“We had family. We had grandchildren. It was a long hard decision for me. It wasn’t an easy thing to do—I cried for three years before I left.” Janet had prolonged her decision because “the children were still there, the nest wasn’t empty, there were still things going on. I always had hoped our life together would improve with time.
“I realized the personality. I just couldn’t live with the personality anymore.”
Neil took it hard. “Can’t you do something about it, Neil?” his friend Harry Combs asked. “No, I just can’t,” Neil answered. “Jan has just given up on us. She doesn’t want to live that kind of life.” Says Combs, “He was in the deepest depression that I’ve ever seen.
“It was awful. He would just sit there and glare at the table—not even move. I would ask him, ‘Is there any improvement?’ and he would say, ‘The children are supportive, but I have no sign of ever getting her back.’ There were two or three years of this stuff.”
Dean confirms that Neil became very depressed: “He begged her for a long time to come back.”
The separation was tragically bookended by the deaths of Neil’s parents; first Stephen, then Viola. Their last few years of life had been sad and problematic ones. Stephen had suffered a series of minor strokes and thought they did not have enough money to live on. The children moved their parents into a duplex in Bisbee, Arizona, where June and her husband Jack Hoffman lived. Viola adapted well, but Stephen hated the desert. In the summer of 1989 Neil moved them to the Dorothy Love Retirement Community in Sidney, Ohio.
Stephen lived unhappily in an unassisted private apartment at the nursing home for six months and made life even more difficult for Viola. Neil was with him on February 3, 1990, when he succumbed to another series of strokes. “Dad sat straight up in bed, looked at us, and laid down and died,” Neil remembers. A few days before, Stephen had motioned his wife over, whispering, “I love you.”
After grieving for her husband, Viola was ready to go on living. A previous diagnosis of pancreatic cancer turned out to be a heart problem. During a visit with June in Arizona, she impulsively purchased six pairs of shoes, reveling in the indulgence. Unfortunately, her health was more fragile than anyone suspected. On Monday, May 21, 1990, back in Ohio, she died suddenly. A few days earlier, she surprised her daughter by saying, “I am not sure there really is a God. But I am very happy that I believed.”
That next winter following the death of his parents and his separation from Janet, Neil suffered his heart attack. His cardiac health recouped quickly, but it would take longer to cure the heartache.
Out of ashes, if a person is lucky, a brand-new life can rise. For Neil, rejuvenation—and a type of personal redemption—began the moment he met Carol Held Knight.
Carol Knight, born to Victor Held and Rosario Cota in 1945, was a recent widow. Her husband, forty-nine-year-old Ralph Knight, had been killed in a small plane crash in Florida in 1989, on his way to see motorcycle races in Daytona. Carol was left to raise her two teenage children, Molly, fifteen, and Andrew, fourteen, and also run the family business, a small Cincinnati construction company.
The meeting between Neil and Carol in the summer of 1992 was surreptitiously arranged by mutual friends, Paul and Sally Christiansen, at a pre–golf tournament breakfast at their club in suburban Cincinnati. Out of embarrassment at sitting next to the famous astronaut, Carol said little, then left early to tend to her ill mother. Neil escorted her out to her car.
“A couple of weeks later, my son Andy and I were out in the backyard. I could hear the phone ringing. There was a very quiet voice on the other end, ‘Hello.’ And I said, ‘Who is this?’ And this quiet voice said, ‘Neil.’ And I said, ‘Neil who?’ And he said, ‘Neil Armstrong.’ And I said, ‘Oh, what do you want?’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Well, actually, my son and I are trying to cut down a dead cherry tree.’
“Neil came to life and said, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ ‘Well, you know where I live,’ I answered, ‘across the street from Paul and Sally.’ ‘Well, I’ll be right over.’ Thirty-five minutes later, there’s a pickup truck in the driveway. Andy answered the door and Neil’s standing there with a chainsaw in his hand. Andy comes back in the kitchen and he says, ‘Do you know who’s at the door?’ I said, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you.’
