I thought I wanted to see the documentary film “Apollo 11” to witness the first moon landing as I’d never seen it before. The movie features rare archival footage.

Indeed, the scenes of the launch, flight, landing and, of course, moon walks are stunning. But so are the views of the NASA staffers at “mission control,” and the crowds of people who gathered in Florida to watch the Saturn V rocket take off. I was jarred by the clarity of the images. I felt transported back 50 years.

I’ve gotten used to the fact that my childhood looks like it took place in another century — which, of course, it did. There was a moment, and I’m guessing it was sometime in the 1990s, when TV footage of the 1960s and ’70s started looking ancient to me. Black-and-white film, not digitized — my youth was officially history.

In contrast, the scenes in “Apollo 11” that show NASA personnel and spectators look as if they were filmed with actors a few weeks ago. As astronaut Neil Armstrong’s son, Rick, told Vanity Fair: “The combination of the footage quality and the way it was edited made me feel like I was watching it in real time.”

I watched the event on television in 1969, and it became one of those experiences I’ll never forget.

After all, the space program was something that united Americans. We’d been pursuing the dream of landing a man on the moon for as long as I could remember. It was a milestone of the “space race” in which we competed against our Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union.

The previous year, as I wrote in an earlier column, had been a notable one, for me and for the country. Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. both had been assassinated in 1968. Protests against the war in Vietnam had been escalating, with violence erupting outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

I was in the sixth grade in 1968, in the final year of elementary school. My classmates and I were accorded special privileges and knew we were the top dogs. Inside, though, we worried. Junior high school loomed.

Now, halfway through 1969, we had something to celebrate. Some 600 million people around the world watched the moon landing. As the trailer for “Apollo 11” says, “Witness the last time we were one.”

A comforting thought. But the nation continued to be torn apart by Vietnam. Two days before the landing, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, a locale on Martha’s Vineyard. His passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, who had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign, died. I was a kid growing up in Massachusetts; the moon landing and the Chappaquiddick accident would forever be seared — together — in my mind.

The next month, followers of Charles Manson would go on a murder spree in Southern California, sending shock waves through the country.

But for the spectators at the launch, it was a golden moment.The Vanity Fair article describes a J.C. Penney parking lot “packed with moms, dads, and kids in the rust- and mustard-colored Ban-Lon leisurewear of the period, drowsily biding their time in the Florida heat until the launch.”

One woman wore a faux-feather hat. This was a cap that fit tightly over her head, covered with brightly-colored strips of what looked like crepe paper but probably were something more substantial. I had a déjà vu moment because I had once seen such a hat in real life, maybe more than once. I just hoped it wasn’t my mother’s, but I don’t think it was. She had good taste.

Women in shift dresses and Ray-Bans … I swear I saw somebody in “Apollo 11” wearing a shirt that I once had, earth tones in a chevron pattern.

Memory is both public and private. We share important historic moments as a community, but we all have our own responses. My family watched the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in my parents’ bedroom, sprawled on the bed and the floor. I looked out of a school library window on Sept. 11, 2001, and wished that the children playing in the field outside never had to come in to learn what had happened. I sat with my parents and my sister and watched Neil Armstrong take that first step, and felt my heart swell.

I don’t dwell on the past. I don’t wish to go back in time. But I am grateful I had the chance to experience, for a few minutes, a 1969 that was as fresh and bright and orangey as I remember it.

 

Liz Soares welcomes e-mail at lizzie621@icloud.com.

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