First Man

by James R. Hansen

  —JUNE ARMSTRONG HOFFMAN

  CHAPTER 3

  First Child

  With first love, teenage Viola thought she had experienced the pinnacle of human emotion. But, at age twenty-three, the birth of her baby forever changed that belief. “Oh, how good it was to hold him in my arms—truly the flesh and blood of Stephen and me, completely fashioned by God, truly a precious blessing given to us to have, to hold, to cherish, to love, and to teach the beauty of life.”

  Ten days after delivering Neil, Viola rose from bed, “caring for the baby instead of mamma doing it all.” Contrary to 1930s societal norms, Viola “was able to breast-feed him as well as our two later babies. This I prayed so hard for, and my prayers were answered.”

  The doctor did not permit her to attend her father-in-law Willis’s funeral, but with Stephen at home she arranged for Neil to be baptized by Reverend Burkett, the minister who had married them, in a “hallowed place, truly sacred,” the same living room where the couple’s marriage and Neil’s birth had taken place. “Our hearts were all running over with thanksgiving for our beautiful son…. In my heart I dedicated him to God, and promised I would do my best to rear him according to God’s Holy Word.”

  Stephen’s job with the Bureau of Inspection and Supervision of Public Offices (a branch of the auditor’s office in the Ohio Department of State) demanded an immediate transfer from Lisbon to Warren, Ohio, forty miles to the north, where he would assist a Mahoning County senior examiner. The Armstrong family would make sixteen moves over the next fourteen years, in an Ohio odyssey including stops in Lisbon (1930), Warren (1930), Ravenna (1931), Shaker Heights (1932), Cleveland Heights (1932), Warren (1933), Jefferson (1934), Warren (1936), Moulton (1937), St. Marys (1938), Upper Sandusky (1941), and Wapakoneta (1944).

  Viola found Neil to be a serene and untroubled baby. Yet family photographs captured the boy’s tendency toward shyness. A visit to Santa Claus when he was about three left Neil “A little bit scared. See, you can see that funny little look.” Staging a photo with his birthday-present puppy dog, Tippy, Viola had to exhort a reluctant Neil, “Stand up there like a man!”

  She read to Neil constantly, instilling in her son the love of books shared with Neil’s grandmothers Caroline and Laura. The boy learned to read extraordinarily early and could read street signs by age three. His father Stephen, in a 1969 interview before the Apollo 11 mission, explained: “He’s a deep thinker. He likes books. He’s made the statement many times that he wished he could have books all around him.”

  During his first year in elementary school, in Warren, Neil read over one hundred books. Though the boy started his second-grade year in the rural consolidated school in Moulton but finished at St. Marys, Neil’s teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Hutton Adams, found him reading books meant for fourth- and fifth-grade pupils. Together with school superintendent C. C. McBroom, they decided to move him up to Mrs. Grace Wierwille Schrolucke’s third-grade class, which made him eight years old when he started St. Marys’ fourth grade the following autumn. Nonetheless, he received top grades and his teacher, Miss Laura Oelrich, said she “couldn’t keep him busy all the time.”

  Wherever the family went, Neil acclimated well and made friends easily. According to Neil, “as far back as I can remember, I was always moving. I didn’t think so much about it.”

  No children were Neil’s more constant companions than his younger sister and brother. On July 6, 1933, when Neil was almost three, June Louise Armstrong was born in Warren, Ohio; a year and a half later, on February 22, 1935, Dean Alan Armstrong arrived in Jefferson.

  Though they always felt loved and cherished by their parents, young June and Dean sensed that their older brother was “mother’s favorite.” “When it was time to plant potatoes out at our grandparents’ farm, Neil was nowhere to be found. He’d be in the house, in the corner, reading a book. Also, I don’t think all of us were allowed to get [model airplane] glue all over everything! But he was.” June recalls, “He never did anything wrong. He was Mr. Goody Two-shoes, if there ever was one. It was just his nature.”

