First Man

by James R. Hansen

  How the Civil War affected Stephen Armstrong is unknown. When the conflict broke out in 1861, Stephen was only thirty-four. Union service records do not indicate that he fought in the war, though by war’s end, nearly 350,000 Ohioans had joined the Union army. Of these, some 35,000, fully 10 percent, lost their lives.

  Stephen married Martha Watkins Badgley (1832–1907), the widow of George Badgley and mother of two sons, George and Charles Aaron, and two daughters, Mary Jane and Hester (“Hettie”). Stephen must have met and wed “Widow Badgley,” six years his junior, by 1863 or 1864, because on January 16, 1867, Martha gave birth to Stephen’s son, Willis Armstrong, named after his guardian James Willis Major. Previously, the couple had lost two consecutive babies in childbirth.

  When Stephen Armstrong died in August 1884 at age fifty-eight, he owned well over four hundred acres whose value had nearly quintupled from the 1850s purchase price of roughly fifteen dollars per acre to over $30,000—the equivalent today of over half a million dollars.

  Stephen’s only natural son, Willis, inherited most of the estate. Three years later, Willis married a local girl, Lillian Brewer (1867–1901). The couple, both twenty years old, lived in the River Road farmhouse with Willis’s mother Martha. Five children were born in two-year intervals between 1888 and 1897. But in 1900 Muriel, the eldest, fell from her horse and died from head injuries, and then in 1901 Lillie died trying to give birth to yet another child.

  Bereaved, Willis began a part-time mail route. One regular mail stop was at the highly respected law firm of John and Jacob Koenig. Their unmarried sister Laura Mary Louise worked as their stenographer and secretary, and, sometime in late 1903—about the time two brothers from nearby Dayton were test flying an airplane over coastal North Carolina’s Kitty Hawk—Willis began courting her. When they married in June 1905, Laura was thirty-one years old.

  Willis gifted Laura not only an expensive wedding ring and precious gold lavalieres, but a honeymoon by train to Chicago, where Willis bought his new wife a dining room suite and a table service for twelve of pure white Haviland china. Returning to St. Marys, he purchased a house on North Spruce Street. Later, he moved the family into an impressive Victorian on a corner of West Spring Street.

  It was here that Stephen Koenig Armstrong, Neil’s father, grew up. The first of two children born to Willis and Laura (Mary Barbara was born in 1910), the boy was welcomed on August 26, 1907, by half sisters Bernice, seventeen, and Grace, ten, and half brothers Guy, fifteen, and Ray, twelve. Laura was thirty-three when her first child was baptized, an occasion commemorated by the Koenig family with a vial of water from the River Jordan.

  What most defined Stephen’s boyhood, however, were economic misfortune and a streak of family bad luck. Willis sank most of his money into an investment scheme whereby his brother-in-law John Koenig envisioned Fort Wayne as a regional interurban rail hub. Seeing a clear path to fortune, Willis mortgaged his farms.

  Unfortunately for the investment, the Fort Wayne and Decatur Interurban Electric Railway was built in perfect concert with the rise of the automobile. Fatalities from a pair of highly publicized 1910 railway accidents included the man who headed the Bluffton, Geneva, & Celina Traction Company, which subsequently aborted a plan to build a new westward line out of Fort Wayne. The resulting financial disaster soured family relations, including Willis’s marriage.

  In the spring of 1910, Stephen’s eighteen-year-old half brother Guy was lured to Maricopa, California, north of Los Angeles, by reports of a bountiful gusher, only to perish in an April 1912 oil rig accident. Back in St. Marys, the Armstrong house caught fire in 1914. Six-year-old Stephen escaped with just his corduroy suit on his back.

  In 1916, Willis, forty-nine years old and deeply in debt, quit his mail route and headed for Kansas with “oil on the brain.” Willis traveled to the Mid-Continent Range with his twenty-one-year-old son Ray.

  In early 1919, after the end of World War I had significantly weakened demand for oil, Willis returned to Ohio with an unknown—likely modest—sum. Within weeks, Willis moved the family back to the River Road farm, still heavily mortgaged. Soon crippled by chronic arthritis, Willis relied on Stephen to work the fields; finishing his education was a task on which Stephen’s mother insisted.

