First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Armstrong’s down-to-earth view dates back to his boyhood. During these same years, another product of an Ohio boyhood, cartoonist Jerry Siegel, envisioned a hero named Superman who hailed from Smallville. This biographical detail was a vital component of his fictional character, whose powers could only be fostered by an environment that promoted the triad of revered abstractions: “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

  It was not Smallville but Warren, Jefferson, St. Marys, Upper Sandusky, and Wapakoneta that harbored Neil Armstrong. None of these burgs registered a population in the 1930s and 1940s much above five thousand. In these genuine Smallvilles, young people—with the right kind of family and community support—grew up embracing ambition.

  In addition to Neil Armstrong, that mind-set marked all seven of the original Mercury astronauts: Alan B. Shepard Jr., of East Derry, New Hampshire; Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom of Mitchell, Indiana; John H. Glenn Jr., of New Concord, Ohio; Walter M. Schirra Jr., of Oradell, New Jersey; L. Gordon Cooper Jr., of Shawnee, Oklahoma; and Donald K. “Deke” Slayton of Sparta, Wisconsin. Only the hometown address of M. Scott Carpenter—Boulder, Colorado—might register on a larger scale, but, during Carpenter’s youth in the 1930s and 1940s, Boulder counted just over ten thousand citizens.

  In the view of the Original Seven, if the famous ephemeral quality that came to be known as “The Right Stuff” existed at all, it derived socially from their common upbringing. “Small-town values are a mark of distinction of the Project Mercury pilots,” Walter Schirra wrote in his autobiography Schirra’s Space (1988). John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit, concurred: “Growing up in a small town gives kids something special.” Children “make their own decisions” and “maybe it’s no accident that people in the space program, a lot of them tended to come from small towns.”

  For most of the history of the U.S. space program, a greater number of astronauts have come from Ohio than from any other state. Still today, of the four states producing the most astronauts (the others are California, New York, and Texas, the country’s most populous states), Ohio ranks first in terms of astronauts per capita, with one native-born astronaut for every 662,000 people.

  Though the amiable atmosphere of small-town life in Ohio, real or imagined, faced a serious crisis in the 1930s, young Neil noticed hardly any financial hardship: “The small towns, the ones that I grew up in, were slow to come out of the Depression. We were not deprived [Stephen Armstrong’s annual salary was just above the 1930 national average of $2,000], but there was never a great deal of money around. On that score we had it no worse and no better than thousands of other families.” To some of his boyhood friends, the fact that Neil’s father had a job meant that the Armstrongs were rich, and they told Neil so.

  Neil’s first employment came in 1940 when he was ten—and weighing barely seventy pounds. For ten cents an hour, he cut grass at Upper Sandusky’s historic Old Mission Cemetery. Later, at Neumeister’s Bakery, he stacked loaves of bread and helped make 110 dozen doughnuts. He also scraped the giant dough mixer clean: “I probably got the job because of my small size; I could crawl inside the mixing vats at night and clean them out. The favorite of the senior bakers was the hot-buttered bread, but the greatest fringe benefit for me was getting to eat the ice cream and homemade chocolates.”

  When the family moved to Wapakoneta in 1944, Neil clerked at Wahrer’s West End Grocery and then at Heller and Bowsher Hardware. Later he did morning and evening chores at Rhine and Brading’s drugstore for forty cents an hour. His parents let him keep all his wages, but expected him to save a substantial part of it for college.

  An incident from Neil’s Boy Scout days in Upper Sandusky seems to confirm his superior work ethic. Early one morning Neil and two of his fellow Scouts, John “Bud” Blackford and Konstantine “Kotcho” Solacoff, set off for Carey, Ohio, ten miles to the north, on their twenty-mile qualifying hike toward a badge required to make Eagle Scout. After eating lunch at a windmill-shaped restaurant the boys started back. According to Kotcho Solacoff though “fatigue was setting in…Neil kept pushing us to go faster and faster so he could get to work. We told him to go ahead.” Neil started “the Boy Scout pace,” alternately walking and then running intervals between roadside telephone poles. “By the time we got home,” Kotcho recalls, “we were not only exhausted but we had painful cramps in our legs.” The next day Kotcho and Bud found that Neil had made it to the bakery on time.