  As older brothers go, June says, Neil “was definitely a caretaker.” The first time she ventured onto the high board at Upper Sandusky, Neil cheered her on from the water below: “Jump! Jump! It’s okay.” He always waited for her before heading home, usually carrying her towel so it would not get caught in the spokes of her bike.

  With brother Dean, who was five years younger, relations were more difficult: “I never violated Neil’s space. It would have had to have been an invitation.” Though the brothers were in the same Boy Scout troops, Neil outpaced Dean in badges earned and socialized with his older friends from school. They both loved music, but Dean enjoyed competitive sports and played on the varsity basketball team. Neil was “consumed by learning,” like his mother, while Dean was more like his dad, “a fun-loving person” who did not care much for books. Dean boasts that Neil “only had two dates in high school and I had to get both of them for him,” a remarkable claim considering that Dean was only twelve when Neil, age sixteen, graduated.

  “I’ve never competed with Neil in any way,” Dean asserts, but sister June isn’t convinced: “Dean wasn’t left out, but that’s still the way he perceives it.” Friends of the family also wonder about Dean’s feelings. But Neil’s senior prom date, Alma Lou Shaw, who also knew Dean well, says, “I never experienced anything to make me feel he was envious of Neil.”

  “Neil was just not made to hurt anyone,” Dean acknowledges, “very much like mother.” Stephen had a bad temper, Stephen’s father Willis had a bad temper, and Dean realized that he did, too. Childhood Monopoly games found Neil always serving as banker—and almost always winning. At the height of Dean’s inevitable frustration, he “would kick the middle of the card table and send all the money and cards flying. All Neil ever said, as calmly as he could, was, ‘Okay, this game is over.’” In Dean’s view, his brother never displayed any “outer fire.”

  Neil’s unusual combination of coolness, restraint, and honesty could be read as inscrutable. But he was rarely that in the eyes of his mother. “He has a truthfulness about him,” Viola said in a summer 1969 interview with Life magazine writer Dodie Hamblin. “He either had to be truthful and right, or he didn’t think he’d engage in it. I really never heard him say a word against anybody, never. That hurt him. If he heard somebody say something against somebody, that too would hurt him.” June compares that essential quality in Neil to her mother: “Mother thrived on goodness.” She never said a curse word stronger than “Lordy.” As the family disciplinarian, her style was not physical but moral: “She wanted us to be good.”

  But a person’s being “good” did not preclude resolution to the point of stubbornness. Neil “thinks things through,” Apollo 11 crewmate Michael Collins answered when asked about this facet of Armstrong’s personality, but “Yes, I would have to say stubborn rather than whatever the opposite of stubborn is.” Dean suggests the synonym “self-willed”: “Neil always does things on his terms. Our parents never tried to change him in any way. They were happy with him the way he was.” June regards the quality from a different angle: “The way Mother treated him fostered a high level of self-confidence.” To which Dean adds: “I don’t think he ‘scared’ that much.”

  If anyone ever did scare Neil Armstrong, it was his father, who himself was a product of the “old school” of stern parenting. According to June, “One of his favorite phrases was, ‘Straighten up!’” Judicious in any personal statement, Neil has always been especially reserved when discussing his father: “My father’s job kept him away from our home most of the time, so I didn’t think of him as being close to any of the children and did not notice if he seemed to be closer to one than another.” When asked whether Neil and his father were close, June replied: “No, they weren’t close. I may have been the closest to my father, but even that was not close.” Mother hugged the children but Father did not. In June’s recollection, “Neil probably was never hu
gged by him and Neil didn’t hug, either.”

  When Neil wrote home from college, he addressed the envelopes to “Mrs. S. K. Armstrong.” His letters greeted “Dear Mom and Family.” Dudley Schuler, one of Neil’s closest high school friends, found the Armstrongs “very close and very loving—a really nice family.” Area residents found Stephen Armstrong “amiable,” but it was Viola who stood out. “Neil’s mother was one of the nicest persons I’ve ever known,” proclaims Alma Lou Shaw-Kuffner. Dudley Schuler concurs: “She couldn’t find fault in anybody.” Though he called Steve “a great father,” high school friend Arthur Frame regarded Viola as “really the spine of the family.”

