy’s affairs and bad judgement has not dimmed my memories?

I’m a grouchy old man. I am a writer who takes a jaundiced view of most things. I was none of those things during JFK’s presidential run. My parents seemed entranced by the news reports on our black-and-white TV. So handsome, my mother said. So Catholic, my father said. I love Jackie’s hair, Grandma said. All the adults in my life were on board with Kennedy, saint and war hero.

I yearn for those days. How I want them back. As a family, we listened over and over to Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family” records on Dad’s stereo. My father made his first hi-fi as those things were called back in the day. It’s no surprise as he built crystal radio sets as a boy in his basement and served four years as a radioman with the U.S. Signals Corps during the war. He also admired JFK’s war record; Nixon’s paled in comparison. Little did we know, we hadn’t heard the last of Tricky Dick.

Kennedy was central to my coming-of-age years, 9-13. I read “Profiles in Courage.” I knew the PT-109 story by heart, the public one. Our family was on the verge of being cut adrift by the aerospace age, influenced by the Cold War and The Race to the Moon.  At 9, we lived in a new house in a Southwest Denver suburb not far from the Fort Logan Induction Center my father signed on to fight the Nazis in 1942. At 10, I attended the second half of fourth grade near a missile base in Washington State. I went to fifth grade in Moses Lake, sixth grade at College Hill Elementary in Wichita. We moved closer to Wichita’s Air Force base for the first half of St. Francis seventh grade and was there when Kennedy was shot. I was 14 when we returned to Denver and I went to the first half of seventh grade at a public junior high in Denver crowded with Boomer kids. And then we landed in Florida with a mission: send men to the moon because JFK said so. I was in Our Lady of Lourdes Grade School in Daytona Beach. I didn’t know it then, couldn’t even have guessed, that last Sunday I was back at OLL in Daytona attending mass at a spacious new church presided over by a justice warrior priest. I was a white-haired senior, disabled, pushing a walker. Still looking for answers.

And today I contemplate JFK because my daughter wants to know. She reads this blog. Read on, Annie. And keep reading.

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 2

I stepped off the plane at the old Jacksonville airport expecting the worst. It was after dark and August’s heat and humidity wrapped me in its stifling embrace. I herded my mother and brothers and sisters down the airplane stairs, across the tarmac, and into the terminal. I greeted my Dad and complained about the heat. “You get used to it,” he said.

We loaded kids and luggage into our Ford Falcon station wagon and headed to a motel as it was getting late and the babies were crying and the rest of us were cranky. We drove by a car and its window was wide open and the guy driving was not wearing a shirt. Seems ridiculous to remember that decades later but in Colorado or anywhere else in the West I had never seen a guy driving without a shirt. We landed at a motel and my brother Dan and I saw a family swimming in the pool. Swimming at night? My God, this was a different sort of universe. We bugged our Dad to let us go swimming and he did, probably because he’d been on his own for a couple months and had forgotten how many unruly children he had spawned and wanted to get rid of a few of them. The pool felt great after a day spent on planes and in airports.

The next day, we drove to our new home in Volusia County. Every bridge we crossed had at least one person fishing on it. It was a workday in the middle of the week and everyone seemed to be fishing. We breezed into town, crossed the Intercoastal Waterway, drove through a tunnel under a big hotel and right onto the beach. I had seen the Pacific during our vacation trip to the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 (we lived in Washington State then) but I had never actually been in an ocean. And so many girls in bikinis.

The next day, we all went to the beach. The water was kind of rough but being in the ocean was so cool. Mom made us wear shirts when not in the water to cover skin vulnerable to the sun like any other Irish-American kids who’d spent their youth in snow country. Mom came in the water with us but Dad watched from the beach because he never learned how to swim. Hurricane Cleo was coming up the coast and passed through Daytona the next day, stirring up the surf on its way to St. Augustine. It dumped plenty of rain, more than I’d ever seen in one storm.