  Of the 294 individuals selected as astronauts between 1959 and 2003, over two hundred (more than four in every five) had been active in scouting. This included twenty-one women who served as Girl Scouts. Forty of the Boy Scouts who became astronauts had made it to Eagle status. Of the twelve men to walk on the Moon, eleven participated in scouting. On this list stand both Neil Armstrong and his Apollo 11 crewmate Buzz Aldrin, though Aldrin stayed in Scouts only briefly.

  In the opinion of Bud Blackford, “The Scouts can take a lot of credit for Neil Armstrong.” When the family moved to Upper Sandusky in 1941, the town of roughly three thousand people still had no Scout troop. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—breaking news of which Neil heard on the radio when his father called him inside from playing in the front yard—soon changed that. On the following day, when the U.S. Congress declared war, the Boy Scouts of America placed its entire resources at the service of the government. As Neil remembers, news of the war “was around us all the time, in the newspaper, on the radio. And of course there were a lot of stars in the windows of the families who had children that had gone off to war.” As Bud Blackford recalls, “A new troop was formed right from scratch,” to be led by Protestant minister J. R. Koenig, “a real taskmaster sort of fellow.”

  The new troop, designated by the national organization as Ohio’s Troop 25, met monthly in a room above the Commercial Bank building in downtown “Upper.” Thirty-two boys joined, whom Reverend Koenig lined up by height and had them count off into four “patrols.” Neil’s group called itself the Wolf Patrol and elected Blackford as patrol leader, Solacoff as assistant patrol leader, and Neil as the scribe who penciled the minutes into “a beat-up three-ring binder.”

  Troop 25 and its Wolf Patrol became, in Neil’s words, “immersed in the wartime environment.” Airplane recognition was a Scout forte that suited Neil perfectly. He and his friends made models that their Scout leader sent on to military and civil defense authorities so their experts could better distinguish friendly from enemy aircraft. Troop 25 skit night had the Wolf Patrol skewering Axis leadership. Blackford played Hitler, Solacoff imitated Mussolini, and Neil was a German general. “The show received great acclaim under the circumstances,” Blackford recalls.

  When the terse Reverend Koenig was assigned to an out-of-town ministry, Ed Naus, “less of a disciplinarian,” stepped in, assisted by Neil’s father. “He was not a Scoutmaster,” Neil explains, “but he was very helpful and very involved.” In Bud Blackford’s eyes, Stephen Armstrong and Ed Naus were a “wonderful combination.”

  Blackford remembers that Steve Armstrong encouraged the troop to start a monthly newspaper. At his office in the courthouse, he typed the editorial staff’s stories, news items, and a few dumb jokes (“You serve crabs here?” “We serve anyone, sit down.”) onto unforgiving mimeograph paper that yielded such masthead misspellings as features editor “Niel.” The Pup Tent News was first released on Flag Day, June 14, 1943.

  In their Wolf Patrol, Neil, Bud, and Kotcho entered into one of those indelible adolescent friendships that thrived on good-natured rivalry. Kotcho Solacoff remembers a chem-lab prank: “I said, ‘Here Neil, try some C12H22O11.’ To my surprise and horror, Neil grabbed a pinch full and put it in his mouth. I yelled, ‘Spit it out, it’s poison!’ Neil said, ‘C12H22O11 is sugar.’ I said, ‘I know, but I didn’t think you did.’ That was the last time I took for granted that I knew something that he didn’t.”

  The antics escalated at the Bowling Green State University Science Fair. “Neil ha
d made a steam turbine out of scraps of wood and a little alcohol lamp that heated the little boiler. Every time he lit that lamp, his turbine would turn with such speed and eloquence. Bud and I had to save some face. So we built a little pinhole camera. The pictures were quite fuzzy but visible. The day came for the science fair. Neil’s little turbine was spinning without missing a beat. He was teasing us that the judges would fall down laughing when they saw our science project. Several hours went by before the judges got to Neil’s turbine; it wouldn’t work…. the axles on the turbine warped and locked in place from overuse. A week or so later, the certificates from the science fair arrived. Bud and I got a superior, the highest award. Neil got a fair rating. Neil was furious. While telling the story recently at a class reunion, Neil wanted me to know that he had finally forgiven us. That little turbine can now be seen in the Neil Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta, Ohio.”

