Visiting NASA in 1969

I don’t know why I didn’t post this photo this summer.  I had thought about posting it since it was the 50 year anniversary of the moon landing, but somehow I overlooked it.  I posted a photo from this same vacation a year ago, so sometimes I hesitate in posting something similar too soon.  This photo was taken on July 25, 1969.  On the 25th of July this year in my blog, I stated that I was looking for a photo commemorating a 100 year anniversary of something, but couldn’t find anything that week.  I should have cut my goal in half and searched for a 50 year old event to memorialize. 

Then I would have seen this photo.  But that obviously didn’t happen.  The first moon landing was on July 20, 1969, and we posed for this photo at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on July 25, 1969.  It was so soon after that monumental event and we were so excited to be there.  When we were walking around, there was a commotion of some sort with a motorcade  on site.  We thought it was either the astronauts going into quarantine or the arrival of the moon rocks at the Center.  So exciting.

When we were growing up in the Landry household, there were eight people in the house.  That’s a lot of people considering that the house at 758 Lucy Street in Jennings, Louisiana, only had three bedrooms and one small bathroom.  So there were three girls in one bedroom, the three boys were in another, and our parents were in the other one.

In the boys’ room, we had two chest of drawers in the room.  Or as I always thought of them back then – chester drawers.   Above the chester drawers was a metal cabinet where we kept all of our treasures.  The main thing I remember about it – and the reason I’m mentioning it – is that we had several space-related stickers on the front of it.  During the last few years of the 1960s, space flight and landing on the moon held a lot of interest in the American public.   And particularly for young boys growing up in the Landry household.  Of course merchandisers took advantage of that fact.  We drank Tang.  We ate Space Food Sticks.  We watched “Star Trek.”

But mostly we begged our mom to buy the cereal that had those space-related stickers in the boxes.  When I just did a search for that, I see that it was more likely that they were stick-on patches that were in those boxes.  You could put them on jackets or clothes, but we collected them on front of the cabinet in our bedroom.  We had the Mercury patches, the Gemini patches, and of course the Apollo ones.  If I had a picture of that old cabinet, I’d share that photo, too.

But sadly, I did not grow up in the age that takes pictures of every little thing they do.  I’m sure we’d have hundreds of photos of that whole house and every pet and/or meal we ever had.  But I can’t really be sad.  I grew up in the time that we were putting people on the moon!  And I have this picture to prove it. 

Try not to be too jealous.