First Man

by James R. Hansen

  In the months leading up to the launch, Neil’s mother and father were “besieged by newsmen of every category,” from England, Norway, France, Germany, and Japan. Viola recalled, “Their prying questions (‘What was Neil like when he was a little boy?’ ‘What kind of a home life did he have?’ ‘Where will you be and what will you be doing during the launch?’ etc. etc.) were a constant drain on my strength and nervous system. I survived this only by the grace of God. He must have been at my side constantly.”

  NASA sent a special protocol officer to Wapakoneta from Huntsville, Alabama. “Tom Andrews was blessed with the most beautiful head of red wavy hair that anyone ever saw,” Viola remembered. “Plus he was common like us, so we felt very much at ease with each other. He said, ‘Now, Mrs. Armstrong, I’ll answer your doorbell, answer your phone, and help you folks in any way that I can.’ My! He was welcomed with open arms.”

  To facilitate their coverage of Apollo 11 from Wapakoneta, the three major TV networks erected a shared eighty-five-foot-high transmission tower in the driveway of the Armstrong house. The Armstrong garage was turned into a pressroom with messy rows of telephones temporarily installed atop folding picnic tables.

  Because Neil’s parents still had only a black-and-white television, the TV networks gave them a large color set on which to watch the mission. On a daily basis, a local restaurant sent down a half dozen pies. A fruit company from nearby Lima delivered a large stock of bananas. A dairy from Delphos sent ice cream. Frito-Lay sent large cartons of corn chips. A local dairy, the Fisher Cheese Co., Wapakoneta’s largest employer, proffered its special “Moon Cheeze.” Consolidated Bottling Company delivered crates of “Capped Moon Sauce,” a “secret-formula” vanilla cream soda pop. Neighbors and friends contributed delicious foods of the midwest summertime.

  The proud mayor of Wapakoneta requested that every home and business display an American flag (and preferably also the Ohio state flag) from the morning of the launch until the moment “the boys” were safely back. Among a few locals, the media spotlight inspired a different kind of civic embellishment. Some told exaggerated stories, even outright lies, about their special connection to the astronaut. Even kids took to spinning yarns: “Listen, my dad is Neil Armstrong’s barber!” or “My mom was the first girl ever to kiss Neil!” or “Hey, I chopped down Neil Armstrong’s cherry tree!”

  Since the Armstrongs’ Auglaize County phone number was public knowledge, Tom Andrews arranged to have two private phone lines run into the family’s utility room, off the kitchen. Around noontime the day before the launch, Neil called his mother and father from the Cape. “We enjoyed a very pleasant conversation,” recalled Viola. “His voice was cheerful, and he said he thought they were all ready for the takeoff the next morning. Daddy said, ‘Will you call us again before you leave?’ and he said, ‘No, I’m afraid I won’t be able to call again.’ These words were spoken very softly. We asked God to watch over him, and then we had to say ‘good-bye.’”

  Neil’s sister and brother attended the launch. June, her husband, Dr. Jack Hoffman, and their four daughters flew to Florida from their home in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Dean Armstrong, his wife, Marilyn, and their two daughters drove down to Florida from their home in Anderson, Indiana. Both children called their mother and father the day prior to the launch. June said, “Momma, if you feel someone squeezing your hand these days, you’ll know it is me.” Viola replied, “Oh, thank you, darling. You know I already have one hand in the Lord’s hand, and now I have yours in the other. Now I’m sure I can go ahead.”

  Late that night Neil’s wife Janet telephoned Viola to report that she and the boys had not been able to see Neil, but they had talked with him briefly by telephone and had wished him a successful flight. A government car had driven them to see the gigantic rocket spectacularly alit with the spacecraft atop it. Janet told Viola that at dawn they would be heading out onto the Banana River in the corporate yacht. “Janet, too, was full of cheerfulness,” Viola remembered. “She felt the crew was ready.”

  Viola’s recall of that extraordinary morning remained sharp until her dying day: “Streets about our house were blocked off. Old Glory was flying everywhere. The weather was quite hot, and the skies were clear and beautiful. Stinebaugh Construction had installed two window air conditioners for our comfort. Tom Andrews guarded our doors and our very selves. Lawmen were at watch outside. Our local WERM radio station had its truck out in front, too. TV and radio personnel were busy setting up their equipment.

