Carrot Sticks and Peppermint and the Man on the Moon

On the night of the moon landing, I was not quite old enough for preschool. What I remember mostly involves the snacks I was fed to keep me quiet.

We had a good-sized family gathering in a small apartment in Santa Monica. I watched with the members of my family who had left the rough country of north Missouri to follow the siren call of the space race.

As I recall, the TV was set up with big rabbit ears, tilted and calibrated just so, in front of a long wall of louvered windows. I remember six adults there — my parents, and my aunts and uncles. They settled in with five tiny toddlers to watch a man walk on the moon.

I doubt that anyone thought of it at the time, but the moment was one of those pivot points, like a baptism or a graduation, in which one way of life is receding and another is taking its place.

My family had landed in California as the result of a sweeping Great Society program born of the paranoia that America didn’t have enough engineers to build the missiles we needed.

Really, the role of Sputnik in the exodus from states like Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma is underappreciated today.

Any country boy in the early ’60s who showed a talent for math or science was sucked into a machine that educated him, dressed him up in a white shirt and deposited him into a job in aerospace, engineering or computer science. And the place to go for those jobs was Southern California.

By 1969, the most numerate men in my family had all been sucked into that machine.

One of those men was my father, who had recently dropped out of engineering school at the University of Missouri. Within a few years, he would be working for the biggest private engineering company in the world, selling nuclear power technology to developing East Asian countries. His brother was an engineer, too, who founded his own company.

My mother’s brother was finishing his doctoral work in computer science at UCLA. He was something of a pioneer; if you’ve ever studied one of the foundational programming languages, there’s a good chance you used one of his textbooks.

His father, back in Missouri, had only gone to school through the eighth grade.

All three of those young technocrats came from families who had settled in Missouri long before the Civil War. By the early 1960s, the lives and values of those families weren’t all that different from those of the ancestors who had first farmed that land.

Strange to think that my mother turned 23 the week of the moon landing, and her fifth wedding anniversary was just a few days away. It strikes me as idyllic, that night, for these young couples from Missouri. I doubt that these people knew that they would not be gathering like this for much longer.

Within five years, two of those couples, freed from the constraints of the culture that produced them, would divorce. Their families would scatter. My mother and I returned to Missouri, to a society that was not ready to accept divorced women or to enforce child support orders.

For the children who watched the moon landing that night, it seemed that our parents were so strange and serious. I remember the beeping. Mostly I remember that the adults were working really hard to keep us quiet. One of my aunts tried to pacify us with a pack of gum.

She handed out sticks of Wrigley’s with strict warnings not to swallow it.

I had never had gum before. One of my younger cousins — she might have been 2 — well, she swallowed it and started crying because she thought it was going to kill her.

Since the gum was a complete failure, my aunt decided to give us carrot sticks instead. With that first bite of carrot, I swallowed my own gum, and I proceeded to go around the room and ask everyone if it was going to kill me, too.

My aunt, she worked so hard to keep us quiet, I believe she missed the moon landing altogether.

It’s funny, the things you remember. The gum. The carrot sticks. The fear that these strange snacks are going to kill you. The beeping that put us all on edge. Just goes to show that it was a night to remember, even for the tiniest of toddlers.