Moon Landing Anniversary

The reminiscences about the July 1969 moon landing started a couple of weeks ago. It got me thinking about that summer and my experience of those events. I was exactly a month shy of my 15th birthday on the day of the moon landing. There's a picture of me from that summer that I remember. It's a polaroid taken by my aunt in the back yard of her house. It's one of a tiny handful of pictures of me that I actually liked at the time it was taken. I thought it made me look good. I still do, but my camera-shyness pervades the frame. She's looking for the picture and if it's found, I'll post it.

We took it for a specific purpose. I was visiting my cousin in the town of Winterset, Iowa, to which I introduced you in a previous post. There was a film crew in town that summer making a movie called "Cold Turkey." It didn't get released until 1971, but they shot it that summer. I was thinking about showing up at a casting call for extras. I can't remember why I decided not to do it, but one of the requirements was a photo.

I asked my mom what she recalled about watching the moon landing, because I remember being in Winterset watching the television in the living room of my cousin's home. Well, what I really remember is the television being on, all of us being in the living room, but with the kids less eagerly engaged than our elders thought we ought to be. I remember my mom being mad at us for not paying enough attention to the telecast of the momentous events. Of course, for the kids, it was another space mission. We had already been watching them take off for eight years.

She remembers it differently. She thought we had watched coverage of the Apollo 11 mission on TV in Winterset, but that we had left to drive home to Kansas City on the afternoon of July 20. She recalls getting home just in time to see the landing on TV.

I've wondered what the counterpart to the moon landing is for my nieces and nephew whose ages range between 18 and 25. Maybe it's the Internet, but I think I'm looking for an event that can be marked at a particular point in time. Maybe they know.

My recall of that summer is of specific incidents and moments in time. I don't really remember the order in which things happened. Most of the memories have something to do with watching the movie get made. Many of the small towns in Iowa have an event they call "Crazy Days." There is often a parade, an ice cream social and sidewalk sales by the downtown merchants. Winterset still does it, I think.

The 1969 Crazy Days in Winterset had a parade with a costume contest. My cousin and I entered with an homage to the film. "Cold Turkey" is about a town whose entire population quits smoking at the same time. Our costumes were a cigarette and a match. I was the match. My hair was redder them and I teased and sprayed it into a point to look like the flame on a match. Then I constructed a tube made from posterboard and painted it tan. I climbed inside the tube in my swimsuit and I was dressed. My cousin used a posterboard to create a cigarette with a brown filter closest to her head and a red edge at the bottom to make it look like it was burning. She had to cut an eyehole in the posterboard to see out. She cut handholds in the sides of her costume. I'm not sure how I kept mine in place.

We didn't practice walking in the costumes. When we arrived at the staging area for the parade, we put them on and got in line and the march itself turned out to be a test of endurance. The bottom edges of the posterboard tubes raked the backs of my ankles as we walked. For some reason we had decided we would have to walk barefooted. It was really hot that day and our feet were miserable on the pavement. The costumes forced us to take tiny, quick steps instead of regular strides. My cousin nearly broke her neck trotting to keep up and with limited visibility.

The parade route took us around the square of Winterset - a leisurely walk of maybe 10 minutes duration under ordinary circumstances. When it was all over, our feet were fried and I had a noticeable sunburn on my face and shoulders. The scars from the scrapes on the backs of my legs took more than a year afterward to go away. A week later we were notifed that we had won second prize in the costume contest. I remember reading it in the local newspaper. The prize was money - maybe $5 for each of us.

The town of Winterset is deeply woven into my memories of summer. I remember a lot about how I felt at the time of those visits. It's interesting to me that a town where I spent, at the most, a few weeks out of every year is so evocative of time and place - like a song or a scent. Those summers created a memory that holds together 40 or more years later. I have visited Winterset the last two summers for vacation and it has changed remarkably little in that time. I spend a lot of time on those visits walking and bicycling around the town. The familiarity I used to have with it comes back after a little while, but it still looks different at least partly because my cousin and sister aren't there with me.

Midsummer

I don't remember liking summer all that much in the past. Maybe I liked it when I was a little kid, but I have very few clear memories of it. I'm someone who has never had much tolerance for sun exposure and those fun outdoor activities involving the water involved serious sunburn for me. I grew up at a time when there was no such thing as sunscreen. When I was in my teens I remember summer as a time of feeling stressed about looking fat in a swimsuit and my mom fussing at me not to stay out in the sun too long.

But one happy memory of summer has to do with the time I spent in two small towns in Iowa called Winterset and Indianola. I had family living there including a cousin close to my age. My sister and I would spend weeks at a time in one or the other of those two towns every summer. We had the run of the town on bicycles. It was a fascinating change for me to go from the suburbs of a good size city - Kansas City, to a town of fewer than 5,000 residents.

I've gone back to Winterset for vacation the last three years. My present job tends to be stressful and omnipresent and being able to go away on vacation has become very important to me. The town hasn't changed too much in appearance since I spent my summers there. It has a few more houses and maybe a few more people and some businesses whose products and services didn't even exist when I was a kid, but really, it's about the same.

If you ever read The Bridges of Madison County, Winterset is the town where that story takes place. It's also the birthplace of John Wayne. The small victorian cottage where he was born has been restored and it's a national historic site. The town has some beautifully preserved/ restored victorian residential architecture, a nice swimming pool and a downtown square that is mostly occupied. There are still a couple of stores there that were in business when I was a kid. The city government and business community have been smart about promoting the town as a tourist spot for readers of the novel and John Wayne fans.

Walking or cycling around Winterset or being at my aunt and uncle's home in Indianola are some of the most evocative experiences of my adult life. When I'm there I remember with crystal clarity what I felt like the summer of my eighteenth birthday - just out of high school, waiting for life to start happening. I remember the music that played on the radio when my cousin and sister and I sat out on the deck late at night talking and watching cars go by on the highway. We waited every night for my cousin's boyfriend to ride his motorcycle out highway 92 past her house listening to Alice Cooper sing "School's Out" and Derek and the Dominoes playing "Layla." I was not a carefree child or adolescent, so I won't tell you that those summers were idyllic, but the memory of them stays with me.

I made my reservation yesterday for a week-long stay in Winterset later this summer. I'll post some pictures and write more about it when I get there.