These Moon Landing Anniversary promotions have gone too far!

[difalkner]

I had just turned 15 two days before and had been at church camp, got back an hour before the landing. On Thursday before I left for camp I had been porting and polishing the heads on my '65 Mustang and managed to get cast iron in my eye but didn't realize it. Over the weekend it got worse and worse, certainly couldn't wear my contacts and am blind without them.

When I got home we geared up for the landing. I remember sitting about 3' from the TV and sort of watching Neil Armstrong and hearing his words. It was spectacular! The next day I had to have (minor) surgery to remove the now rusting cast iron but all the doctor could talk about was the landing. I'll never forget it!

David

[5th Element]

Originally Posted by tbeltrans

What I remember about the moon landing, other than the landing itself, is … color tv. Our neighbor, the plumber, was the first in our neighborhood to have a color TV and we got to see the moon landing on it.

My grandparents were watching Perry Como in color over a dozen years before that. It may have been after the moon landing before my mom could afford one, though.

[BluesKing777]

Originally Posted by personatech

I was 12 at the time. Can't remember if the set was color or B&W, but since the transmission from the moon was B&W it didn't really matter.

For the record, I'm still pissed that we haven't made it to Mars yet. Back in '69, a lot of us spaceheads were certain we'd have a Mars colony by 1999. Oh well...

Nobody really wants to go to Mars after they left poor Matt Damon there!


BluesKing777.

[stringjunky]

Originally Posted by JayBee1404

When Neil Armstrong took his first ‘small step’ on the moon, and it was on TV, I was playing in a band at a club near Doncaster, South Yorkshire. There were seven people in the club that night, of which four were the band and one was the bartender.

We played until the audience of two left for home, about 10pm. The guy wouldn’t pay us because we ‘hadn’t drawn a crowd’!

Well, you do know three's a crowd,

[personatech]

Originally Posted by tbeltrans

Sorry to hear that you are still pissed of we have not made it to Mars yet. That something you will likely never be able to resolve, and will therefore be completely dependent on somebody else to accomplish for you. Better to let it go and be concerned about that which you can control.

Good point - maybe "pissed" was too strong a term. After all, I survived the Beatles breaking up just fine, and with age comes the realization that there's far more to life than the realization of boyhood dreams.

Perhaps the word "disappointed" is better. It was doable, considering what we accomplished in just 10 short years, and that we haven't really had similar lofty goals since then is a bit disconcerting.

[tbeltrans]

Originally Posted by 5th Element

My grandparents were watching Perry Como in color over a dozen years before that. It may have been after the moon landing before my mom could afford one, though.

So your grandparents were watching color tv prior to 1957 (1969 - 12). I can't prove or disprove that. However, my first memories of tv were those big floor standing boxes with a little bw picture tube. I was born in 1953 and my recollection would probably be from 1958 or so. Anything I have seen showing tv from that time period, shows the kind of tv I remember.

Color tv was available in the mid 60s, as I recall, but expensive at the time. According to Wikipedia's "History of Television:

Although all-electronic color was introduced in the U.S. in 1953,[117] high prices and the scarcity of color programming greatly slowed its acceptance in the marketplace. The first national color broadcast (the 1954 Tournament of Roses Parade) occurred on January 1, 1954, but during the following ten years most network broadcasts, and nearly all local programming, continued to be in black-and-white. It was not until the mid-1960s that color sets started selling in large numbers, due in part to the color transition of 1965 in which it was announced that over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color that fall. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later. In 1972, the last holdout among daytime network programs converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season.

...which certainly supports the claim of color tv being in existence in the 1950s.


My dad made a good income, but with a lot of kids, there wasn't much money to go around. The neighbor was a plumber and made a decent wage and had only two kids, so they had more "toys" than many in the neighborhood. It was a lower-middle class neighborhood, so nobody was destitute. Most people just had one tv, and that was bw until the cost of a color tv came down a few years later.

I didn't go over to their house because they didn't have any kids my age, so the only time I saw their tv was when everybody went to their house for the moon landing. So, as another poster pointed out, the color tv didn't matter for the moon landing itself, but everything else was in color, and it was the first time I saw that. This is the reason I remember that tv so well - two major events at the same time for me.

For those who either weren't old enough to appreciate that, or were too young or not yet born, my recollection probably does seem strange.

What is even more strange to me is that I am now finding myself in that position of remembering something that was a big deal to me, and others' response would be "so what" or "it doesn't matter", because they were not in a position for whatever reason to appreciate the event in the same way. I can still remember being young enough to react that way when some other old fart had a recollection in his or her life that might have seemed mundane to me.

I know there were people alive during my lifetime who experienced their first telephone or electricity or automobile, though all of those were around before I was born, and were therefore mundane to me. Now it is my turn in the barrel, so to speak. I wonder if there has been any music event in folks' lives who were born, say, in the 1980s or later, that had the impact of seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show - and on an analog bw tv, no less.

