Word: wapakoneta
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...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...
...drugstore (400 an hour) and as a 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...
After graduating from Wapakoneta High School, Armstrong won a Navy scholarship to Purdue, the alma mater of three other astronauts (Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, both of whom died in the Apollo launch-pad fire of Jan. 27, 1967, and Eugene Ceroan, a member of the Apollo 10 crew). Called to service in Korea at the end of his sophomore year, Armstrong earned a reputation as a hot pilot and three Air Medals in 78 combat missions. Returning to Purdue, he collected his degree in aeronautical engineering, and a wife, the former Janet E. Shearon of Evanston...
Before the big home-town parade through the crowded streets of Wapakoneta, Ohio, somebody asked the local hero, Astronaut Neil Armstrong, 35, just how nervous he really was when Gemini 8 began its wild yawing and rolling last month during the Agena rendezvous. Replied Armstrong, with rueful pertinence: "It wasn't any worse than some of the scares I've had driving an automobile...
When he was four years old, Eugene Z. of Wapakoneta, Ohio tumbled down the cellar stairs, banged his head, was knocked out for a few minutes. Two years later, he suddenly fell into an epileptic fit, had to leave school. After that, every day for 17 years, fits seized him as often as 18 times a day. While his nine brothers and sisters grew up, he clung to his mother, a man-size baby. Last October, in despair, his parents took him to Neurologist Howard Douglas John Fabing of Cincinnati...