  Even before Stephen graduated from high school in 1925, he had decided not to pursue the farming life. He wrote as much to his older half brother Ray in Los Angeles. Back in St. Marys, Stephen Armstrong dreamed of opportunities out West.

  Yet right there in his midst was a pretty, highly intelligent, sensitive, and soft-spoken young woman with whom he fell in love. Her name was Viola Louise Engel.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Strong of Spirit

  Ralph Waldo Emerson came close to expressing a universal truth when he claimed, in 1860, “Men are what their mothers made them.”

  Stephen Armstrong’s family had been living in America for well over a century when Viola’s grandfather, Frederick Wilhelm Kötter, sailed into Baltimore harbor aboard Johannes in October 1864. In a family effort to circumvent enforced conscription into Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck’s military, eighteen-year-old Fritz Kötter’s father sold part of his farm to pay their son’s passage to America.

  From Baltimore, Frederick made his way to Cincinnati and then north via the Miami and Erie Canal to the little burg of New Knoxville, Ohio. A state whose German immigrant population exceeded 200,000 (predominating in thirty-seven of eighty-eight counties) held obvious appeal to the native of Ladbergen, Germany. Kötter soon found a wife, but she died, perhaps in unsuccessful childbirth. In the early 1870s, after purchasing eighty acres of land near the village of Moulton, six miles to the north of New Knoxville, Fritz married a first-generation German-American, Maria Martha Katterheinrich. They Americanized their name to Katter. Two newborn daughters died, but the couple later enjoyed the healthy birth of six sons and one daughter, Caroline Matilda, born on February 6, 1888. Nineteen years later, on May 7, 1907, Caroline gave birth to her first and only child, Viola.

  Some of Viola’s most vivid childhood memories involved watching her German-speaking grandmother, Maria Martha Katter, prepare traditional recipes. An apple pancake topped with a chunk of butter and sorghum molasses was Viola’s best-loved treat, and a half century later, she would tell her son Neil to “hurry home from the Moon” because she would have his favorite apple dessert ready and waiting for him.

  Whereas the Armstrongs for three centuries had been Presbyterian, Viola’s family worshiped at the St. Paul Reformed Church, whose doctrine derived from Martin Luther’s Catechism, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Augsburg Confession, drawing on a fundamentalist tenet: “The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are recognized as the Word of God and the ultimate rule of Christian faith and practice.”

  After the Moon landing, Viola summarized her beliefs: “My faith is deep and simple. I believe our body houses the soul within us—our body is a living temple of God, therefore it is sacred.”

  Young Viola sat for long stretches singing hymns. She prayed—sometimes in German—before meals and at bedtime. According to her daughter June, Neil’s younger sister: “Mother never preached. She’d take us to church and [hear] us say our prayers good night. But she never preached.”

  The Bible was her rock. She respected the King James Version for “the way it is written.” In 1929, her mother’s wedding gift was The Red Letter New Testament, “With the Words of Jesus Christ Printed in Red.” Viola’s underlining and margin notations reveal treasured passages, among them Psalm 37—“Trust in the Lord, and do good” and “the meek shall inherit the earth.”

  “I do believe my mother was deeply in love with the father she never knew,” her daughter June has expressed. On May 4, 1909, Martin Engel (1879–1909), a butcher by trade and not yet thirty years old, died of tuberculosis, with his wife and baby daughter at his side. On May 7, Viola’s second birthday, her father was buried in Elmgrove Cemetery, near the Armstrong farm, whic
h John and Rebekah Armstrong had settled in 1818.

  Viola frequently asked about her father. He “loved his home and his family very much,” related twenty-one-year-old widow Caroline Katter Engel of the man who played the violin beautifully “by ear,” owned a typewriter and an Edison phonograph, and wore stickpins and cuff links. Viola was left to romanticize him.

  Caroline’s parents cared for Viola while she cooked for the wealthy McClain family. In 1911, Dr. Vernon Noble (the son of Dr. Harry Noble, who had delivered Viola) diagnosed liver cancer in Caroline’s mother, Maria. Viola remembers being banished so that an “awful surgery” could be staged on the family dining room table.