I have read posts from others here around my age that felt that same impact at the same time, so I know I am not completely alone in that experience. We also experienced color tv for the first time, computers for the first time, and a number of things that are commonplace today.

Those who grew up with these things simply can't relate to a world in which these did not exist, just as I couldn't relate to a world in which the telephone, automobile, air travel, and telephones didn't exist. The current generation will experience similar when they reach my age.

Tony

[5th Element]

Originally Posted by tbeltrans

So your grandparents were watching color tv prior to 1957 (1969 - 12). I can't prove or disprove that. However, my first memories of tv were those big floor standing boxes with a little bw picture tube. I was born in 1953 and my recollection would probably be from 1958 or so. Anything I have seen showing tv from that time period, shows the kind of tv I remember.

I was born in '54 and have some memories going back to 18 months old (not that I remember what I had for lunch yesterday). I remember watching Perry Como in color when I was about three. My grandparents were big fans. Color TV was rare then, and not many shows were in color. We'd go over there some times just to watch. We moved away when I was 3-1/2, so that dates it pretty accurately.

[GCWaters]

Como was apparently broadcast in color in ‘56, one of the first shows to do so...


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perr...nd_radio_shows

[tbeltrans]

Originally Posted by 5th Element

I was born in '54 and have some memories going back to 18 months old (not that I remember what I had for lunch yesterday). I remember watching Perry Como in color when I was about three. My grandparents were big fans. Color TV was rare then, and not many shows were in color. We'd go over there some times just to watch. We moved away when I was 3-1/2, so that dates it pretty accurately.

That is the coolest thing! Your grandparents were way ahead of their time.

According to the article I cited, the two reasons for color tv becoming more common in the 60s were cost and standardization of the color broadcast. But, as I mentioned seeing in the article, like you mentioned, color tv was around well before then.

Tony

[TBman]

I remember watching game shows as a kid and almost every time I watched "Let's Make A Deal" one of the big prizes that everyone ohh'd and ahh'd over was a console color tv.

For you younger people, a television set used to be a big piece of living room or family room furniture. Many had doors that covered the screen when it wasn't in use also.

Sometimes a TV console came bundled with a turn table stereo system. Now TV's are almost like a piece of paper you just stick on a wall somewhere,

[5th Element]

Originally Posted by tbeltrans

That is the coolest thing! Your grandparents were way ahead of their time.

According to the article I cited, the two reasons for color tv becoming more common in the 60s were cost and standardization of the color broadcast. But, as I mentioned seeing in the article, like you mentioned, color tv was around well before then.

It's odd as my grandparents weren't particularly well to do, and color was a rarity. The cool thing was that that TV brought a lot of music into homes, color or not. As a young child, it was a primary way of seeing musicians perform. I never did acquire the elder generations appreciation of Como, Lawrence Welk, etc. However, by the late '60s, then-contemporary music — stuff I was into — was showing up more and more with shows like Midnight Special, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, the Smothers Brothers, and others. Landing on the moon was cool too, I watched that.

[cmac]

Originally Posted by personatech

https://www.takamine.com/ltd2019



Actually, it looks pretty sweet, for what it is. Still, I think I'd rather have a '69...

Listed at £2500 in the UK, which seems very expensive for what it is. Also I assume it looks better in the flesh than in the photos, because the grey finish in the photos makes it look like it's made of plastic. (And I don't like sad-face guitars with downturned bridges!)

I have the Takamine limited edition for 2000, and I really like the wood inlay on the neck and around the soundhole. But for me they have just gone too far with this one.

[tbeltrans]

Originally Posted by 5th Element

It's odd as my grandparents weren't particularly well to do, and color was a rarity. The cool thing was that that TV brought a lot of music into homes, color or not. As a young child, it was a primary way of seeing musicians perform. I never did acquire the elder generations appreciation of Como, Lawrence Welk, etc. However, by the late '60s, then-contemporary music — stuff I was into — was showing up more and more with shows like Midnight Special, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, the Smothers Brothers, and others. Landing on the moon was cool too, I watched that.

In addition to those, we had Thaxton's Hop and a bunch of others that were styled after Dick Clark's American Bandstand, which were the Top 40 shows. I never got into the dancing myself. It always looked like the people just wiggled at each other, rather than interacting as in more formal dance.

Tony

[rstaight]

I remember watching the lunar landing. I was 10 years old. It was amazing.

I'm not the least upset we don't have a colony on Mars. My big question is, Where the heck is my jet pack?

[RJVB]

Originally Posted by BluesKing777

Nobody really wants to go to Mars after they left poor Matt Damon there!

Wasn't Sharon Stone killed there too?

I didn't even realise this was 50 years ago (somehow I had the year down as '67). Maybe Faith guitars will do a promo on their Blood Moon models?