(HOST) Recently commentator Peter Gilbert was reminded of a time – not so very long ago – when anything having to do with "space" was still the stuff of science fiction.
(GILBERT) Fifty years ago this week, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the first manmade satellite into space. It was called Sputnik – and it was the beginning of the space age.
It was just the size of a basketball and weighed a mere 183 pounds, but it changed everything. Sputnik sent shockwaves across the United States. We became alarmed that our educational system was not strong enough in math, science, engineering, and technology. And we were deeply concerned at the prospect of "the Russians" having an advantage over us in space. Thus began the space race.
Five years later, in 1962, President Kennedy would set as a national goal going "to the moon in this decade." With youthful ambition, he said that we would do that and . . . "other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." It was an exciting venture, and a heady time when nothing seemed impossible.
All this came to mind when I read, just three weeks ago, a wonderful story in the Oregonian, the Portland newspaper where my sister works. It seems that a third-grade teacher asked that two ratty old green chalkboards be removed from the wall of her classroom. When they were taken down, they found an old-fashioned blackboard underneath, one with those lines that guide you in forming capital and lower-case letters. A lesson was written on it in chalk. It was about a mission to space, and it was written in May 1969, less than twelve years after Sputnik.
In perfect teacher penmanship it said, "Apollo 10 is on the way to the moon. It has three astronauts on board. They will look closely at the moon. They will splash down on Sunday."
Since then, numerous parents, teachers, and young kids have visited Room 125 in that Oregon elementary school to see the chalkboard – and all have responded with a kind of awe.
Many adults recalled where they were when the next Apollo mission, Apollo 11, landed on the moon two months later in 1969, and Neil Armstrong took one "one giant leap for mankind."
The discovery of the blackboard provided an opportunity to teach kids in the school about the space program; they watched a video and were thrilled to hear Neil Armstrong describe what he saw from the surface of the moon.
While still deadly dangerous and fiendishly complex, space travel today – the space shuttle, for example – doesn’t inspire the same kind of awe that it did fifty – or even forty – years ago.
But there will always be a special place in the human imagination for those adventurers who "boldly go where no one has gone before. And there will always be a special place in the human heart for such poignant time-capsules as a chalk board bearing a message from the past.
Peter Gilbert is executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council.