  To Viola, the undertaker’s funeral wreath was a symbol “that God had taken one of His flock home.” Viola took to pretending that the Katter barnyard, like Elmgrove, “was a cemetery. I would bring flowers (weeds) and lay them on the stones, feeling so sad, actually crying tears.”

  The veil of tragedy lifted until 1916, when Grandfather Katter became fatally infected with erysipelas, “St. Anthony’s fire.” “Suddenly a most beautiful white angel appeared at the foot of his bed,” Viola believed. “The angel had really called him Home.”

  For Caroline Katter, loss yielded to happiness when a romance blossomed between herself and a local farmer, two years her junior, by the name of William Ernst Korspeter, whom she had met at the Reformed Church in St. Marys. The church was the site of their marriage on October 7, 1916.

  Cleardale School in Washington Township was about a mile’s walk from Viola’s new home. Only sixteen children (many of them siblings) enrolled during her seventh- and eighth-grade years (1918–20). Viola recorded, “I am sort of lonesome as I am the only one in my [eighth] grade. …I haven’t missed a day so far, which I hope I never will.”

  The previous school year, Viola had kept a “commonplace book” filled with “Memory Gems,” such as D. L. Moody’s adage, “If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of itself.”

  Even as a young girl, Viola established the touchstones of her parenting philosophy: “Oh, you who have a mother dear; / Let not a word or act give pain; / But cherish, love her, with your life; / You ne’er can have her like again” [unattributed]. Certainly, son Neil learned these lessons well.

  In a decision she would come to regret, Viola forewent the pursuit of her teaching qualifications at Normal School and instead matriculated at Blume High School in Wapakoneta, where she graduated in a class of ninety-three students.

  Viola’s favorite teacher, a Miss Pera Campbell, taught American classics from history to satire. Religious and moral themes of Nathaniel Ward, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards naturally interested her. “We learn, if we never have before,” she wrote of Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, “that we must be born again, or converted, sometime in our life.” From Philip Freneau’s romantic elegy “The House of the Night,” she learned “what death really is and should be.” Life beckoned as well, as evidenced by a keepsake sketch of Venetian gondolas annotated in Viola’s hand, “The picture looks at me with eyes that penetrate.”

  Her high school years appear to have been very happy. A slender girl with unassuming ways, Viola seems to have been “one of the sweetest, brightest, and most charming of friends,” while maintaining high academic marks in what today would be considered demanding college-level coursework. A student of the piano since the age of eight, she was known for her love of music. This quality, along with inventiveness, concentration, organization, and perseverance, she passed along to her son Neil.

  Yet, Viola’s dearest aspiration was to devote her life to Christ: “I had longed to be a missionary, going to distant lands, but being an only child, my parents discouraged me.” She instead earned twenty cents an hour clerking at St. Marys’ Glass Block Company, touted as the “Largest Department Store in Western Ohio.”

  It was then that Viola started seeing Stephen Armstrong, who himself had just graduated from St. Marys Memorial High School, Wapakoneta’s archrival. The two first spoke during a youth group meeting at St. Paul Reformed Church. Their “courting” unfolded within fairly strict bounds: “We went places close around, but only on Sunday afternoons or evenings. We had a wonderful time together,” Viola reminisced. “I guess when you love one another you really don’t need much money.” The ardor of their young love disguised their many differences.

  For Christmas 1928, Viola and Stephen exchanged engagement rings and announced their plans to marry. Like most young couples, they were not unaware of the challenges ahead but knew “somehow we would manage.” Their wedding was set for October 8, 1929, at 2:30 P.M.

  Viola prayed, “asking God to help us always to do right, that we might be pleasing in His sight. I told Him that I wanted us to be right for each other. I asked Him to help us have a beautiful marriage and be useful and helpful people while we lived here on earth. These talks with God made me strong to face the future, whatever it might bring.”