  “I don’t remember any discord in the family,” recollects sister June. “I don’t remember my parents arguing.”

  A certain element of tension did intrude in 1943, when Stephen’s mother, Laura, after living alone in St. Marys for thirteen years following Willis’s death, broke her ankle. Stephen and Viola took the sixty-nine-year-old woman into their home in nearby Upper Sandusky, an arrangement that became permanent when they moved in 1944 to Wapakoneta.

  For Viola, Laura’s thirteen-year stay, until her 1956 death at age eighty-two, was a daily cross to be borne. “Always, always there,” remembers June, who from age ten on had to share her bedroom with Grandmother Laura. She “wasn’t an interfering person,” but her preference to be treated as “more of a guest” was particularly hard on Viola. Yet Viola was “the flexible one,” June notes. She actually “stood it better than my father,” who “would become more irritated with it.” As for Neil, who was thirteen years old when Grandmother Laura arrived in the household and who would leave home for college soon after his seventeenth birthday, the impact was minimal.

  The same could not be said for the effect on Neil and his siblings of the evolution of Stephen and Viola’s marriage. On the surface, the relationship appeared solid. But underneath, the conjugal union seems to have run an all-too-typical course, from loving passion to emotional distance.

  One divisive issue was religion and the accompanying moral trappings of temperance, in drink and language. Stephen never talked openly about his religious ideas. Nor has Neil ever done so. Viola wrote shortly after the Moon landing that “Stephen’s love of the Master never seemed to be as deep as mine.” The same was true for Neil, Viola knew, though she always found that harder to admit to herself.

  That is not to say that Neil did not believe in God, as a few uninformed writers and proponents of atheism—notably the famous American atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair—suggested during the rush of Apollo 11 publicity in 1969. It is clear that by the time Armstrong returned from Korea in 1952 he had become a type of deist, a person whose belief in God was founded on reason rather than on revelation, and on an understanding of God’s natural laws rather than on the authority of any particular creed or church doctrine.

  While working as a test pilot in Southern California in the late 1950s, Armstrong applied at a local Methodist church to lead a Boy Scout troop. Where the form asked for his religious affiliation, Neil wrote the word “Deist.” The confession so perplexed the Methodist minister that he consulted Stanley Butchart, one of Neil’s fellow test pilots as well as a member of the congregation. Though uncertain of the principles of deism, Butchart praised Neil as a man of impeccable character whom he would and, during their flying together, did trust with his life. Unlike many Christians he had met, he had never heard Neil once utter a profanity, nor to his knowledge had anyone else. Taking Butchart at his word that Neil would positively influence young Scouts the minister gave Neil the position.

  By Neil’s own admission, he did not become aware of deism through any history or philosophy class. By the time he was in high school, his favorite subject was science, under the direction of department head and Dean of Boys John Grover Crites, a master of science education from Ohio State University. Crites came to Blume High School in Wapakoneta in 1944, the same year the Armstrongs moved to town. A man in his early fifties, Crites taught chemistry, physics, and advanced mathematics; he was the type who, according to one of Neil’s classmates, “gave the kids [who shared his interests] all the experience and all the knowledge they could absorb.” With Crites’s help, Neil won the Freshman General Science Award given by Bowling Green State University. During his senior year, Crites selected him for Buckeye Boys State, an American Legion–sponsored weeklong government program held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Dudley Schuler identifies Crites as “an idol,” “a tremendous man,” and “a great influence on Neil.”

  Living into the 1970s, Crites was available for interviews on the eve of the Apollo 11 mission. “Science was [young Neil’s] field and his love,” Crites reported to journalists. Neil not only kept “a goal in mind,” but “he was the type of fellow who always tested out a hunch. He was always seeking an answer to some future question,” always on course to find the “right answer.” This critical spirit made him “a natural for research.”

  It would also have set him on collision course with his mother over religion, if he had ever allowed that to happen. According to Dean, whenever his mother spoke about religion, Neil would listen politely and in silence, offering some terse comment only if pressed. Perhaps young Neil developed this conflict-avoidance strategy in a more general context, but surely his relationship with his mother was the primary reason for it.