Next: Trial by hurricane

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 1

Over 400,000 people worked on the Apollo Program. – From the end credits of Richard Linklater’s Netflix film “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood”

My father was one of them. Unlike’s Linklater’s Houston-based father, mine worked closer to Cape Canaveral, in an office in Daytona Beach, Fla. Thousands joined the Moon Mission, most of them answering JFK’s call although he was no longer around to cajole and promise. Lyndon Johnson would be president when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969 after being launched from the Cape on July 16. Johnson was glad for a bit of good news after the battles of the 1960s which weren’t over yet. Camelot a distant memory. On this hot July day in Florida, hundreds of thousands of space-age lunarnauts and millions more around the world rooted for U-S-A!

July 20 always brings footage from the lunar event. It seems like yesterday that I watched it in black-and-white telecasts beamed from the lunar lander. I am 72 and retired. I look through veils of nostalgia. I sometimes share my memories with my two 30-something children. They are mildly amused. At least they believe that we landed on the moon. I think they do but it’s difficult to know for sure. All of us carry different memory-loops through life and they change as time passes.

What do I remember from this time? Some things I know for sure. Others are a bit foggy so I conjure what seems closest to the truth. I have not made up anything that follows but I may remember it imperfectly. That’s life.

I was 13.67 years old in August 1964 when our family of 10 moved to Florida. I was not pleased to be moving to the third state I would live in during the past eight months. In January, I’d been yanked out of St. Francis Grade School in suburban Wichita in the midst of basketball season and the wooing of classmate Patty Finn. In February, I was walking to the bus stop in snowy Denver to attend the split session at a junior high packed with Boomer kids and the site of at least two knife fights and a teacher mugging during my short time there. In June, my father came home from work to announce his new job with G.E. and our Florida move. He had finished the task of hiding nuclear missiles among the sagebrush of the West. The space program needed his accounting skills and our family was going along for the ride. Dad moved immediately. We sold our house, packed our goods, said goodbye (again), and off we went.

Next: Night Swimming in the Sunshine State

"For All Mankind" shows what the U.S, space program could have been

As I move on to the second season of “For All Mankind” on Apple-Plus, I keep asking the same question:

What happened to us?

By us, I mean U.S. as in US of A. The show posits a vigorous space program motivated mainly by the Soviets beating us to the moon in 1969. One member of the Soviet crew is a woman cosmonaut. Down on earth, Americans with hangdog looks are watching this on TV. They can’t believe the Reds beat us to the moon. Didn’t President Kennedy promise us that we would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade? We did, in fact, land a man on the moon on July 20, 1969, well ahead of the Russkis who never managed it.

The genius of this show is showing how the U.S. took the Soviet challenge, recruited women astronauts (Nixon’s idea) and landed one on the moon to claim a spot on the rock. The astronaut was a chain-smoking blonde, Jerrie Cobb, who was one of the first choices back when NASA tried to match the Mercury 7 men with a female contingent. The Cobb in the series (Molly) goes to space while the real Cobb, an accomplished aviator who passed all the NASA tests, did not. Season 1 Episode 4 is dedicated to her.

That’s the cool thing about the series, imagining what could have been. It resembles the “Hollywood” series on Netflix which imagined a post-war Tinseltown that appreciated its gay actors and didn’t demonize them. Also, in the dystopian TV world, the U.S. lost World War II and was divided up between Nazi Germany and Japan. Or you can see an America which is now the Gilead in “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Also, zombies. Zombies everywhere.

I ask again: what happened to us? What happened to the U.S. space program? My father worked for the space program from 1964-69 in Daytona Beach. We kids watched all of the launches. We were happy when July 20, 1969, came around and showed the U.S. what we were made of. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Ran into trouble with the balky shuttle, losing two crews and our sense of adventure. Vietnam kicked our ass as did all the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s.

We get to see what could have been on “For All Mankind.” I am only on the second episode of the second season so I do not yet know what ultimately happens. But I do know what has not happened during my lifetime. And that’s very sad. 

1969 moon landing memories linger on the beach and in The House of the One-Eyed Seahorse

I like to think that I was a witness to history during Moon Landing Week in July 1969.

