https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/rape-american-mind-will-alexander/
“In the same decade that JFK, RFK, and MLK were assassinated; when America was bogged down in Vietnam; and one month before the grisly Manson murders – three men landing on the moon shouted to the world that, above it all, the American spirit still soared.”
Last week my better half and I, Tess, went to a Southern California thrift store to hunt for treasures that others had all but trashed. Tess found a couple of delicate plates that a young clerk was about to wrap with an old yellowed-out newspaper that she had just torn at the fold.
“Wait a sec,” I said before the nonchalant clerk took another rip. “That’s a pretty old newspaper. Mind if I take it off your hands?”
“Sure,” she shrugged, quickly handing it to me then reaching for more paper to wrap the plates.
The dingy, old broadsheet turned out to be the torn top portion of the Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1969, published one day after Neil Armstrong became the first man on Earth to step foot on the moon.
An estimated 650 million people around the world, including 93 percent of Americans, watched as Armstrong descended the ladder of spacecraft “Eagle” to plant his left boot onto the powdery lunar surface.
Like many newspapers, the LA Times’ “Extra” edition packed it’s A-Section with headlines aimed at capturing every possible angle of the history-making.
The story “Millions Over World Cheer Moon Landing” began: “Crowds screamed joyously in Trafalgar Square, people danced in Chile, a Russian yelled, ‘Hooray.’ Almost everyone on earth was somehow touched by man’s arrival on the moon.”