In the July 18 issue, we asked our readers to send us their memories of where they were when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Here are a couple of their stories:

On the day of the lunar landing I was working at the Pacific Telephone Los Angeles Television Operating Center (LATOC) on the 12th floor of the 434 S. Grand Ave. building. The Bell System provided all of the microwave radio systems that made up the television networks. The LATOC was where all of the feeds from the networks’ headquarters in the east coast terminated and were sent to the ABC, CBS and NBC network facilities in Los Angeles. Those network facilities sent back to the LATOC the feeds for the west coast. We had monitoring (video and audio) capabilities for all of the networks. So we had a view of all major network feeds before and during the landing. All maintenance operations were suspended during the operations so we did not cause any errors in service. It was exciting and we all breathed easy when they had landed. Same thing with the liftoff, too.

Our location was right in the middle of a lot of things that the viewers were not aware of. We saw the Christmas show that came from one of the Apollo missions that was not aired. We had an audio monitor on all of the time that was connected to the NASA to Apollo spacecraft communications link. We did hear the “Houston, we have a problem” from Apollo 13 just as it was spoken.

I was at the TOC from January 1966 through February 1975. We saw and heard a lot of history being made.

Tom Suter, La Crescenta

The historic day of July 20, 1969 (in India it was still July 19) I was in my office working for the prominent Hindi daily newspaper Hindustan as chief of News Bureau. TV in India was in its infancy and we got the news on news agency tele-printers. Though it was expected, when Armstrong actually landed on the moon we all got very excited and re-wrote the whole story with appropriate headlines.

As if by divine inspiration, I instantly produced a poem of 12 lines or so. Normally, poems were only in the magazine section, not on news pages, but that was a special day and my poem appeared along with the news.

I thought it was the first poem on moon landing written the same day and printed anywhere in the world.

It ran as follows (free prose translation): Man’s steps on the Moon have fulfilled the dream of centuries making all humanity proud. Eagle went with a message of peace and planted the seed of love on the distant little brother’s land. Knowledge and science are now slaves of the man that have brought Moon and the Earth nearer. One small step on the Moon is a big step for mankind (as Armstrong stated). This has made imagination and fact come together. 

Yatindra Bhatnagar, Tujunga