I witnessed the launch from the beach the morning of July 16. The Hartford Avenue beach approach in Daytona is located 62 miles northwest of Cape Canaveral. The Saturn 5, NASA's largest-ever launch vehicle, lit up an already bright morning and its sound waves seemed to ruffle the smooth Atlantic. The rocket arced into the sky and out to sea. It was visible only a few minutes. When it was gone, we went back in the water. Or maybe I was in the water already. I forget, as I saw so many launches during my 14 years in Florida. They merge into one big launch that shows the U.S. commitment to space exploration in the 1960s and into the 1970s. JFK showed the way with his 1961 speech. Congress shoveled money at the program as it took seriously Kennedy's vow of a man on the moon in 1969. An American man on the moon. Take that, Russkis!

It was all about the Cold War. The USSR ambushed us with Sputnik, Laika the Space Dog, and Yuri Gargarin. We fought back with Mercury and Alan Shepard and Gemini and finally Apollo. We won the Space Race with the moon landing. It was important to win something in the mid-60s, since we were losing in Vietnam and young people were lost to their elders and some of our biggest heroes were gunned down by assassins in 1968.

My father was a rocket man. He didn't fly them or test them. But he was a contract specialist with General Electric and later NASA. He worked out deals with suppliers of nuts and bolts and many of the gadgets that went to the moon. He could look at a launch with pride and announce that the big hunk of metal ferrying Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin to the moon was partly his doing. He and thousands of other Americans had worked together to get the U.S. first on the moon.

But all was not well in Rocketland. Workforce cutbacks had started two years earlier. One day, GE honchos told Dad that his services were no longer needed in Florida. He accepted a transfer to Cincinnati where GE was building all kinds of new and wonderful things. He said he would go on alone and the family would join him when school got out in June. Dad didn't like Cincinnati and we couldn't sell our house in Daytona as hundreds were leaving and  it was a buyer's market. This well-educated workforce that had come from New York and Ohio and New England in the fifties and sixties were no longer needed. It hurt Daytona. It was not exactly the Silicon Valley of the 60s. Most jobs were in the service industries that fed the tourist industry. I worked some of those jobs. Busboy, bagboy, laundry pick-up guy for beach motels, worker on a beach float stand. My brother was a gremmie selling suntan lotion by a hotel pool. One of my sisters was a nursing assistant taking care of old people who flocked to Florida's Promised Land. The engineers who made the rockets (and their families) would be missed by local businesses and schools.

But Dad grew tired of city life and found a job with NASA back on Daytona. I was happy because I had just made my high school's basketball squad after a year's worth of practice and visualized a bright future as a power forward.

On the afternoon of July 20 when Apollo 11's Eagle landed near the Sea of Tranquility, I was parked by the Atlantic Ocean with my girlfriend K. The radio news followed the ship's descent which we only partially listened to. When "The Eagle has landed" was announced, we paused our kissing and fondling for several minutes to let history wash over us. It rained heavily and the beach seemed deserted, odd for a July afternoon. Minuscule waves broke on the sandbar 50 yards in front of us. No surfing today. Once the announcers returned to just talking about the landing of the Eagle, we returned to our previous engagement.

I know the exact spot where this happened. When I'm in town, I walk by it and remember that historic afternoon. I see my rusty red Renault Dauphine with the light blue door that replaced the original, sheared off in a hasty back-up from my garage. Two people are inside, at least I think it's two people, as the windows are fogged. The spirit of that day drifts over that spot as does the memories of an eighteen-year-old me. This presence remains at the beach even when I'm back home in Wyoming. It may still be here when 68-year-old me and then (God willing) the 78-or 88-year-old me toddles down the beach, cane poking holes in the soft sand. When I'm gone, will the ethereal presence remain of the radio broadcast and the automobile and the young man and young woman, their thumping hearts and hopes and dreams? I like to think that beachgoers in 2069, parked in the same spot in their futuremobile, will pause their canoodling to listen to the voices of astronauts landing on Mars or orbiting Saturn. Maybe in the background they will hear a faded voice: "The Eagle has landed." 

That night, in The House of the One-Eyed Seahorse, I joined my family to watch Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. The video feed was grainy but I could make out Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin cavorting on the lunar surface. We watched on a TV that struggled to pull in signals via antennae supplemented by a coat hanger and a broken channel changer replaced by vice grips. Nine kids are tough on TVs, even ancient ones that received but three channels. We no longer live there, haven't in a long time. My brothers and sisters and I carry around those memories. Fifty years ago, we were plotting our escape. Now, in quiet times, those memories swirl in our aging heads. They also exist somewhere in the house that almost burnt down in August of '69. We could have lost everyone but for the quick actions of my sister Molly. I was on a date and running late so I salvaged one of the cars, the other one burned to a cinder in the garage where the fire started. My memories would be vastly different as a lone survivor.