  “Visitors, neighbors, and strangers gathered around to watch and listen, including my mother, Caroline; my cousin, Rose; and my pastor, Reverend Weber. Stephen and I sat side by side, wearing for good luck the Gemini VIII pins that Neil had given us. For so long I had been talking with my Lord, and for so long He had been giving me strength. It seemed as though there was something around me holding me up. These were tense moments, yet the watchful eye of the Life people was constantly upon us, snapping pictures, especially, I thought, when we were looking our worst. Reverend Weber with his prayers at intervals was most comforting. We all had explicit faith in NASA and our boys, and I had a feeling that our Heavenly Father was the Supreme Commander over all…. When the final count-down began, I felt someone gentle and firm supporting me right through the liftoff. There was our Neil with Buzz and Mike off on a journey to the Moon!

  “It seemed as if from the very moment he was born—farther back still, from the time my husband’s family and my own ancestry originated back in Europe long centuries ago—that our son was somehow destined for this mission.”

  PART ONE

  AN AMERICAN GENESIS

  Even the greatest American is an immigrant or has descended from immigrants.

  —VIOLA ENGEL ARMSTRONG

  America means opportunity. It started that way. The early settlers came to the new world for the opportunity to worship in keeping with their conscience, and to build a future on the strength of their own initiative and hard work…. They discovered a new life with freedom to achieve their individual goals.

  —NEIL A. ARMSTRONG, “WHAT AMERICA MEANS TOME,”THE READER’S DIGEST,APRIL 1975

  CHAPTER 1

  The Strong of Arm

  Two obscure European towns took special meaning from the first human steps on another world. The first was Ladbergen, in the German province of Westphalia, about thirty-five miles from the Dutch border. Here in the northern Rhine region stood an eighteenth-century farmhouse-and-barn belonging to a peasant family named Kötter, the same common folk from which Neil Armstrong’s mother, Viola Engel Armstrong, descended. Five hundred miles to the northwest, on the Scotch-English border, lay Langholm, Scotland, home of the Armstrong ancestry. One branch of its lineage led to Neil’s father, Stephen Koenig Armstrong.

  In March 1972, not quite three years after the Apollo 11 landing, Neil was named Langholm’s first-ever honorary freeman. To the cheers of eight thousand Scots and visiting Englishmen, Armstrong rode into town in a horse-drawn carriage, escorted by regimental bagpipers dressed in Armstrong tartan kilts. The glorious reception marked a reversal of fortune for the Armstrong name. Chief magistrate James Grieve, arrayed in an ermine-trimmed robe, gravely cited a four-hundred-year-old law, never formally repealed, that ordered him to hang any Armstrong found in the town. “I am sorry to tell you that the Armstrongs of four hundred years ago were not the most favored of families,” Grieve instructed. “But they were always men of spirit, fearless, currying favor in no quarter, doughty and determined.” Neil responded wryly: “I have read a good deal of the history of this region and it is my feeling that the Armstrongs have been dreadfully misrepresented.” Neil then “smiled so broadly,” said the local newspaper account, “that you could tell he loved every last one of the ancestral scoundrels.”

  The Armstrong name began illustriously enough. Anglo-Danish in derivation, the name meant what it said, “strong of arm.” By the late thirteenth century, documents of the English nation—including the roya
l real estate records Calendarium Genealogicum—listed the archaic “Armestrange” and “Armstrang.”

  Legend traced the name to a heroic progenitor by the name of Fairbairn. Viola Engel Armstrong, who immersed herself in genealogy in the years after her son’s immortal trip to the Moon, recorded one version of the fable. “A man named Fairbairn remounted the king of Scotland after his horse had been shot from under him during battle. In reward for his service the king gave Fairbairn many acres of land on the border between Scotland and England, and from then on referred to Fairbairn as Armstrong.” Offshoots of the legend say that Fairbairn was followed by Siward Beorn, or “sword warrior,” also known as Siward Digry, “sword strong arm.”

