One of the benefits of being something of a collector of old newspapers is that it gives one the opportunity to do some shuffling and sorting in seldom opened bankers boxes when spurred on by some historic event such as today’s referendum on the 307-year-old union between Scotland and England. The fact none of my stored newspapers likely have anything to do with earlier Scottish news is largely beside the point. After all, surely there might be something on the first Quebec Referendum of May 20, 1980 or the photo-finish second Quebec Referendum on Oct. 30, 1995 to take another look at today?
Or not.
But the search was by no means time wasted. It lead to me uncovering a cherished copy of The Globe and Mail from Monday, July 21, 1969. I’ve been lugging that paper around – Oshawa, Peterborough, Boston, Durham, North Carolina, Kingston, Ottawa, Yellowknife, Halifax, Sackville, New Brunswick, Thompson, and no doubt a few places I’ve overlooked, for 45 years now.
The 72-point “going to war” main headline that day– in green yet, at a time when colour printing was rare in newspapers, marked one of humanity’s historic moments: “MAN ON MOON” read that main headline with a bold black second deck subhead: “‘Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed'”
For a 12-year-old boy, it spoke to my imagination in a way nothing ever had before. The Sixties, which I was too young to fully appreciate, were coming to an end. But this I knew with the moon landing: This was a world, as Expo 67 in Montreal had suggested, where all things technological were truly possible.
The “lede” to the main story, as we quirkily spell lead in newspaperspeak, was elegant in its simplicity. Globe and Mail reporters David Spurgeon and Terrance Wills, in a double bylined story datelined Houston and filed from NASA’s Mission Control, wrote: “Man walked on the moon last night.”
In a “special message” delivered on May 25, 1961 to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” U.S. President John F. Kennedy had said, “First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish….”
Ah, 1969.
To put in perspective just how remarkable the achievement was, the world of 1969 was largely a world without ATMs (they wouldn’t become commonplace until the early 1980s, although the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969, just 4½ months after the Apollo 11 moon mission.
The quartz watch was introduced in 1969 and was considered a revolutionary improvement in watch technology because instead of a balance wheel, which oscillated at five beats per second, it used a quartz crystal resonator which vibrated at 8,192 Hz, driven by a battery powered oscillator circuit.
And, of course, the first message transmitted over the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the military forerunner to today’s civilian Internet, was sent by UCLA student programer Charley Kline from an SDS Sigma 7– a computer the size of a one-bedroom apartment – to Bill Duvall, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California Oct. 29, 1969.
It was quite a year, 1969. Or as the Eagles noted in their 1976 seemingly ubiquitous title track from the album, Hotel California …we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.”
soundingsjohnbarker 