  The ceremony took place in the small living room of the Korspeter farmhouse at an altar made of red and yellow cockscomb, marigolds, and pink and lavender asters. Viola, her hair curled that morning, wore a street-length dress of blue transparent velvet and black satin pumps with silver buckles. She carried a bouquet of four pink rosebuds. Stephen dressed in a hand-tailored, finely striped navy blue suit, a white carnation in his lapel. His best man, Guy Briggs, was dating Viola’s best friend and bridesmaid, Marvel Hoeper. Stephen’s beautiful younger sister, Mary Barbara, served as maid of honor; the day before the wedding, she had turned nineteen. Reverend H. R. Burkett of St. Paul Reformed Church officiated. His wife played the piano—Lohengrin’s processional and Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” for the recessional. Viola’s friend LaRue Stroh sang “O Promise Me” and “I Love You Truly” before immediate family and friends. Viola had made her own wedding cake, an iced angel food in three graduated layers ornamented with rosebuds and garlands, and hand-churned the ice cream served out of bell-shaped molds.

  For a honeymoon, the couple drove “Papa” Korspeter’s automobile sixty miles for their first-ever trip to Dayton, where they nervously signed in for their overnight stay at the Biltmore. Stephen spent $275 on a 1927 Chevy two-door, leaving precious little to spare. Two weeks later, on October 29, 1929, Wall Street’s stock market crashed and the Great Depression began.

  Stephen moved Viola into the River Road farmhouse, where she helped his mother with the cooking and housework. Opportunity arose when the county auditor and a friend of the family offered him part-time work as an appraiser. Stephen went to Columbus, the state capital, to sit for the civil service exam, and in February 1930, he received his passing marks as well as an appointment to assist Robert Horn, Columbiana County’s senior auditor. Arrangements were made to auction off the farm and to move his parents into a small house in St. Marys. Stephen and Viola saw a godsend in a promising new job and a life together—and a baby on the way.

  Viola claimed, “Immediately I became aware that I had conceived. Oh, the thoughts kept racing through my mind, oh, really and truly, Stephen and I were going to have a child.” When she was alone, she “fell on her knees and thanked God with all my heart.” She promised to teach the child “the very best I knew how” and “to give him back to God, to use as He saw fit.” She prayed her baby would “grow up to be a good and useful person.”

  In mid-May 1930 Stephen and Viola, six months pregnant, drove the 230 miles to Lisbon, near the Pennsylvania border. They were “thrilled beyond words” to have electric lights and hot and cold running water in their furnished two-room apartment.

  Two weeks before her due date, set for August 4, Viola prepared to give birth at her parents’ farmhouse, in the same front room in which Stephen had courted and married her. On a bedside table, she carefully laid out the layette she had made herself, every stitch “one of love and expectation.”

  The evening of August 4, 1930, found Viola sitting at the kitchen table writing a letter to Stephen
, who remained in Lisbon: “The baby and I will be all right—you know, honey, if it’s God’s will. Today is the fourth and we haven’t any little Teddy yet—but the day isn’t up yet.” As she closed the letter, a severe pain overcame her and a gush of amniotic fluid ran down her leg. Dr. Vernon Noble, who had had to be called in, said, “Well, I cannot save the child, but we will try to save the mother.” Finally, at 12:31:30 on August 5, 1930, he managed to deliver the baby—a boy—with the assistance of Stephen’s sister Mary Barbara. The child’s jaw structure resembled his father’s. But his nose and eyes were all Viola.

  When Grandmother Caroline placed the boy dressed in his new clothes into his mother’s arms, all Viola could do was look at “that beautiful little dear” and thank God over and over again. Exhausted from her ordeal, she fell fast asleep. Caroline picked up Viola’s letter and added a postscript:

  Viola’s Mother: Papa Stephen. Baby weighs 83/4lb. Viola was very sick from9:30P.M. to 12:31A.M. Dr. had to take it with instruments. But Viola seems to be getting along fine, but she is weak and sore. Baby is very pretty. Don’t worry about Viola. If she takes worse we will let you know. Will write more tomorrow. Viola sent her love to you.

  Viola and Stephen called their son Neil Alden. Viola liked the alliteration, “Alden Armstrong,” and the allusion to Alden from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic poem “The Courtship of Myles Standish.” No one in either family had ever been christened “Neil.” Perhaps they knew that “Neil” was the Scottish form of the Gaelic name Néall, which translated as “cloud,” or that, in its modern form, it meant “Champion.”

  PART TWO

  TRANQUILITY BASE

  Neil read a lot as a child and that was his escape. It wasn’t an escape from anything; it was an escape to something, into a world of imagination. As a boy he felt secure enough to risk escaping, because he knew, upon returning, he would be in a nice place.