And…..I’m back! It’s been a nice vacation these past few weeks. Got caught up on other things in my life. Didn’t even read other blogs. Nice to let it go for a bit…and nice to be back.

……

Wired.com reports that the original, un-remixed, unfiltered video tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing have vanished and may perhaps never be found. These tapes were made at the earth-link stations monitoring the direct feed from the surface of the moon. Because this feed was in a non-standard format (in order to fit into the very low bandwidth available at the time) it had to be converted and reformatted before being sent to NASA and then on to the half billion television viewers watching world wide.

That such original tapes even existed–and that anyone should care–only came to light fairly recently when engineers who designed the camera equipment used on the moon happened to see still photos taken of the unconverted feed. This feed had been displayed in real time on monitors at an Australian tracking station. These images were significantly clearer and more distinct than the fuzzy, blurry mess the television viewers saw. The engineers felt vindicated; their cameras had apparently worked as well as they had been designed to work. In the translation to the broadcast TV signal, something significant had been lost.

But the picture quality wasn’t the only thing lost. It seems that the unconverted moon transmissions had been recorded on video tape and sent to NASA. The camera engineers rejoiced; all they had to do was find those tapes and the world would finally see what they had intended it to see all along: crisp, clear footage of Neil Armstrong’s “one small step.” One small problem though–the tapes had taken “one giant leap” into oblivion. The engineers are still searching, hoping those videos will one day turn up somewhere (and, they hope, before the only machine left in the world that can play them stops working). Right now, it doesn’t look good.

I had my own set of lost-forever tapes connected to the Apollo 11 moon landing. Like a lot of boys growing up in the ’60s, I was head over heals in love with all things space related. Nowadays many of us don’t even realize a shuttle launch has occurred unless something goes wrong with it, but back then every manned rocket launch was a national event. Classes stopped at school so we could gather around a TV in the auditorium to watch the Redstone, Titan, or Saturn V propel its Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo mission into history. I had shelves of books about the space program, astronaut action figures, a space suit including helmet with radio transmitter–I was into this thing.

In some ways the space program was a great drama. President Kennedy’s speech promising that the 1960s would not close without an American on the moon set into motion an epic tale. There were great heroes: the astronauts, of course (most boys my age could name every one of the Mercury “Freedom 7″). There were many plot twists and turns (such as the constant reminders that the Soviets were slightly ahead of us in the space race). There was tragedy: the launch pad fire of Apollo 1 killing all three of its crew. But above all there was the great climax all this was building towards: Apollo 11 and the moon landing.

I remember the days of mid-to-late July 1969 as one of the most exciting times of my childhood. All of the daydreams and heart-longings that had been my obsession for as long as I could remember were riding with Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong as they hurtled at unimaginable speed toward the glowing white disc I squinted up at each evening. And best of all, the announced date for man’s first steps on a another world was my birthday, July 21!

The landing took place on the 20th as scheduled, and you can bet I was watching every moment of the coverage. Some time after the touchdown, my mother decided that since I would likely be up all night (the moon walk was scheduled for the wee hours of the morning of the 21st) she would give me my birthday present early. I was almost as thrilled as I was with the moon landing to open the wrappings and find one of the new portable compact cassette player/recorders and a supply of blank tapes. I immediately knew the first thing I would do with my new acquisition: I would record the audio of man’s first steps on the moon….on my birthday!

But some overeager astronauts unknowingly threw cold moon dust on a young boy’s twelfth birthday hopes. Reporting to NASA that they were far too excited to take their scheduled nap, Armstrong and Aldrin received permission to exit the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) several hours early–on the 20th instead of the 21st. For a short time I was crushed. But Walter Cronkite, everybody’s news anchor dad, seemed to be telling me to quit my whining and celebrate America’s triumph. At around 10 p.m. I switched on my new cassette recorder, placed the microphone near our television’s speaker, and let history flow onto the magnetic tape. I actually remember looking forward to someday playing the tape for my grandchildren.

Later that summer my family took a week’s vacation. My beloved recorder came along with me, but my precious moon walk tape stayed home safe and secure in my top dresser drawer. So I thought. When we opened the kitchen door upon returning from our trip we were greeted with a scene of chaos and destruction that was almost impossible for us to take in. The house was trashed. Totally. Top to bottom. Every piece of food or drink had been sprinkled or smeared all over every surface of the kitchen. Furniture was overturned or broken. Picture frames were smashed. Papers and financial records were strewn everywhere. Books had their pages ripped out.

We staggered through the war zone that was our first floor like the few survivors of a terrible holocaust. But suddenly I was snapped from my zombie-like state. Had they gone upstairs? Had they gone to my room? Had they found…

The moment I passed through my bedroom door I knew the terrible news. Audio tape streamed like confetti all over my bed, my dresser, and my floor. The now empty cassette cartridge labeled “Man on the Moon - July 1969″ lay in the midst of it. Just to insure that it would never be playable, the vandals had smeared it with honey they had brought up from the kitchen.

Weirdest of all, we eventually figured out that the vandals were two eight-year-old girls from our neighborhood. They had wriggled through the little door where the milk man used to leave his bottles. They thought we would think their escapade was funny.

“Life has a way of trashing your treasures,” I once heard a commencement speaker say. Whether it’s lost transmissions from the moon or a little boy’s sacred memento of his childhood obsession, we can’t hold on to anything. Today on the radio I heard about a Microsoft engineer who is recording every detail of his life with a camera strapped to his chest, the data loaded to huge hard drives. Has anybody asked him what good all those discs will be 50 years from now? I think I’ll try to be happier about whatever memories my brain decides to preserve and bring back. And I think I’ll try to preserve them in the stories I tell my grandchildren. Better chance there than on magnetic tape.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 10:02 pm and is filed under It`s All About Me, Tell Me a Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.