  Wapakoneta has been consistently identified as Neil Armstrong’s hometown, but it was his three years in “Upper” that Neil cherished most of all. Yet, as much as the entire family enjoyed their residence from 1941 to 1944 (Neil’s age eleven to fourteen) at 446 North Sandusky Avenue, circumstances forced the family to make one last move, the one to “Wapak.”

  This time, Neil recalls, his father “thought he might get drafted” even though he was thirty-six years old, “on the upper edge” of “draft material.” Wapakoneta, some fifty miles southwest of Upper, was farther from Stephen’s work, but, explains Neil, “Mother had her parents nearby.”

  Stephen bought a large two-story corner home at 601 West Benton Street. As always, Neil had no particular trouble adjusting to his new environs, and he immediately became active in Boy Scout Troop 14. Blume High School was located just six blocks from his home. His high school transcript shows that his best grades were always in math, science, and English. Contrary to some historical accounts that have misunderstood Blume High School’s grading system, he never received any poor, unsatisfactory, or failing grades. His lowest grades were in drawing (freshman year), Latin (sophomore year), American history (junior year), typing (junior year), and metalworking (senior year), but even in those classes he never earned less than a “fair.”

  Always musically inclined, Neil joined the school orchestra, boys’ glee club, and band. Despite his small size, he played one of the largest instruments, the baritone horn, because he liked its distinctive tone. He joined Hi-Y, a student organization, served on the yearbook staff, and acted in the junior class play. Elected to the student council in grades eleven and twelve, in his senior year Neil served as vice president.

  Neil even lent his baritone to a neighborhood ragtime combo, with Jerre Maxson and Bob Gustafson on trombones, and Jim Mougey on clarinet. The Mississippi Moonshiners’ one paying job was a two-night gig playing Spike Jones tunes at grange halls in nearby Uniopolis and St. John—for five dollars to be split four ways. According to a laughing Gustafson, “Neil knew only one song by heart.” That was “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” “Oh, God, I can still hear that one today!” Jerre Maxson, now deceased, gave Neil’s musical abilities a higher grade: “Neil was a very good musician. He had a strong after-beat, and really kept us going.” Maxson took note of Neil’s cerebral approach, recalling his saying that “music contributed to ‘thought control.’”

  Of the Moonshiners’ rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Jerre Maxson admitted, “We were so bad that only half the people stood up. Before we got done, everyone had sat down.” “We would probably never have been successful commercially,” Neil adds wryly.

  High school friends remember Neil not as shy or introverted, but as “a person of very few words” who “thought before he spoke.” Remembers Bob Gustafson, “I think he wanted to be sure everything was right.” According to Ned Keiber, “He just had things to do and he did them and he didn’t talk about it.” “I wouldn’t call Neil shy,” explains Arthur Frame, who for years subsequently served as Neil’s stockbroker. “If you are someone who has something to say or has done something that he thinks is worthwhile, he’ll participate in it wholeheartedly. But it’s all on his terms.”

  Neil went on very few dates in high school, but “most of us really didn’t have steadies,” remembers Dudley Schuler. Maybe a boy would meet a girl and walk her home; “that was about it.” According to Schuler, Neil “was as interested in girls as the rest of us, but he never really had a steady date, not a steady girl.”

  Neil’s most memorable date, as it was for many high school students, was his senior prom.

  “I think I was his first date, as a date kind of thing,” recalls Alma Lou Shaw-Kuffner. “It was no romance between us. I think his mother said to him, ‘You’ve got to go with somebody,’ and he figured, ‘What the heck.’”

  “That was a big thing—to get the car,” remembers Dudley Schuler, who double-dated with Neil, Alma Lou, and Dudley’s girlfriend Patty Cole in the Armstrongs’ brand-new Oldsmobile. “The last thing [Stephen Armstrong] told Neil was, ‘You don’t go to Dayton.’”

  By the time the car had traveled halfway to Dayton, Neil got cold feet. “If we got in an accident,” Schuler remembers the rationale, “we’d be in trouble because everybody would know we had gone to Dayton.” Instead, Neil drove them over to the amusement park at Russell’s Point at Indian Lake. But the park was closed. “We were going to stay out all night,” Alma Lou reminisces, “so we just drove.” At about three o’clock in the morning, the two young couples in their formal wear found an all-night diner in Lakeview, where they ate breakfast, then started home.

