Word: neil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After a few short but interminable seconds, U.S. Astronaut Neil Armstrong placed his foot firmly on the fine-grained surface of the moon. The time was 10:56 p.m. (E.D.T.), July 20, 1969. Pausing briefly, the first man on the moon spoke the first words on lunar soil...
Command Pilot Armstrong is considered tight-lipped and phlegmatic, even in the notoriously taciturn fraternity of astronauts. "Silence is a Neil Armstrong answer," his wife Janet said in an interview with LIFE. "The word no is an argument." Last spring, he spent two full days with his father and never once bothered to mention that the day after they parted he was going to be officially named as the first man to set foot on the moon. With his sandy hair, innocent blue eyes and boyish smile, he looks as though he has just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell...
...born in Wapakoneta, Ohio (pop. 7,500), the son of a career civil servant who is now assistant director of the state's Department of Mental Hygiene and Correction. As a youth, Neil limited his social life mainly to school and church functions; when he went out with a girl it was usually on a double date to the ice-cream parlor. He played baritone horn in the school band. He studied hard, and while his teachers do not remember Armstrong as a particularly brilliant student, he impressed them all with the thorough, meticulous way he went about his work...
...grease monkey at the airfield to accumulate the money for flying lessons ($9 an hour), and earned his pilot's license on his 16th birthday, the first day he was eligible. For a while, he had to bicycle the three miles between Wapakoneta and the field; Neil Armstrong was flying planes before he had a driver's license...
...close look at the moon through a homemade 8-in. reflector telescope fashioned from a stovepipe and mounted on roller-skate wheels atop a garage. The wondrous device belonged to Jacob Zint, a neighbor of the Armstrongs and a draftsman in the Westinghouse plant. "I can't recall that Neil ever said he wanted to go to the moon," says Zint. But as early as 1946, Armstrong was regularly visiting the makeshift observatory and often, says Zint, "he looked right into the Sea of Tranquillity"?the prime site for next week's landing...