First Man

by James R. Hansen

  Neil’s great moment of landing on the Sea of Tranquility became Zint’s own high point back in Wapakoneta: “At 2:17 A.M. on July 21, Jacob Zint hopes to have his eight-inch telescope trained on the southwest corner of the moon’s Sea of Tranquility. Weather permitting, the sighting will complete an odyssey in time and space that began here 23 years ago when a small blond boy named Neil Alden Armstrong took his first peek at the Moon through Mr. Zint’s lenses.” Everyone wanted to know what Zint was thinking at the moment of the historic landing: “It’s unbelievable, when I think of all those times Neil and I talked of what it would be like up there,” he told many interested reporters. “And now he’s up there.”

  Perversely, nothing that Jacob Zint, now deceased, ever had to say about his relationship with Armstrong was true—not a bit of it, though Zint’s telescope, along with his dismantled astronomical rotunda, sits in a favored location inside Wapakoneta’s Auglaize County Museum.

  “To the best of my recollection,” Armstrong admits today with reluctance and typical reserve, so as not to overly impugn the reputation of Wapakoneta’s highly publicized amateur astronomer, “I was only at Jake Zint’s observatory the one time. As for looking through Zint’s telescope and having private conversations with Zint about the Moon and the universe, they never happened…. Mr. Zint’s story grew after I became well known,” Neilsays. “All of his stories appear to be false,” though Neil never bothered to correct them or insist that Zint refrain from telling them.

  Most people in 1969 had no reason to disbelieve what was being reported so widely in the newspapers. Moreover, Zint’s prophetic version of Neil’s “destiny” just seemed, as one journalist put it in July 1969, “Almost Too Logical to Be True.”

  “When all that came out, I thought it was fishy,” remarks Alma Lou Shaw-Kuffner. “It didn’t sound right to me, either,” echoes Ned Keiber.

  Zint’s voice was one among many, including Neil’s favorite science teacher, John Crites. Under a harvest Moon that was “just gorgeous,” Crites recalled, he inquired about Neil’s future plans. “Someday,” Neil replied, pointing to the full Moon, “I’d like to meet that man up there.” “That was in 1946,” Crites told reporters in 1969, “when no one had a thought of going up there.”

  “That’s fiction,” Neil comments tersely. “All my aspirations in those days were related to aircraft. Space flight would have been an unrealistic ambition.”

  In their bicycle shop less than sixty miles south of the Korspeter farm where Neil was born, Dayton’s Wilbur and Orville Wright had experimented with different types of wings and propellers, built a wind tunnel for aerodynamic analysis, and prepared successive models of their aircraft concept for flight testing at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. After achieving their goal of inventing the first powered and controlled airplane in December 1903, the Wrights returned to their Ohio home. In a large meadow on the outskirts of Dayton known as Huffman Prairie, they steadily improved their Flyer. By late 1905 the brothers had achieved the first truly practical airplane.

  Many accounts of Armstrong’s boyhood relate that Neil read about the Wrights as a first grader. That seems to be just another edifying myth. Neil explains. “I don’t remember reading about the Wrights or anything about any of the books I read in the first grade.”

  “When Neil was approximately two or three years old,” Stephen Armstrong recalled in 1969, “he coaxed his mother into buying a little airplane at the ten cents store, and there was an argument between a ten- and twenty-cent plane. Of course, his mother bought him the twenty-cent plane. From that time on, he liked airplanes because he was always zooming around in the house and out of the house.”

  Neil took his first airplane ride at about six years old when the family was living in Warren.* Over the years he has heard and read so many different versions of the story that he says, “I don’t know what’s true. It’s my belief that [the plane] was offering rides for a small fare [twenty-five cents], to tour around the city.” His father remembered it this way: “One time we were headed—at least his mother thought we were headed—for Sunday school, but they had an airplane ride [at the Warren airport] that was cheaper in the morning and then a price that escalated during the day. So we skipped Sunday school and took our first airplane ride.”