This all will be on my mind as I watch film of the July 16 launch and the July 20 walk on the moon and the July 24 splashdown.

Scouting report: Finding the best Wyoming spot to watch the eclipse

View from The Castle, looking west toward Laramie Peak.

The family and I drove to Guernsey State Park for Mother's Day. This is only my second visit to the park in the 26 years that I've lived in Wyoming. The first visit was in May 2008 when I joined my colleagues at Wyoming State Parks and Cultural Resources to celebrate the 75th anniversary of FDR's New Deal, which included the Civilian Conservation Corps and WPA projects for writers, artists and actors. Writers earned a buck from Uncle Sam by writing field guides of the states and conducting oral histories of residents, as Zora Neale Hurston did with ex-slaves in Florida. Nelson Algren and Richard Wright researched and wrote in Illinois. Noted author Vardis Fisher wrote the Idaho guide, still regarded as one of the best of its kind.

CCC workers built many magnificent structures in this park. Guernsey is home to The Castle, a rock-and-timber shelter that overlooks the park. A few paces down the walking path is a restroom dubbed the Million Dollar Biffy. The interpretive sign says that workers gave it that name not because it took a million dollars to build, which is a lot of Depression-era money, but that it took so darn long to build. Unemployed young men from Iowa and Tennessee hewed the timbers and cut the rock and forged the iron. It should last a thousand years, causing archaeologists of 5017 to remark, "These ancient humans certainly built quality restrooms." In 5017, the biffy and The Castle may overlook a teeming inland sea. The waves will be bitchin'.

We visited the park to see if it would serve as an outpost to watch the total solar eclipse set for high noon on August 21. We are a bit late getting started. Some have been planning eclipse activities for years. Hotels in Casper, eclipse epicenter, have been booked up for months. Campgrounds, too along the event's path in WYO, which runs from touristy Jackson in the west to sleepy Torrington in the east, with stops in Riverton, Hell's Half Acre, AstroCon 2017 in downtown Casper, the burg of Glenrock, and Douglas, home of the state fair,  Chris and I  are trying to find an eclipse-watching spot somewhere in there. We bought a Guernsey day pass for Aug. 21. We also got on the campsite waiting list. We thought that might be fun during this grand ol' party celebrating the majestic universe which can't be any older than 6,600 years, give or take.

Chris and I won't be around the next time, when Colorado gets the nod in 2045. By then, we will have experienced a total eclipse of the heart. We hope that the words of the Federal Writers Project will survive, although in what form it's hard to say. Thee printed word has gone through amazing changes since Gutenberg. Since the 1930s, books have gone from typed-and-printed form to e-books. It happened a lot quicker than that -- from the 1980s to now.

One hopes that books survive as long as the biffy.

In search of spring's Pink Moon

After reading about “the pink moon” on Facebook for several days, my daughter Annie and I decided to take a look for ourselves.

Each full moon has its own name and stories. The Pink Moon is April’s moon. Here’s how it’s described by the Farmer’s Almanac:

The name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and, among coastal tribes, the Full Fish Moon, because this is when the shad swam upstream to spawn.

Susan Tweit, a nature writer out of Salida, Colo., had mused about the pink moon for several days. Susan has a fine moon-viewing venue in the Colorado mountains. On Thursday night, she posted a gorgeous photo of the full moon. It wasn’t pink (at least to the camera’s eye) but it was big and bright, lighting up wispy high-altitude clouds and what looked like a jet’s contrail.

That night, I saw the same moon from my Cheyenne backyard. A fast-moving storm was rolling in. I called my wife Chris and daughter Annie to come out and take a look. But within minutes, the moon was hidden by clouds.

“What moon?” they said.

“It was here a minute ago.”

Friday night brought more commentary and another smashing photo from Susan. I watched the moon emerge from behind my neighbor’s house. Not pink but still glorious. Even though I was wearing a jacket, the cold wind drove me inside when all I really wanted to do was stand and stare.

