Historic Highlights: Illinois residents were glued to TV for moon landing

On the evening of July 20, 1969, an estimated 650 million people worldwide watched televised coverage of the first moon landing. Plenty of people in Illinois joined in.

On that historic Sunday night, the streets of many communities were empty as residents were glued to their television sets, causing a severe drop in attendance at theaters, concerts and dance clubs. Even church services ended early so parishioners could get home to watch.

In Alton, the Telegraph reported that “area streets and highways, usually swarming with Sunday afternoon pleasure seekers, were mute witness” to the excitement of the lunar landing. It created an unusual scene on a seasonable summer day when temperatures reached a moderate 88 degrees.

Viewers of the landing reacted with a mix of awe, wonder and fear. “It’s something wonderful and unbelievable,” said one Decatur woman to the Daily Review. She was also well aware of the many unknowns in the flight. “I’m still worried and I hope they get back,” she added.

A Jacksonville motor repairman told the Daily Journal that he “was kind of nervous. I didn’t think the moon’s gravity pull was like that.”

“I thought for sure [Neil Armstrong] was going to sink in,” said a teenage Jacksonville resident. “It was a relief [when he didn’t].”

One 11-year-old in Decatur didn’t think she wanted to go to the moon herself. “Too scary,” she said.

In the Quad Cities, the manager of a Moline shopping center told the Dispatch that the center “usually does a large Sunday business but didn’t yesterday” because “everybody was watching TV.” He was unfazed, though, as he called the landing “truly fantastic.”

His choice of words was repeated across the city, as the Dispatch wrote that “fantastic” was “becoming a common word of description” for the moon landing. One man who lived on the appropriately named John F. Kennedy Drive in Moline added an adjective, calling it “utterly fantastic.”

Likewise, the Daily Review ran its local coverage under the same word: “Moon Walk ‘Fantastic,’ Decatur Residents Say.”

Similarly, the landing left Jacksonville residents, in the words of the Daily Journal, “agog.” Others used “multi-syllabic words to describe the mission,” like “wonderful,” “fantastic” and “marvelous.”

In Decatur, one woman said the landing made her “proud to be an American, proud of our country, and the courageous people who would undertake something like this when they didn’t know what the results would be.”

Another Decatur resident, in the words of the Daily Review, “thought the moon walk was an occasion worth getting the flag out for.” His choice was a woolen, 48-star, 9-by-18 Navy flag. He said that “the flying of the flag should mean a great deal to our country, with this historical event.”

Not everyone, however, was impressed. One Jacksonville teacher, who chose to remain anonymous, called the moon landing “excellent, a very brave thing” but believed the space program should be dropped in favor of “many things on Earth to be taken care of, like poverty and hunger.”

A Jacksonville barber was even more pointed. “I think it’s much better to give the money to the American people,” he told the Daily Journal, “if it would do something like cure cancer or if it was for some military purpose, to keep other countries from whipping us.

“But we can’t live on the moon,” lamented the barber. “It’s a heck of a lot of money spent silly.”

A Decatur woman was also critical. “I’m not against progress or anything like that,” the woman told the Daily Review, “but I do think they spend too much money on it.” The woman admitted that she did not watch the landing.

She was one of the few statewide who didn’t. Theater managers in Moline reported a “marked decrease compared to the usual Sunday attendance,” as did many nightclubs.

Moviegoers at the Starlight Drive-In in Alton paid more attention to the news coverage on their car radios than to the picture on the screen. The manager told the Telegraph “I could hear the car radios going all over the place so people could keep pace with the moon landing.”

Elsewhere in Alton, the manager of the private swimming pool at the River-Aire Swim Club told the Telegraph that “one-fifth of the normal crowd” showed up. The paper added that at “some of the area night spots,” the “dance bands played to empty chairs and walls.”

At the Southern Illinois University campus in Edwardsville, the Mississippi River Festival was in its inaugural season as a premier concert series, and would be wildly popular throughout the next decade. In July 1969, the festival had already proven a success – except on the night the Eagle landed.

The Alton Telegraph wrote that the St. Louis Symphony, a frequent performer in the MRF’s early years, performed to a “nominal crowd of 900,” much smaller than average that summer.

Officials did not seem surprised at the low turnout. A representative of the SIUE news service ruefully remarked, “I was surprised that there were that many there.”

As the symphony played, the moon “peeked occasionally through rain-threatening clouds” overhead, a seeming reminder of where the action really was that night. Television sets at the university center nearby were tuned to the landing, watched by concertgoers keeping an eye on Apollo 11.

In Bloomington, the Pantagraph was feeling patriotic. The first 2,000 readers who sent a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the paper received a free, 3-by-5-inch “U.S. Moon Flag Decal.”

The requests were to be filled “upon return to earth of Apollo 11.” The paper suggested that the decal could be placed on an automobile to “salute our astronauts.”

The lunar landing was also on the mind of Sweeny Brothers, a Bloomington business that dubbed itself “The Carpet Kings.” Since there had been “tremendous response to our carpet ad,” Sweeny was extending its hours and increasing its sales goals. As the company said, “We are shooting the moon.”

The Eagle landed on the surface of the moon at 4:17 p.m. local time, and Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” at 9:56. That allowed local worshipers to attend church, then hurry home to watch.

The pastor of the Calvary Southern Baptist Church in Alton said the landing “didn’t affect his evening service at all,” but conceded that he had “updated his evening service, which ended at 7:25 p.m.”

At the Alton Church of the Nazarene, the pastor described his congregation as “anxious and interested” about Apollo 11, but “people came to church just the same.”

Armstrong and fellow crew member Buzz Aldrin were on the moon for a total of 21 hours and 36 minutes, with 2 hours and 31 minutes spent outside the lunar module. They were the first of 12 men – all Americans – to walk on the lunar surface between 1969-72.

• Tom Emery is a freelance writer and historical researcher from Carlinville, Illinois. He may be reached at 217-710-8392 or ilcivilwar@yahoo.com.