Moon landing spans older frontier

On July 20, 1969, I was in the day room of a hospital I worked at in NYC, with all the staff and patients looking up at the ceiling TV. We silently watched as Neil Armstrong worked his way down the ladder to plant his foot on the lunar soil. At that moment one of our oldest patients, a frail lady of 103 sitting in her wheel chair quietly turned to me and said, "I remember when my father and brother hid my mother and me in the root cellar while they were fighting off the Indians surrounding our house."

I looked down at this women in awe and amazement, barely able to imagine her feelings as her mind spanned the enormous gulf between her childhood on the frontier and the new one she was seeing opening before her.

David Werdegar

Naperville