Change
Fifty years may not sound like much, especially not when containing the span of a lifetime. But, when the present is compared to fifty years ago, the difference is sometimes abysmal. This past Saturday was the fiftieth anniversary of man's first trip to the moon. What a difference fifty years make.
I don't remember the moon landing at all. The fact that I was almost four months old would explain that. I don't remember if my parents watched it or not. I think I asked my mother a long time ago, but I don't remember her answer. At the time of the landing, we were living in an apartment in East Boston, our first pied-à-terre in the United States. We were there the first six months. Afterward, we moved to 9 Hanover Avenue in Boston's North End, a tiny apartment consisting of two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a fire escape. I do remember a television set there. It was a large cabinet television, with a small curved screen exclusively in black and white. My parents didn't buy it. They probably got it from friends who were upgrading.
The television died when I must have been four or five. I remember my father tearing it apart, trying to see if he could find out what had happened to it, learning a little about appliances, and enough to know he wouldn't make a good television repairman. It was thrown out and we bought a Zenith television. Actually, we got two for the price of one. My mother later explained that the first one that was delivered had a knob that was bent. Another one was delivered to replace it, but the first one wasn't taken back because the house had smelled of fried fish and the men hadn't wanted to return to pick it up. It doesn't make much sense and I don't know the real reason (my mother's lack of English probably made her misunderstand), just that we had two televisions, one of which went to my room later when we moved to the triple decker in Jamaica Plain.
Fifty years ago, Spain was the first point on earth to hear the astronauts announce their arrival on the moon. For the manned Apollo missions, three distinct spots on Earth were chosen to relay messages. One was at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, another was at Honeysuckle Creek in Canberra, and the third was at Fresnedillas de la Oliva in the province of Madrid. At both the moments of the landing and lift off from the moon, messages were relayed through Fresnedillas because the other two stations were on the side of the Earth away from the moon. The station was opened through a previous agreement with Franco as a way to track Soviet transmissions, and then was used for the Apollo missions. In 1987, they were definitively closed.
At that time, Spain was a ghost of what it is now. Fresnedillas was a rural area, and people moved more with donkeys and mules than with cars. The Spain my parents had left behind a couple of months earlier was still predominantly rural. Few people had televisions, fewer had cars. One week after I was born, I was baptized. To go to the parish church, about three kilometers away, my parents asked a favor of the only neighbor who had a car in the area of our village. Now, every house has at least two cars.
The house we live in now was the house my parents lived in then. The only electric appliances they had was a small motor for the well and a radio. There was electric light in all the rooms, but it was weak. In fact, the voltage was reinforced sometime in the eighties, to bring it up to 220. The majority of people had no television, so neighbors would get together from time to time to pass away the evenings. Yet this was the country that received communications from the moon before anywhere else in the world.
Fifty years on and life in this country is on a par with just about every other developed country. This is no longer the world I was born into. A half century changes things a lot.
I don't remember the moon landing at all. The fact that I was almost four months old would explain that. I don't remember if my parents watched it or not. I think I asked my mother a long time ago, but I don't remember her answer. At the time of the landing, we were living in an apartment in East Boston, our first pied-à-terre in the United States. We were there the first six months. Afterward, we moved to 9 Hanover Avenue in Boston's North End, a tiny apartment consisting of two rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a fire escape. I do remember a television set there. It was a large cabinet television, with a small curved screen exclusively in black and white. My parents didn't buy it. They probably got it from friends who were upgrading. The television died when I must have been four or five. I remember my father tearing it apart, trying to see if he could find out what had happened to it, learning a little about appliances, and enough to know he wouldn't make a good television repairman. It was thrown out and we bought a Zenith television. Actually, we got two for the price of one. My mother later explained that the first one that was delivered had a knob that was bent. Another one was delivered to replace it, but the first one wasn't taken back because the house had smelled of fried fish and the men hadn't wanted to return to pick it up. It doesn't make much sense and I don't know the real reason (my mother's lack of English probably made her misunderstand), just that we had two televisions, one of which went to my room later when we moved to the triple decker in Jamaica Plain.
Fifty years ago, Spain was the first point on earth to hear the astronauts announce their arrival on the moon. For the manned Apollo missions, three distinct spots on Earth were chosen to relay messages. One was at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, another was at Honeysuckle Creek in Canberra, and the third was at Fresnedillas de la Oliva in the province of Madrid. At both the moments of the landing and lift off from the moon, messages were relayed through Fresnedillas because the other two stations were on the side of the Earth away from the moon. The station was opened through a previous agreement with Franco as a way to track Soviet transmissions, and then was used for the Apollo missions. In 1987, they were definitively closed.
At that time, Spain was a ghost of what it is now. Fresnedillas was a rural area, and people moved more with donkeys and mules than with cars. The Spain my parents had left behind a couple of months earlier was still predominantly rural. Few people had televisions, fewer had cars. One week after I was born, I was baptized. To go to the parish church, about three kilometers away, my parents asked a favor of the only neighbor who had a car in the area of our village. Now, every house has at least two cars.
The house we live in now was the house my parents lived in then. The only electric appliances they had was a small motor for the well and a radio. There was electric light in all the rooms, but it was weak. In fact, the voltage was reinforced sometime in the eighties, to bring it up to 220. The majority of people had no television, so neighbors would get together from time to time to pass away the evenings. Yet this was the country that received communications from the moon before anywhere else in the world.
Fifty years on and life in this country is on a par with just about every other developed country. This is no longer the world I was born into. A half century changes things a lot.
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| 1974 |
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| 2019 |
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