A Great Story (Library Research)

Today is officially the first day I have ever asked a librarian to help me find something in a library. It's kind of a sad day, but I've come to terms with it. See, I take some amount of pride in my understanding of the Dewey Decimal system. I realize that the TCU library actually uses the Library of Congress' numbering system, but books are still listed in alphabetic and numeric order! So why couldn't I find Life magazine?

It turns out I was looking on the wrong floor. There are indeed a lot of bound periodicals to be found in the basement, but not all of them. No, Life magazine was on the first floor. Shelves upon shelves of Life magazines. I was limited to the 1950's and 1960's, of course, but a lot of magazines are printed over a twenty year span. For a while, I didn't know where to begin.

And then I carefully found a particular month within a particular year and slid the heavy tome off the top shelf. It was July of 1969, the year that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and for the first time in all of history, a man walked on an extraterrestrial surface.

I have always loved the stories of space travel and Neil Armstrong has always been a hero of mine. The excitement was building up within me as I opened the magazine and I could barely contain myself when I discovered Neil's picture on the cover. I skipped over the advertisements, barely glanced at the letters to the editor, and skimmed the table of contents just enough to find the first space related article.

Off to the Moon - July 4, 1969

It was a biography of Neil Armstrong.

I read it all the way through. I didn't care one way or another if it had anything to do with coming of age, I felt like I was 7 years old again and nothing was going to stop me from devouring every word on those few pages. Only after I had finished the article and sat in quiet contemplation for a few minutes did I realize that what I just finished reading had everything to do with coming of age. The story was all about how Neil got to where he was today and dealt heavily with his childhood and his transition to becoming not just an astronaut, but a father and a man.

It talked about how Neil was a quiet, but hardworking and driven boy. He was expected to help earn money for the family and to "yearn only for the things they could afford," and he did both. At the same time, he dreamt of flight and airplanes and got a pilot's license on his 16th birthday before even his driver's license. Piloting lessons weren't cheap, of course, and he worked long hours only taking off time when he had enough to run over to the airfield and have another lesson. The words on the page painted a picture of a boy who knew what he wanted and worked for it.

His parents were mentioned just long enough to say that they instilled values in him of dedication, hard work, the value of money and the importance of honesty, before getting out of the way and letting their child dream.

I don't know how much of the article is really technically true and how much of it is overzealous reporting, attempting to make a hero out of an ordinary man. Honestly, it's probably a little of both. But what it does do is show just the sort of childhood and person that people of that time admired. They were enthralled by the story of a man who worked himself to where he was, who had achieved great things based solely upon his desire and dedication to greatness. Children should dream, and they should dream big. And then, they need to go after that dream and achieve everything they dreamed of. That's the story that people wanted to hear in that time.

And that's the story that 7 year old me still wants to hear. It was ordinary people who dreamed extraordinary things that built, engineered, and piloted America to the moon. And whether that's technically true or a mixture of overzealous reporting and patriotism, I don't know.

But it sure makes a great story.