  By the 1400s, the Armstrong clan emerged as a powerful force in “the Borders.” The great Scottish writer and onetime Borderlands resident Sir Walter Scott wrote four centuries later in his poem “Lay of the Minstrel” of the flaming arrows emblematic of endemic clan feuds: “Ye need no go to Liddisdale, for when they see the blazing bale, Elliots and Armstrongs never fail.” Or as another Scottish writer put it, “On the Border were the Armstrongs, able men, somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame.”

  By the sixteenth century, Armstrongs were unquestionably the Borders’ most robust family of reivers—a fanciful name for bandits and robbers. Decades’ worth of flagrant expansion by the Armstrongs into what had come to be known as “the Debatable Land” eventually forced the royal hand, as did their purported crimes of burning down fifty-two Scottish churches. By 1529, King James V of Scotland marshaled a force of eight thousand soldiers to tame the troublesome Armstrongs, who numbered somewhere between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand, or roughly 3 percent of Scotland’s population. Under the pretext of a hunting expedition, James V marched his forces southward in search of Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, known locally as “Black Jock.” Their fatal standoff in July 1530 was immortalized in the “Ballad of Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie,” which is still sung in the Borders of Scotland, and by a stone monument inscribed: “Here this spot was buried Johnnie of Gilnockie…John was murdered at Carlinrigg and all his gallant companie, but Scotland’s heart was ne’er sae [so] wae [woe], to see sae many brave men die.”

  In his nineteenth-century collection of ballads The Border Minstrelsy, Sir Walter Scott identified William Armstrong, nicknamed “Christie’s Will,” as a lineal descendant of the famous Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie. Scott may have been right. Historians have inferred that Will was the oldest son of Christopher Armstrong (1523–1606), who was himself the oldest son of Johnnie Armstrong.

  Walter Scott’s nineteenth-century stories do not coordinate very precisely with seventeenth-century genealogy. All information about Christie’s Will gives his birth year as 1565. His infamous kidnapping of Lord Durie, made legendary by Scott, could only have happened around 1630, when Will would have been sixty-five years old. Reportedly, the same Christie’s Will fought for the crown early in the English Civil War and died in battle in 1642; he would have been seventy-seven.

  In the 1980s a private genealogical research firm in Northern Ireland suggested to Viola Armstrong that Christie’s Will was the likely founder of her husband’s family in Ulster in northern Ireland. Conveniently, he was one of the few Armstrongs with a known biography.

  As early as 1604, records show a William Armstrong settling in Fermanagh, where by 1620 no fewer than twenty-five different Armstrongs (five headed by a William) lived as tenant farmers. Militia muster rolls for Ulster from the year 1630 indicate that thirty-eight Armstrong men (six named William) reported to duty.

  Contrary to Viola’s conjecture, no Neil Armstrong progenitors ever settled in Ireland. They stayed in the Borderlands until they immigrated directly to America sometime between 1736 and 1743. Fittingly, for the family history of the First Man, the ancestry goes back literally to Adam.

  Adam Armstrong, born in the Borderlands in the year 1638 and died there in 1696, represents Generation No. 1. Coming ten generations before the astronaut, Adam Armstrong is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great paternal grandfather of the first man on the Moon. Cemetery records indicate that he died in Cumberland Township, Green County, Pennsylvania, in 1749, most likely making him the first of Neil’s bloodline to immigrate to America.

  Adam Armstrong had two sons, Francis (year of birth unknown), who died in 1735, and Adam, born in Cumbria, England, in 1685. At age twenty, Adam Armstrong II married Mary Forster, born in Cumbria the same year as he. Together the couple had four children—Margaret (b. 1706), William (b. 1708), Adam Abraham (b. 1714 or 1715), and John (b. 1720)—all baptized in Kirkandrews Parish, Cumberland, England. Adam Abraham Armstrong also came to America, probably with his father, likely in the mid-to late 1730s.