  The machine that took them up was a high-wing monoplane, the Ford Trimotor, nicknamed the “Tin Goose” for its skin of corrugated aluminum. First flown in 1928, the airplane employed fixed landing gear, accommodated up to twelve passengers in wicker chairs, and cruised at a speed of about 120 miles per hour. The pilot was a man named Johnny Finta. Neil’s father volunteered during a pre–Apollo 11 interview, “Those old Ford Trimotors; they really rattled. I was scared to death and Neil enjoyed it.”

  Sometime during his adolescence Neil began to have a recurring dream: “I could, by holding my breath, hover over the ground. Nothing much happened. I neither flew nor fell in those dreams; I just hovered. But the indecisiveness was a little frustrating. There was never any end to the dream.” According to Carl Jung, flight dreams express one’s desire to break free of restrictions, limitations, and difficulties. Alfred Adler thought that flying in a dream tapped into an impulse toward superiority and domination. Sigmund Freud connected dreams of flight to the libido and expression of sexual desire. (A simpler interpretation is that flying is fun.)

  In 1873, the Russian space flight visionary Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii (1857–1935), aged sixteen, imagined a spaceship driven by centrifugal force: “I was so worked up that I couldn’t sleep all night.” Through the streets of Moscow, young Tsiolkovskii wandered through a blinding snowstorm. “By morning I saw that my invention had a basic flaw. My disappointment was as strong as my exhilaration had been…. Thirty years later, I still have dreams in which I fly up to the stars in my machine, and I feel as excited as on that memorable night.” The creative imagining stayed with the Russian for the rest of his life, which lasted well into the Stalinist period. Along the way, “the father of cosmonautics” conceived of such advanced ideas as rocket staging, high-energy liquid propellants (such as liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen), Earth-orbiting space stations, space suits for what would become known as “space walks,” and even self-sustaining ecological starships capable of intergalactic travel. In Tsiolkovskii’s view, a human future in space was inevitable. “The Earth is the cradle of civilization,” he wrote, “but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”

  Even more haunting was the dream of Robert Goddard (1882–1945), the American rocket pioneer. At age seventeen, Goddard climbed to the top of his backyard cherry tree. “It was one of the quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England,” recalled Goddard in notes for his autobiography, “and as I looked toward the fields to the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet…. I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended, for existence at last seemed very purposive.” For the rest of his life, Goddard celebrated October 19 as his “Anniversary Day.” After his marriage in 1924, he lived with his wife in a house near where the cherry tree stood. When he subsequently moved his rocket-testing experiments from Massachusetts to New Mexico, he visited the tree whenever he could: “Got rocket weighed and ready, in afternoon. Stopped at cherry tree at 6 P.M.” (Oct. 19, 1927). “Took out trailer to farm, with Sachs. Went out to cherry tree” (Oct. 19, 1928). “Worked on flow patterns in afternoon. Went to cherry tree—Anniversary Day” (Oct. 19, 1932). In the fall of 1938, Goddard received a letter from a Massachusetts friend informing him that his cherry tree had been uprooted in a nor’easter. In his journal that night (Nov. 10, 1938), the father of American rocketry wrote, “Cherry tree down—have to carry on alone.”

  In the case of Neil’s boyhood nighttime reveries, “I can’t say they were related to flying in any way. As I look back on it, it doesn’t seem like there was
much relationship, except for being suspended above the ground.” Neil dismisses his dream: “I tried it later, when I was awake; it didn’t work.” Yet, he still recalls the dream some sixty years later.

  Curiously Armstrong, like Goddard, did have a memorable boyhood tree-climbing experience. At age eight, Neil set out to scale the biggest tree in his St. Marys backyard. In a way, navigating the height of the stately silver maple may have been Neil’s first attempt to think like an engineer, and to explore the sensations of flight.

  His sister June still characterizes Neil’s fifteen-foot fall as “awful.” “He hit smack on his back. He was white as a ghost and not moving at all. All of a sudden, he opened his eyes and looked up. I said, ‘Should I get Mama?’ All he could do was barely shake his head no. Then he said weakly, ‘Yeah.’ So I ran yelling into the house for Mom to come.”

