Of first footsteps, and last; heroes and fathers

Neil Armstrong died today. A man who didn’t seek out the hero’s mantle, and surely didn’t cash it in as some have.

I grew up to be quite a space nut – and not just because my father, an engineer who worked for Boeing, actually got to work on the space program. It was just … the promise of the future and all that entailed.

I built a LEM (lunar lander) from a cutout cardboard sheet, more tape than paper when I was done. I built a Saturn 5 from a plastic kit of pieces, probably more glue than plastic when I was done (never was much for hand-eye coordination). In junior high, we did rockets, and my awfully painted lil red one must have flown, I suppose. I don’t remember it that much.

We — my father Paul, stepmother Jeannie, and two older brothers Pete and Rick (well he was Larry then) – moved to Cocoa, Fla., on the mainland near Cape Kennedy, in 1966. We left in 1968 for Kent, Wash., where my father – starting to show the signs of the bulbular palsy that would take his life within a few years – was to work for Boeing on the SST. Until Congress killed it.

Darn it.

Anyway, we’ve always been masters of timing. We moved to Cocoa after Gemini, left before Apollo — we were there for the deadly fire. (And we left as Disney World just began taking shape.) And my father worked, after the fire, on the guy-wire system that was going to get those astronauts out of the frickin capsule if another fire happened.

I used to read the Boeing newsletters he brought home avidly – though they were full of acronyms and jargon and I never quite understood them. I was already hit by the writing/journalism bug.

More than a billion folks watched man land on the moon, watched Armstrong’s first step.

I wasn’t one of them.

Alas, that’s the week my Boy Scout troop in Kent, Wash., decided to finish the 50-mile hike, from Stevens Pass to Sonoqualmie Pass, that was aborted the year earlier when one of them got lost. (That was before we moved there.)

I remember two things about that hike – one when we were roped together and a fat kid named Wally Schneider (fitting right?) didn’t follow the guy ahead of his footsteps in the still-present high-Cascades snow – so he started to slip down the hill (mountain?) — dragging us with him.

Then there was Mr. No Coordination, walking on a log with a pack on my back, and of course I fell in the water. I was dry – the backpack and sleeping bag got soaked.

Or so I recall.

So yeah, I wasn’t able to see man land on the moon — remember, there were no VCRs, much less DVRs then. (Though a few years later, a now-missing HS friend, Gene Tichy, and I would watch the moon landings, the Lunar Rover etc. – and he’d record them on a huge reel-to-reel video recorder.)

I know Neil Armstrong felt all the thousands of people who put him and Buzz Aldrin on the moon were just as much heroes as he was. (Decades later, I came up with the winning Progress edition theme for The Bulletin — ‘Everyday Heroes.’ We had trouble getting folks to agree to be called that. The best heroes are those so modest they don’t want or need the spotlight. They just do their jobs, or what needs to be done.)

Anyway, I don’t know if I ever told my dad he was a hero to me. He passed away in 1975 of a truly scary disease, bulbular palsy – as scary as the Alzheimer’s plague of today. He became very emotional, crying and … it was hard to see or take.

But today, as we remember a hero from the old school, a self-professed ‘white shoes pocket protector nerd’ who made history with a footstep that still sits on the moon’s airless plains, I have to offer a public salute to my father, Paul Lerten, one of the many folks who were part of a grand effort that almost seems impossible in retrospect, from today’s divisive, deep-in-red-ink Blame Society.

Both were heroes, and I’m sure my dad would have shunned the title just as Neil Armstrong did.

But both deserved it, richly, for what they did and what they stood for — doing right by family, doing a job to make something big and grand happen. But doing so without fanfare, just … because it needed to be done.

We miss that. We need more of that.