  Somewhere between the little towns of New Hampshire and St. Johns, about twenty miles west of Wapakoneta on U.S. Highway 33—with Dudley and Patty sound asleep in the backseat—Neil nodded off. “It was like four o’clock in the morning,” Schuler recalls, “and all of a sudden we hit this ditch on the wrong side of the road.” Neil could not free the car, and the girls’ prom gowns got grass-stained from trying to push. Just as day started to break, a man on his way to work in Lima pulled the automobile out.

  The car would not start. The rescuer’s car had to pull the big Oldsmobile until the engine triggered. Neil, now wide awake, drove his father’s car westward into Wapakoneta. “Stop the car here,” Dudley told Neil, “and if doesn’t start again, we’ll push it across and get it started when we coast down Fire Alley.” As feared, the car would only start by rolling it downhill. Neil managed to pull it into an all-night garage where they found a truck driver who discovered a loose wire.

  “We thought we were out of the woods,” Schuler explains, “until the next morning when Neil’s dad found that the whole side of the car was scratched.” The girls were left to explain the grass stains on their dresses. Alma Lou’s mother observed, “You must have had an interesting evening.”

  The month following the prom, sixteen-year-old Neil Armstrong graduated from Blume High School. Among his seventy-eight classmates, his grades placed him in the upper 10 percent, eleventh in his class. Accompanying Armstrong’s senior class picture in the Blume High School yearbook for 1946–47 was the telling epigram, “He thinks, he acts, tis done.”

  In the quietly congenial world of the series of midwestern towns that amounted to the truest Tranquility Base that he would ever know, Armstrong prepared to meet the world. He would dare risking his peace and comfort on something he discovered there.

  That “something” was flying.

  CHAPTER 5

  Truth in the Air

  Jacob Zint relished his role as Wapakoneta’s Mr. Wizard. A lifelong bachelor who lived with two bachelor brothers in a sinister-looking three-story home at the corner of Pearl and Auglaize streets, just a few blocks from the Armstrong home, Zint worked as an engineering draftsman for the Westinghouse Company in Lima. On top of his garage, the scientifically minded Zint built an observatory, a domed rotunda ten feet in diameter that revolved 360 degrees on roller-skate wheels. An eight-inch reflecting telescope pointed outward at the stars and planets. Through Zint�
�s best eyepiece, the Moon appeared to be less than a thousand miles away, rather than the actual quarter million miles’ distance. It was a setup that would have pleased the eccentric sixteenth-century astronomer Tycho Brahe, one of Zint’s heroes.

  Jake Zint would have forever remained an obscure local oddball if not for his self-proclaimed connection to young Neil Armstrong. One evening in 1946, when the future astronaut was sixteen, Neil, his friend Bob Gustafson, and a few other members of Boy Scout Troop 14 paid a visit to Zint’s home. Their purpose was to qualify for an astronomy merit badge. Because Zint, age thirty-five, did not like people coming to his place unasked, the Scoutmaster, Mr. McClintock, had painstakingly prearranged the appointment.

  In Zint’s estimation, the moments that followed represented a turning point in the life of young Neil Armstrong. The Moon, so Zint said, “seemed to be Neil’s main interest. He would dote on it,” as well as expressing “a particular interest” in “the possibility of life on other planets. …We hashed it over and concluded there was no life on the Moon, but there probably was on Mars.” So taken was Neil with Zint and his observatory that his visits “continued even after he went away to Purdue University.” On the eve of the Moon launch, Zint even claimed, Neil sent, via a visiting newsman, his old astronomical mentor a special message: “The first thing he’s going to do when he steps out on the Moon is find out if it’s made of green cheese.”

  Headline after headline during June and July 1969 featured the Zint connection to Armstrong: “Neil Dreamed of Landing on Moon Someday,” “Astronomer Jacob Zint Provided Neil A. Armstrong’s First Close-Up Look at Moon,” “Neil Armstrong: From the Start He Aimed for the Moon,” “Astronaut Realizing Teen-Age Dream,” “Moon Was Dream to Shy Armstrong,” and “Jacob Zint, Wapakoneta Astronomer, Says, ‘Neil’s Dream Has Come True.’” Many of the stories included a picture of a smiling Zint, his arms resolutely folded, standing in front of the telescope that supposedly provided Armstrong’s first close-up look at the Moon.