  “Never to trust a dead limb” was young Neil’s takeaway. “I climbed trees, like all boys. I never thought of it as being related to my character.” Nonetheless, the incident serves as an allegory for his life—as an engineer, test pilot, and astronaut—presaging his strong preference for solitary challenges that task the mind more than the body; his desire to experience the unique perspective of unusual heights; his ambition for temporary escapes from an earthbound existence; the greater drama and criticality of his descents and landings over his takeoffs and ascents; and his extreme good fortune in coming away from serious accidents virtually unharmed.

  Neil himself rejects the notion that “there is any psychological backdrop to this.” Yet, some of the most illuminating studies of the character of engineering reveal that “the ideas of engineering are in fact in our bones and part of our human nature and experience” and that for engineering design the “first and foremost objective” is “the obviation of failure.” The engineering mind develops from earliest childhood, when falling down, literally, is a part of growing up.

  “I began to focus on aviation probably at age eight or nine,” Neil recalls, “inspired by what I’d read and seen about aviation and building model aircraft.” An older cousin, Kenneth Benzing, the nephew of Viola’s father Martin Engel, lived down the block in St. Marys and once Neil “saw what he was able to do” with balsa wood and tissue paper, he became hooked.

  The first model Neil remembers building was a high-wing light aircraft cabin, most likely a Taylor Cub, papered in yellow and black. “It never occurred to me to buy models with engines,” because motors cost extra money and required gasoline—both of which were in short supply during World War II. If powered, his models were driven by twisted rubber bands, like those tried in the 1870s by the French aeronautical experimenter Alphonse Pénaud (1850–1880).

  Neil’s models filled up his bedroom plus an entire corner of the basement. According to Dean, Neil built so many planes that he would fly ones that he was tired of or did not like—sometimes aflame—out the upstairs window. June remembers Neil gathering “five or six at least, then he runs down the stairs and out the front door to the end of the driveway,” one of those old-style driveways where two parallel strips of cement ran through a grass center. “So we’re leaning out an open window upstairs, flying these airplanes. Oh, I know Mother would have just died.” Neil would mark the landings with sticks, then “bring them back so we could do it again.”

  Armstrong did not fly models out of upstairs windows often, though: “I usually hung my models with string from the ceiling of my bedroom. I had put a lot of work in them and didn’t want to crash them, so when I flew one of those airplanes it was a rare occasion.

  “My focus was more on the building than the flying,” Armstrong recalls. In flying competitions, “you couldn’t have success with the model that wasn’t built well,” Neil emphasizes. “While I was still in elementary school my intention was to be—or hope was to be—an aircraft designer. I later went into piloting because I thought a good designer ought to know the operational aspects of an airplane.

  “I read a lot of the aviation magazines of the time, Flight and Air Trails and Model Airplane News, anything I could get my hands on.” His employer, Richard Brading, confirmed that “Neil never bothered reading comic books.”

  While Armstrong’s friends drew biplanes with fixed landing gear, Neil drew low-wing monoplanes with retractable tricycle landing gear. “At the time, we thought his airplanes would never get off the ground,” laughs Kotcho Solacoff. Arthur Frame remembers that Neil during World War II “was most interested in the fighter-type model as opposed to a bomber.”

  As part of the Aeromodelers Club at Purdue University, “I would win a number of events or get second place.” Neil recollects racing his “gasoline-powered ‘control-line’ models, flown on wires and operated at the center of a circle,” to speeds well in excess of 100 miles per hour. “I absorbed a lot of new knowledge and found people, some of them World War II veterans, who had vastly more experience and intuition on how to be successful flying.”

  “He tried awfully hard to get out there and get ahold of the real thing,” his mother remarked. Foregoing model airplane kits, fifteen-year-old Armstrong saved toward the cost of flying lessons, nine dollars an hour (roughly ninety 2005 dollars). Making forty cents an hour at Brading’s Drugs, Neil worked twenty-two and a half hours to pay for a single lesson.

  Early Saturday mornings Neil hitchhiked or “rode a bike with no fenders” out to the Wapakoneta airfield known as Port Koneta.