Carol and Neil were married after Neil and Janet’s divorce became final in1994. There were two wedding ceremonies. Planning the family gathering, Carol said, “How does that look, Neil, June eighteenth?’ He opened up his date book and said with a very serious expression, ‘I have a golf tournament.’ Then he looked up at me very sheepishly and said, ‘But I could change it.’”
Because the State of California required a blood test for a marriage license plus a waiting period of five days, Carol and Neil first married in Ohio. The mayor of Carol’s village (also a friend) presided on June 12,1994. The Christiansens stood as their witnesses. Their California wedding took place at San Ysidro Ranch, near Calabasas Canyon in the Los Angeles area. Surrounded by mountains and on a small lawn bordered by a white rose arbor, it was, for Carol, “one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.” With them that day were only the couple’s four adult children, plus Mark’s wife Wendy and their two children.
The new Mr. and Mrs. Neil A. Armstrong decided to build a brand-new house on the same property where Carol’s old house was standing. The one-story English-country-style home was finished in 1997. “We talked about whether we would like to live anyplace else. But all our friends were here and we had come to the stage in life where that network was really priceless.”
Did Carol give much though to what it might mean to be Mrs. Neil Armstrong? “I’m sure the attention is so much less than it was thirty years ago. We have noticed most of that when we travel out of the country. But he’s not recognized that much anymore.”
Carol’s not bothered when the media call her Janet, as appeared in photo captions in coverage of the Columbia memorial service in Houston in2003. “That’s fine. It’s not about me.
“I definitely run interference. I will politely explain, ‘Neil doesn’t sign autographs anymore.’ We try to give them something instead: ‘How about a picture?’ You have to respect their feelings, too. There have been a few times when I’ve been actually scared, maybe twice in the U.S. and a few times in other countries. I remember coming into an overseas airport around two in the morning. I didn’t think we’d be able to get to the car, just people all over! We needed help from half a dozen policemen just to get in the car.
“Once we came back from London and we had just gotten home after the flight and just taken our suitcases in the bedroom, when the doorbell rang. I went to the door and opened it and this woman said in a British accent, ‘I’m from the London Times and I missed you in Britain. I wanted an interview. Could I have one now?’ And I just looked at her and said, ‘You must be kidding.’
“Neil and I are a good balance, so we have a good partnership.”
“Carol turned out to be the greatest,” related Harry Combs. “A humdinger! The fellows in the Conquistadores del Cielo [an elite aerospace group founded in 1937] were just so delighted in the change we all saw in Neil. She just made a new man out of him!” Taft Broadcasting’s Charlie Mechem, though he “loved Janet” and thought she was “a dynamite woman,” admitted he’s “nuts about Carol. I think she’s done a lot to make these last eleven years of his life very happy.” Gene Cernan, who has remained a good friend of Janet’s from their days together at Purdue to the present, offered, “Carol is a match, a fit for Neil like a glove. As for Janet, it’s a woman’s right, she just got tired of being Mrs. Neil Armstrong. She wanted her own identity.”
Today, Janet Shearon Armstrong (she retains the last name) still resides in Utah. She volunteers with the local homeowners association, teaches swimming, takes walks with Cassie, her golden retriever, and travels. “I’m in an investment club here, and that can take all my time. I have friends, and we do things.”
Much
of her time is taken traveling to visit with her two boys and her six grandchildren. After Rick graduated from Wittenberg College in 1979 with a major in biology, he trained dolphins and sea lions for a company out of Gulfport, Mississippi, then went on to Hawaii, after which he began doing dolphin shows at Ohio’s Kings Island. Today, Rick, his wife, and three children live in a northern Cincinnati suburb. Mark majored in physics at Stanford, where he also played on the golf team and helped set up the university’s first student computer lab. He went to work with Symantec in Santa Monica, then he joined his former college roommate’s startup, WebTV, which was eventually bought by Microsoft. Mark stayed with Microsoft in Silicon Valley until 2004, when he moved his wife and three children to the Cincinnati area. It was through Mark’s interest in Apple’s original Macintosh that Neil first became enthusiastic about computers, now a daily hobby.