  John Crites observed: “Neil was the type of boy who never let anyone know that he knew anything. You had to ask to get an answer, but he expressed himself well in written form.” Fellow engineers, test pilots, astronauts, space program officials, and other colleagues concur. “I did not see Neil argue,” remembers NASA mission flight director Eugene Kranz. “He had the commander mentality…and didn’t have to get angry.” According to Charles Friedlander, who directed the astronaut support office at Kennedy Space Center, “I saw that in the crew quarters. If something difficult came up, he would listen politely. He’d think about it and talk to me about it later if he had something to say.”

  Like many journalists covering the space program, CBS’s Walter Cronkite also experienced Neil’s nonconfrontational—some have even said evasive—style. On CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, August 17, 1969, three weeks after the Apollo 11 splashdown, the issue of Madalyn Murray O’Hair publicly declaring Neil an atheist resurfaced. Cronkite asked: “I don’t really know what that has to do with your ability as a test pilot and an astronaut, but since the matter is up, would you like to answer that statement?” To which Neil replied, “I don’t know where Mrs. O’Hair gets her information, but she certainly didn’t bother to inquire from me nor apparently the agency, but I am certainly not an atheist.” Cronkite followed up: “Apparently your [NASA astronaut] application just simply says ‘no religious preference.’” As always, Neil registered another answer as honest as it was vague and nondescript. “That’s agency nomenclature which means that you don’t have an acknowledged identification or association with a particular church group at the time. I did not at that time.” At which point, Cronkite dismissed the matter. According to Neil’s brother Dean, Cronkite on another occasion asked Neil if he felt closer to God when he stood on the Moon’s surface, to which Neil gave a totally ridiculous non sequitur: “You know, Walter, sometimes a man just wants a good cigar.” No available transcript confirms that Neil ever said this—or that Cronkite ever asked this exact question. But even if the brief byplay never actually occurred, it only underscores Dean’s keen recognition of his brother’s conflict-avoidance strategy.

  Janet Shearon, Neil’s first wife of thirty-five years, also faced frustration in this regard. But his mother, unlike everyone else, did not have to guess what was on his mind or in his heart. “Neil was a pleasure for us to raise in every way,” Viola wrote on October 27, 1969, to a Methodist minister in Iowa—a man whom she had never met but who sought to correspond with her about the religious significance of her son’s recent Moon landing—“but when he was a senior in high school, and
even more in college, he began wondering about the truth of Jesus Christ. I felt sure he was praying less…. [Today] he is not teaching his own two fine sons about Jesus Christ. This fact causes a million swords to be pierced through my heart constantly.”

  Nonetheless, Viola found a way in 1969 to interpret her son’s life journey in a positive, Christian way: “As I look back, I can see how the pattern of his life has all dovetailed together. I believe God gave him a mind to use and maybe destined him to the work he has been doing. As a child and as a young man he loved and was completely fascinated by the heavens and God’s great creation. It seemed as if the heavens were calling him—so great was his undying interest. He has been fine and good, a scholar, a thinker, and a diligent worker.” Since the Moon landing, “I’ve listened to every speech of his very carefully. Though not an eloquent speaker, I feel every word is fine and thoughtful and every one from the heart. His thinking is big and his thoughts are far reaching. He seems to be inspired by God, and speaking his Will. For this I am over and over thankful.”

  It was a mother’s loving rationalization against which Neil Armstrong, her precious first child, would never argue.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Virtues of Smallville

  For Neil Armstrong, rural Ohio represented comfort, security, privacy, and sane human values. Leaving NASA in 1971, Armstrong would seek a return to the ordinary on a small farm back in his native state. “I have chosen to bring my family up in as normal an environment as possible,” he would explain. Upon hearing that fellow Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins had told a reporter that Neil, by moving back to Ohio, was retreating to a castle and pulling up the drawbridge, Armstrong countered: “You know, those of us who live out in the hinterlands think that people that live inside the Beltway [as Collins did] are the ones that have the problems.”