It took Armstrong and Aldrin six hours to actually set foot on the moon. It was late, but we tried to stay up long enough to actually see it and I somewhat remember seeing it, although it's not clear that I actually did, because I've seen the footage many times later and memory is a tricky thing.
I started kindergarten a few weeks after Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins made their journey. What I remember is, at least at Jackson Elementary School in Appleton, astronauts were nifty and cool and all of my fellow kindergartners, boys and girls, wanted to be one. As a group we went about 0/25 on that aspiration.
I also remember Woodstock, or at least watching reports of it on the CBS Evening News. My dad didn't like it much.
Do you remember watching the moon landing?
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The 1960s were some amazing years for the nation. So much happened so quickly as the "boomer" generation began to come of age. A post-war generation where general prosperity was the rule rather than the exception. That was a decade that saw the birth of mass media coverage of the great social events like civil rights protests, the war in Vietnam (with increasingly less censorship and support for the state), the anti-war protests, and of course the space race.
My introduction to NASA must have come around 1962 (6th grade I think) when our elementary school put up a cardboard mock-up of the Mercury capsule and we could crawl in and see what it looked like from the astronaut's point of view.
Back then they would roll in the TV's so we could watch the televised launches since it was a pretty big deal. The two broadcasters who stood out for me during those years were Jules Bergman (ABC) and Walter Cronkite (CBS). One went into the details of the mission, the other gave a measure of gravitas. We caught the moon landing at home and watched most of the night as Neil and Buzz ventured out into that a barren moonscape. The excitement of those early days died off pretty quickly once Apollo 11 made it home. The build-up for the landing was so great it was as if 11 was the end, not just a significant milestone.
Woodstock is a whole other story. I had to work that weekend at W.T.Grant, and it was rainy, so when a friend said let's head over to see if we can get in, I took a pass. By the time he left, the roads were already clogged up and I don't think he made it either.
I was 11, and my parents got my brother and sister and me out of bed to watch on the 18" b/w TV (that sat in a 25 pound "console"). It was amazing and exciting.
My parents didn't wake us up for Woodstock coverage.
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