The world changed on a bike ride on a hot summer's day in 1969

A ride to infinity and beyond

I could take the heat better when I was a kid. I’m the only Tucsonan who ever made that claim. And I was the first to ever say that it is, in fact, a dry heat. And yes, the heat is getting to me.

I remember being fourteen and riding my bike from our home at Swan and 27th Street out to Saguaro National Monument East in the beautiful dry heat. In the middle of summer! No sunscreen. One army canteen in my bike basket. No helmet. No hat. No sense. No worries.

No Extreme Heat Warnings. No Antarctic ice melt. No Greenhouse effect. What’s a little summer heat. I’m riding on Venice Beach only there’s no Pacific Ocean just the cool blue of the Rincons and the shimmering asphalt.

Only 95-degrees that day. (You can google anything.)

Nothing this tough Tucson kid and his stingray bicycle couldn’t handle. I was a true desert rat. And it was just another summer of freedom from school in in Tucson and I was doing fine under our breezy swamp box living on popsicles from the orbiting ice cream trucks.

This Sunday in July is one I’ll never forget.

“In the year 2525” was number one on KTKT. Enjoy: "In the year 2525”

I was such a loser I loved my Stingray bike. I even and added saddlebag baskets to enhance the nerd look.

And all the hits were blasting out of the tinny speaker of my cheap plastic made-in-Japan transistor radio as I pedaled east on 22nd Street. Proud Mary kept on rolling and that Bad Moon kept rising as I gleefully rolled on past the Dairy Queen and Handy Andy’s Hardware and Bobs Big Boy and the Thrifty Drug and out into the undeveloped desert beyond the edge of suburbia. Who wouldn’t want to ride across the valley just to ride the 8-mile loop at the Monument in the middle of the day in July?

There was another reason I had my pocket radio cranked up to full volume that day.

Days before a Saturn 5 had rocketed three Americans into space and I didn’t want to miss any news of their whereabouts.

They were heading for the moon and I’d been following the Space Program ever since I had sent my Fireball XL5 to the moon on multiple missions, including one to rescue Moon Maid, a Dick Tracy comic strip character that had far more appeal to me than Roger Ramjet.

And then I expanded my Space Force to include Major Matt Mason whom I eventually outgrew and replaced with my super cool Astronaut John Glenn G.I. Joe action figure who arrived one Christmas complete with his very own really cool “Friendship 7” Mercury Capsule.

After Mercury came Gemini. And with Gemini I began assembling my own NASA space program, Revel kit by Revel kit, with model cement that worried my mom. Was it the fumes that hooked me on the space program or growing up around the Air Force Base? Or was it “Barbarella”, an adult drive-in feature I watched from the roof of our home through binoculars that made me interested in space travel?

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

-President Kennedy in 1962

It was around ten in the morning when my rock and roll had abruptly stopped and I was startled by, ”We interrupt this broadcast for a news bulletin”.

For those of you born in the age of the 24-hour news cycle those eight words brought all life to a halt back in the day. We froze next to our radios and TVs waiting to hear the news. Such bulletins were reserved for declarations of war or the deaths of Presidents or Popes.

I braked, straddled my bike and put the radio to my ear. “This just in. From Mission Control in Houston.” Had they made it?

“The Apollo 11 lunar module has landed on the surface of the moon.” They’d made it! Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and "Buzz" Aldrin had made it to the moon. They did it.

Take that, Roger Ramjet. Eat Moon Cheese Moon Maid! Americans were on the moon! My country could do anything it set out to do! My country had built Hoover Dam and the bomb and had liberated Europe and rebuilt Germany and Japan and had given the world Rocky and Bullwinkle and spam.

I looked up into the big blue sky searching for any sign of a pale crescent moon faintly visible in the daylight and instead found only the blazing sun. Three Americans were somewhere up there. Out there.

I turned and headed back home to watch the news along with the other 3.5 billion human beings living on our planet at the time. A mere sixty some years later there are more than 8 billion human beings living and sweltering here. I’m starting a gofundme for a space ark to Elysium.

That night back in ‘69 we were befuddled by the blurry black and white upside down image of the lunar module’s ladder that was eventually turned right side up. And then we saw the ghostly image of an American descending the ladder. At 7:56 PM Commander Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and the usually stoic Walter Cronkite could not contain his glee. “Armstrong is on the moon! Neal Armstrong… a 38-year old American is standing on the moon..this July 20th nineteen hundred and sixty nine.”

It had been a summer’s day like any other in July. A bit warm. But still, back then it was a perfect day for a summer’s bike ride. And walks and picnics in Reid park or bike rides to Hi Corbett and trips to the pool or to buy the latest 45RPM at the new mall that had a Woolworth’s that served milkshakes and fried hot dogs on buttery toasted buns.

My dad drove us downtown in a Ford Impala that guzzled gas like a good American behemoth.

This week as historic waves of extreme heat blanket our state I am not riding my bike outside. Especially to the Saguaro Monument East. I am sealed inside my cabin. This planet is a hostile world. The temperate earth that the brave American astronauts observed as they flew home more than sixty years ago is not the same whackadoodle earth of today. And we are not the same people nor are we the same country.

When I saw the American flag on the moon I believed my country could accomplish any great goal it set out to do. In less than a decade, no less. United. Selflessly devoted to a great mission. We embraced and exalted science and technology. And inspired by leaders who asked us to ask not what our country could do for us but moved us to consider what we might do for our country

What will extraterrestrials think, light years from now, when they come across our solar system?

Like my carefree self pedaling along many summers ago, perhaps they are simply out for an idle intergalactic ride, checking out the sights. They’ll glide past our lifeless hot planet and circle it a few times to marvel at the ruins below the thick clouds. And then they’ll head up and away and they’ll see it. As they pass our desolate moon it will still be there. An American flag posted in the moon dust.

Or will they ooh and ah over a blue and green marble sustaining a thriving united life form that has embraced the role of planetary steward caretakers of a once in a cosmos Eden.

May we all soon enjoy a cool ride when it’s safe.

Buzz, Neal and Michael. You’re my heroes and always will be. I got to stay up late because of you.