Neither boy ever developed a strong interest in aviation. In high school, Mark did take a few flying lessons at the Lebanon airport, and soloed, but that was the end of it.
Janet wishes her ex-husband well and is still trying to understand him:
“Everyone gives Neil the greatest credit for not trying to take advantage of his fame, not like other astronauts have done.”
“Yes, but look what it’s done to him inside. He feels guilty that he got all the acclaim for an effort of tens of thousands of people. Someone like Jim Lovell was a different personality completely! He would just walk on and not let it bother him. Neil would let it bother him. He always was afraid of making a social mistake, and he has no reason to feel that way for he was always a well-mannered gentleman.
“He’s certainly led an interesting life. But he took it too seriously to heart.
“He didn’t like being singled out or to feel that people were still wanting to touch him or get his autograph. Yet he wouldn’t quit signing autographs for twenty years because probably, in the bottom of his heart, he didn’t think most people were trying to make money selling them.”
“Are you saying that if he had gone out in the public more times over the years that the interest in him would have dwindled—that he’s made himself into a type of target?”
“I agree.”
Neil Armstrong today seems to be a very happy man—perhaps happier than at any other time in his life. Although he technically “retired” in the spring of 2002, he remains as busy as ever traveling around the world, giving speeches, attending events, visiting children and grandchildren, reading books, writing essays, playing golf. He attends meetings of the American Philosophical Society and frequently participates in annual sessions of the Academy of the Kingdom of Morocco, in which he has been a member since King Hassan II established it in 1980. The only other American charter members of the Moroccan Academy (modeled after the Academie Française) were former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Alex Haley, the author of Roots. At meetings in Casablanca, Neil has been presented talks on “New Knowledge of the Earth from Space Exploration” (1984), “Research Values in Contemporary Society” (1989), “The Ozone Layer Controversy” (1989; coauthored with his son Mark), and “Observations on Genetic Engineering” (1997; coauthored with his wife Carol). One of the consistent themes in Neil’s presentations is “junk science,” how a small amount of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and how society should not draw a sweeping conclusion when knowledge about a subject is noticeably incomplete.
As for his personal flying, he still seizes the occasional opportunity to take control of an interesting aircraft. In 1989, when he became chairman of AIL Systems, Inc., he was invited to fly the B-1 bomber. He later flew the B-1 again for the First Flights television series. For that 1991 series, he also flew a number of other aircraft types, including the Harrier, helicopters, gliders, and an old Lockheed Constellation.
In the late 1990s, Armstrong sold his Cessna 310 but kept his pilot’s license current for those occasions when he would be offered the chance to fly a special aircraft. In 2001, in association with his directorship of RMI Titanium Co., he flew an Airbus 320 at Airbus’s headquarters in Toulouse, France. In the summer of 2004 he flew the new Eurocopter and AStar helicopters and an assortment of light aircraft. As often as he can, he still goes aloft in sailplanes, a relaxing sporting activity that he has enjoyed since the early 1960s. “He was always a natural at that,” Janet recalls. “He could actually hear the thermals. It was a wonderful relief for him to be up there flying by himself.”
Many people have wondered why Armstrong finally, after all these years, agreed to an authorized biography. No more explicit answer can be given than to say, “It was time.” For Armstrong’s foremost legacy lies in what is most genuine about his life story and what his truthful experiences can signify to today’s young people—and shall signify for generations to come.
A few years back, Neil and Carol visited their good friends Dorie and Kotcho Solacoff at the home of the Solacoffs’ daughter Kathy and her husband Chris Perry, a PGA Tour golfer. The youngest of the Perrys’ three children, five-year-old Emily, proved to be a real firecracker. Neil took to Emily quickly, and Emily to him, and soon she had him by the hand, taking him on an expedition through her house. “I want to show you a secret, but don’t tell anyone. This is a secret which no one knows about.”
Up in the attic, Emily said, “Look over the mattress and look down there.” There it was—a great big dead bug. “But don’t tell anyone,” she whispered.
