By: Carl Bankey
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. walked on the moon a half a century ago. And then he walked on the streets of Montclair, NJ, his hometown.
Major Jennings, 12 then, recalled seeing the hero in an interview with nj.com. “It was prestigious to have somebody from our community be the second person to walk on the moon,” he said. Jennings would go o to serve as assistant principal at Buzz Aldrin Middle School.
“The greatest example for our students is here; you have a person from our township who probably exceeded everyone’s expectations. Kids can identify with that,” Jennings said in the recent interview. “When you can identify with someone who has done something great and they’ve sat in the same classrooms, walked the same halls, used the same lavatories, ate in the same lunchrooms, you feel good about that and you say, ‘if he did it, why not me?’”
Aldrin’s major claim to fame, of course, was his Apollo 11 moon walk. The Eagle landed at 20:17:40 UTC on Sunday July 20 with about 25 seconds of fuel left. Aldrin, a Presbyterian elder, was the first and only person to hold a religious ceremony on the Moon. He radioed Earth: “I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way,” noted Wikipedia. “Using a kit given to him by his pastor, he took communion, but he kept it secret because of a lawsuit over the reading of Genesis on Apollo 8. In 1970 he commented: “It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the Moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.”
In a book published 40 years later, Aldrin noted, “Perhaps, if I had it to do over again, I would not choose to celebrate communion. Although it was a deeply meaningful experience for me, it was a Christian sacrament, and we had come to the Moon in the name of all mankind – be they Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, agnostics, or atheists. But at the time I could think of no better way to acknowledge the enormity of the Apollo 11 experience than by giving thanks to God.”
Most of the iconic photographs of an astronaut on the Moon taken by the Apollo 11 astronauts are of Aldrin; Armstrong appears in just two color photographs. “As the sequence of lunar operations evolved,” Aldrin explained, “Neil had the camera most of the time, and the majority of the pictures taken on the Moon that include an astronaut are of me. It wasn’t until we were back on Earth and in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory looking over the pictures that we realized there were few pictures of Neil. My fault perhaps, but we had never simulated this during our training.”