Last night, I decided to view the moon’s rising. I found the time and Annie and I jumped in the car and drove down Dell Range to the Culver’s parking lot. It was after nine but people were still diving into those butter burgers. We found a strategic spot and watched the moon rise.

“It’s pink, I think,” I said.

“Looks more yellow,” said Annie.

I forgot to bring the camera but that probably was a good thing. Snapshots would not have done it justice. The moon’s big face looked down on us. That’s how Annie described it.

We sat in the lot and watched the moon slowly shed its pink and take on more of a yellowish cast. It began to brighten to white. We talked of space travel and some of the sci-fi movies we both like. 2001, A Space Odyssey;  Apollo 13;  Star Wars;  Star Trek, etc. I spoke about our country’s space program. My father – her grandfather – had been a part of the race to get a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. I talked about Alan Shepard and Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn and how Gus Grissom and his crew died in that terrible launch pad fire. We talked about walking on the moon – what a thrill that must have been. It was thrilling enough to watch on black-and-white TV. And what a view that must have been, to see earth from a rock 238,000-some miles away!

Sitting there in the front of the Ford, we spoke of the vastness of space. So wonderful but yet so frightening. Annie said that, given the chance, she probably wouldn’t go into space. I had to agree. It frightened me too. I have been having trouble lately dealing with my own “inner space.” I have depression and lately have been struggling with it. If I can’t handle this tiny space I inhabit, how could I possibly face the vastness of space? I could easily be crushed by the universe!

But that won’t happen. The wonder and curiosity in Annie’s voice helps me realize that embracing the universe and its marvels only expands my inner self. Pink moons. Spiral nebulae. Black holes. Vast, empty stretches of space.

On this night in the Culver’s parking lot, we sit together, my college student daughter and I, gazing on the Pink Moon of April. She was born under another full moon, the Full Worm Moon of March (Farmer’s Almanac), the time when earthworms begin working the soil and the robins and the crows reappear and the snow begins to crust over as it thaws by day and freezes by night. Annie was born with a full head of dark hair with silver tips. I told her she had been kissed by the full moon. It was a pretty good story at the time and it seems as good an explanation as any.

On this Saturday during Easter weekend, moonlight shines down on us and the Cheyenne streetscape. We eventually head for home. I am feeling comfortable in my body for the first time in months. Perhaps the light of the Pink Moon carries some healing powers. But I suspect the brightening of my mood has more to do with what’s happening right here on earth, within the orbit of  my own loving family.

Bowie's "Space Oddity" came out before U.S. walked on the moon

"Space Oddity" by David Bowie, was released to coincide with the Apollo 11 moon landing. The BBC featured the song during its TV coverage of the 1969 lunar landing.

Read today's story in UK Telegraph on top ten moon hits. Go to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/space/5871370/Apollo-11-moon-landing-Moon-music.html

Man in the Moon is so very lonely

Lots of newspaper articles and TV coverage marking the 40th anniversary of the U.S. moon landing. All of them seem to ask the same question: WTF?

It was a gallant quest, sparked by a challenge from JFK. A challenge that got many of us pulling in the same direction for a brief shining moment. JFK also kept us heading down the road to ruination in Vietnam. JFK's successor, LBJ, turned that road to ruin into a ten-lane expressway, and decided not to run for a second term in the wake of disastrous results, leaving the field open to Nixon. He did continue NASA's lunar flights but, in his second term, was distracted from the mission by break-ins and paranoia and Christmas bombings and cross-border incursions and trips to China.

Our lunaracy ended about the same time as Nixon's. And we haven't been back to the moon since.

Beating the Bolsheviks to the moon had more to do with beating the Bolsheviks than it did with the moon. We were demonstrating our superiority as the planet's only God-fearing democratic capitalist republic. We not only demonstrated this in space, but also in Hue and Managua and Cuba and Laos and Berlin and Tehran and Taiwan and Jakarta. We were so busy spreading democracy in these places that we forgot about the Sea of Tranquility -- ran out of money, too. Not to mention imagination. Reagan, too. Don't forget about him.

Think about all this next time you wonder: Man on the Moon -- WTF?