  “They did what they called ‘top cylinder overhauls,’” Neil recalls, “or just ‘top overhauls,’ for short.” Once Neil turned sixteen and had his student pilot’s license, he could fly the airplane. “That’s the way I built up flight time, by doing slow time [to coat the valves with high-octane gasoline] after top cylinder overhauls.” “He was a little grease monkey out there,” Neil’s mother once explained. “And for everything he did, why they gave him flying lessons. He learned to fly.”

  For many years now the small grass airfield outside Wapakoneta has been abandoned. As Neil’s father scornfully predicted, “The place is just gonna turn back into a cornfield,” and regrettably it has done just that.

  When Port Koneta opened up, “There were a lot of people around town talking, telling [aviation] stories all the time, and as a young guy I was absorbing all that.”

  The aircraft flying at Wapakoneta were mostly old army planes and trainers. There was a BT-13 made by Vultee and a low-wing Fairchild PT-19. One of the newest airplanes was the Aeronca Chief, a light high-wing monoplane—made in nearby Middleton, Ohio—featuring side-by-side instead of in-line seating for two and a control wheel instead of a control stick. A more basic version known as the Champ was Aeronca’s best-selling model. It was in one of the three Champs at Wapakoneta that Neil Armstrong learned to fly.

  Three veteran army pilots gave Neil flying lessons: Frank Lucie, Aubrey Knudegaard, and Charles Finkenbine, the youngest of the trio, then in his early twenties. Armstrong flew first with Lucie, and most often with Lucie and Knudegaard. “I thought they were excellent pilots, but what did I know! They were certainly much better than I was” at handling the controls.

  Of the seventy students in Neil’s high school class, about half of whom were boys, three—Neil, Ned Keiber, and Ned Binkley—learned to fly that summer of ’46. Each soloed about the same time. Neil has always refused, therefore, to say that his learning to fly was all that unusual. Ned Keiber’s older brother, who was ex–air corps, also flew at the field. (Ned remembers, “We’d stop and pick Neil up.”) A couple of women from the Wapakoneta area were even learning there.

  It was a little unusual, though, that Neil earned his pilot’s license before he got an automobile driver’s license. “He never had a girl. He didn’t need a car,” explained his father. “All he had to do was get out to that airport.” Unfortunately, the logbook the boy kept for his first flights was lost in Neil’s Houston house fire in 1964.

  “I believe you could solo in a glider at age fourteen,” Neil said, “but in a powered airpla
ne you had to wait till you reached your sixteenth birthday,” which he celebrated on August 5, 1946. That day Neil earned his “student pilot’s certificate,” then made his first solo within a week or two.

  The spontaneity of the event meant that the student pilot was in no position to alert family or friends. “You just heard the instructor unbuckle his belt, saw him look at you knowingly, felt his hand placed confidently on your shoulder, and thought to yourself, ‘Oh, oh, here I go.’” Not that Neil would have told anyone about it if he had known. “Flying was pretty much something he did on his own,” Dudley Schuler remembers. “Neil was a lone wolf in this respect.”

  Dean, who helped mow grass and weeds at the airfield, was on scene to observe his brother’s progress, though he personally never had any desire to fly. Viola was too nervous to watch her son fly, but she never tried to stop him from doing it. Part of the reason, according to June, was that the confident Neil “never expressed any fear when he talked about it.”

  Armstrong has only vague recollections of his first solo, for which he got the nod from Frank Lucie. “The first time you solo any airplane is a special day,” Neil states. “The first time ever you solo is an exceptionally special day. I’m sure there was a great deal of excitement in my mind when I got to do that first flight.”

  Fellow student pilot Ned Keiber witnessed it: “I was getting ready to leave and Knudegaard said to me, ‘Hang around, you might get a free Coke out of this.’ So I hung around and I watched him solo.” Neil recalls the mechanics: “I managed to make a couple takeoffs and landings successfully and bring it back to the hangar without incident.” Keiber’s assessment: “He didn’t bounce it like I did on the landings.”