Next the little girl led him into her bedroom. “This is my clock, and this is my lamp, and this is my mirror, and these are some of my books. This book is on Winnie the Pooh, and this one is about Sleeping Beauty, and this is Cinderella, and, oh, here is a book about Neil Armstrong. He was the first man on the Moon.”
Then she stopped, hesitated for a moment, looked at the nice older man like Grandpa who had come to visit her in her house, and said, “Oh! Your name is Neil Armstrong, too, isn’t it?”
Acknowledgments
Historians may also voyage from the Earth to the Moon. My own epic journey began three years ago, in June 2002, when Neil A. Armstrong signed a formal agreement naming me as his biographer. Actually the trip began well before that. I first wrote Mr. Armstrong about my ambition to write his life story in October 1999. A long thirty-three months later, after numerous letters and e-mails had passed back and forth between us (and a critical face-to-face private meeting—our first—in September 2001), Armstrong gave me his thumbs-up. That approval brought unprecedented access not only to Neil and his personal papers but also to his family, friends, and colleagues—many of whom, in deference to Neil, had resisted speaking openly about him before.
So, first and foremost, I wish to thank Neil Armstrong himself. Without his full and generous support, this book could never have been successfully written.
I am also indebted to Neil for the integrity with which he wanted the project carried out. He wanted the book to be an independent, scholarly biography. Although he took the opportunity to read and comment on every draft chapter, he did so only to guarantee that the book was as factual and technically correct as possible. Not once did he try to change or even influence my analysis or interpretation.
It should be clear, then, to all readers that Neil Armstrong is not in any way a coauthor of this book. In fact, I am quite sure that he does not like the book’s title. He would never think to call himself the “First Man,” insisting as he always has that Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon at the very same instant he did. Also, it is not to Armstrong’s liking that “First Man” sounds so biblical, so epic, so iconic; he would never express his life or legacy in those terms. But once Neil had decided to trust my effort, he was not about to interfere with my purpose. The result, I believe, is an exceptionally rare type of book: an authorized biography more candid, honest, and unvarnished than most unauthorized biographies.
Just as it took some 400,000 Americans in government, industry, and universities to carry out the Apollo program, this book could not have been produced without the
help of a score of people. A complete list of people interviewed for the book appears in the bibliography; to every one of them, I express my sincere thanks. I have never—and will never—meet a finer group of individuals. Meeting them and hearing what they had to say about Neil and about their own lives and careers made me think how lucky Neil was to have had them for colleagues and friends. What I shall always remember best about my research for this book is the enchanting time I spent with all the wonderful people I interviewed. Conducting the oral history took me to eighteen states and the District of Columbia.
I owe special thanks to Neil’s immediate family: to his son Rick Armstrong, his brother Dean Armstrong, and especially his sister June Armstrong Hoffman. As readers will quickly surmise, June not only provided me with many extremely informative and deeply personal insights into Neil and the history of her family, but also shared with me all of her mother’s photo albums and personal papers. This “Viola material,” as I came to call it, proved invaluable by significantly deepening my understanding of the family dynamics from which the young Neil emerged. For sharing her mother with me, and thus the world, I have June to thank. Jayne Hoffman, June’s daughter, was also tremendously helpful in sorting out the many intricacies and riddles of the Armstrong family genealogy.
From the start I was committed to hearing firsthand from Neil’s first wife, Janet Shearon Armstrong. It was impossible to tell Neil’s story without telling Janet’s. I was interested not only in what Janet had to say about her former husband of thirty-eight years; I was interested in Janet herself. During the Apollo years, Janet, as the wife of an astronaut and then as the wife of the first man on the Moon, became a public figure in her own right. In that context, it was critically important to examine her own experiences as a woman, wife, mother, and role model.
As hard as it was for her to do, Janet eventually agreed to a series of interviews. What she contributed, in my view, is a priceless addition to this book. If I had failed to talk with her, it would have been like missing the chance to hear from Mrs. Christopher Columbus. I only wish that arrangements could have been made to interview Janet’s and Neil’s youngest son, Mark Armstrong.
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