My grandson has shown me how to make this page, and he tells me that people all over the world may read it. That seems a good reason to write down a few things carefully.

I am seventy-seven years old. I taught earth science in the public schools of Brevard County for thirty-four years. I have lived in Titusville since 1958, close enough to the Cape that the windows have rattled more times than I could count.

July 16, 1969

My sister Ruth drove down from Jacksonville the night before Apollo 11. We left my house at four in the morning with a thermos of coffee and two folding chairs, and even so the causeway was already lined with cars and people who had slept in them. We waited through the sunrise and the long, hot morning. A man beside us had a transistor radio, and a crowd gathered around it for the count.

At 9:32 the engines lit. The light came first, very bright and very quiet, and the rocket was well off the ground before the sound crossed the water and reached us. When it came, I felt it in my chest. Nobody near us said anything for a long time. Ruth took my hand and said, "Hazel, you have been waiting your whole life for this," and she was right.

Four days later we watched Mr. Armstrong step onto the Moon on my small black-and-white television, and Ruth cried, and I did not, because I was busy taking notes.

What I told my classes

That September, and every September afterward until I retired, I wrote the date July 16, 1969 on the board on the first day of school and asked who knew what it meant. In the early years every hand went up. Later there were fewer. I decided that this was not a sad thing. It meant my students had grown up in a world where people had walked on the Moon, and to them it was simply true.

I told them that the Moon is a rock, and rocks were what we studied in my room, and so in a sense we were in the same business as the astronauts. I told them that the rocket was not the important part. The important part was that someone had looked up, asked a question, and then a great many patient people had spent years answering it correctly. I told them that they could be one of those people, and that it would require arithmetic.

My students

Some of them listened. Carl went to work at the Cape as a technician and wrote me a letter after the first Space Shuttle flew in April of 1981. He said he had thought of my classroom during the countdown. I have kept that letter in my Bible. Linda became a meteorologist and now watches the weather for launches, which I believe began with the cloud chart that hung beside my door. Thomas went to Houston, and sends a card every Christmas with a very small handwriting that I would once have marked down.

I do not take credit for them. They did the work. But I will admit that I am proud.

Ruth

My sister was not a science person. She taught piano for forty years and could not have told you the difference between a planet and a star. But she came to every launch I asked her to, and she never once complained about the mosquitoes. She passed away in March of 1997. I still have one of those two folding chairs.

Why I still go out at night

Most clear evenings I carry Ruth's chair into the backyard and sit for half an hour. These nights Jupiter is bright in the east by mid-evening, with Saturn not far behind it. It is the same planet Galileo turned his small telescope toward in 1610, and I find that a steadying thought.

This July, one week and thirty years after Apollo 11, I sat in that chair at half past midnight and watched Columbia go up with a telescope aboard and Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a Shuttle, in charge of it. The whole sky over the river turned to daylight for a moment. I thought of Ruth, and of every student who ever put a hand up.

I spent thirty-four years telling young people to observe carefully. It would be a poor example to stop now. So I look up. I recommend it.

— Hazel Grimes