  These Armstrongs were thus among the earliest settlers of Pennsylvania’s Conococheague (“Caneygoge”) region, named “clear water” by the Delaware tribe. Adam Abraham Armstrong worked his land in the Conococheague, in what became Cumberland County, until his death in Franklin, Pennsylvania, on May 20, 1779, when he was sixty-three or sixty-four. But already by 1760, his oldest son John (b. 1736), at age twenty-four, had surveyed the mouth of Muddy Creek, 160 miles west of the Conococheague and some 60 miles south of Fort Pitt. There John and his wife, Mary Kennedy (b. 1738, in Chambersburg, Franklin County, Pennsylvania), raised nine children, their second son, John (b. 1773), producing offspring leading to Neil. According to regional genealogy expert Howard L. Leckey, John and Mary’s sixth child, Abraham Armstrong (b. 1770), was “the first white child born on this (western) side of the Monongahela River.” While not close to being historically accurate, Leckey’s point underscores the early Anglo movement west beyond the ridge of the Alleghenies. Therein lay the major provocation for the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1756.*

  Following the Revolutionary War, thousands of settlers poured into the Ohio Country, a land that one of its first surveyors called “fine, rich, level…it wants nothing but cultivation to make it a most delightful country.”

  In March 1799, twenty-five-year-old John Armstrong and his wife Rebekah Miller (b. 1776), as well as John’s younger brother Thomas Armstrong (b. 1777), his wife, Alice Crawford, and their infant, William, traveled by flatboat down Muddy Creek to Pittsburgh, then steered into the Ohio River some 250 miles down to Hockingport, just west of modern-day Parkersburg, West Virginia. The two families coursed their way up the Hocking River for 35 miles to Alexander Township, Ohio. Homesteading outside what became the town of Athens, Thomas and Alice raised six children. John and Rebekah eventually settled near Fort Greenville, in far western Ohio.

  To “defend” the frontier in the early 1790s, General “Mad” Anthony Wayne built a series of forts from southwestern Ohio into southeastern Michigan. In August 1794, Wayne’s “Legion” defeated a Native American confederation led by Shawnee chief Blue Jacket at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on the Maumee River near Toledo. At Fort Greenville the next year, chiefs of the Shawnee, Wyandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Miami, Eel River, Wea, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Piankashaw, and Kaskaskia relinquished claims to the entire bottom two-thirds of Ohio.

  Following the War of 1812, in which many tribes had allied themselves with the defeated British, came the Treaty of Maumee Rapids in 1817, which placed all of Ohio’s remaining Native Americans on reservations, followed in 1818 by a supplemental treaty struck at Fort Barbee, near Girtystown, 42 miles north of Fort Greenville, on the St. Marys River.

  Neil’s ancestor John Armstrong (Generation No. 5) and his family witnessed negotiations for what became the Treaty of St. Marys, the last great assemblage of Indian nations in Ohio. David, Samuel, John Civil, Sally, Rebecca, Mary, Jane, and Nancy settled with their parents in 1818 on the western bank of the St. Marys. From the first harvests, the Armstrongs seem to have earned enough to secure the deed to their 150-acre property, paying the two dollars per acre stipulated by the federal Land Act of 1800. St. Marys township collected taxes in 1824 from twenty-nine resident
s totaling $26.64, a dear ninety cents of which was paid by John Armstrong for “2 horses” and “3 cattle,” for what became the “Armstrong Farm,” the oldest farm in Auglaize County.

  David Armstrong, the eldest of John’s children (b. 1798) and Margaret Van Nuys (1802–1831) were Neil’s paternal great-grandparents. It seems they did not marry. Margaret soon married Caleb Major, and David married Eleanor Scott (1802–1852), the daughter of Thomas Scott, another early St. Marys settler. Baby Stephen stayed with his mother until her premature death in March 1831, when Margaret’s parents, Rachel Howell and Jacobus J. Van Nuys, took in their seven-year-old grandson. Stephen’s father David died in 1833, followed by his grandfather in 1836.

  Stephen Armstrong (Generation No. 7) received his grandfather Van Nuys’s legacy of roughly two hundred dollars in cash and goods when he turned twenty-one in 1846. The census of 1850, a year in which farmers made up 83 percent of Ohio’s 2.3 million population, listed Stephen as a “laborer.” After years working for a family named Clark, whose farm was in the low-lying “Black Swamp” of Noble Township, Stephen managed to buy 197 acres (Ohio farms then averaged only about 75). Later he secured the deed to 138 additional acres held since 1821 by the Vanarsdol family (related to the Armstrongs by marriage) as well as the rights to 80 acres held since 1835 by Peter Morrison Van Nuys, Stephen’s maternal uncle.