Nation says goodbye to moonwalker Neil Armstrong

  WASHINGTON -- The nation bid farewell Thursday to Neil Armstrong, the first man to take a giant leap onto the moon.

The pioneers of space, the powerful of the capital and the everyday public crowded into the Washington National Cathedral for a public interfaith memorial for the very private astronaut.

Armstrong, who died last month in Ohio at age 82, walked on the moon in July 1969.

"He's now slipped the bonds of Earth once again, but what a legacy he left," former Treasury Secretary John Snow told the gathering.

Apollo 11 crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, Mercury astronaut John Glenn, 18 other astronauts, three NASA chiefs, and about two dozen members of Congress were among the estimated 1,500 people that joined Armstrong's widow, Carol, and other family members in the cavernous cathedral.

Collins read a prayer tailored to Armstrong's accomplishments and humility. A moon rock that the Apollo 11 astronauts gave the church in 1974 is embedded in one of its stained glass windows.

"You have now shown once again the pathway to the stars," Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon said in a tribute to Armstrong. "As you soar through the heavens beyond even where eagles dare to go, you can now finally put out your hand and touch the face of God."

Cernan was followed by a slow and solemn version of "Fly Me to the Moon" by singer Diana Krall.

The service also included excerpts from a speech 50 years ago by John F. Kennedy in which he said America chose to send men to the moon by the end of the 1960s not because it was easy, but because it was hard. The scratchy recording of the young president said going to the moon was a goal that "will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone."

Shortly after that speech in 1961 at Rice University, Armstrong, not yet an astronaut but always a gifted engineer, was already working on how to land a spaceship on the moon, NASA administrator Charles Bolden recalled. Snow talked of the 12-year-old Armstrong who built a wind tunnel. But most of Armstrong's friends and colleagues spent time remembering the humble Armstrong. Snow called him a "regular guy" and "the most reluctant of heroes."

Bolden, a former astronaut, said Armstrong's humility and courage "lifted him above the stars."

"No one, but no one, could have accepted the responsibility of his remarkable accomplishment with more dignity and more grace than Neil Armstrong," Cernan said. "He embodied all that is good and all that is great about America."

Bolden read a letter from President Barack Obama saying, "the imprint he left on the surface of the moon is matched only by the extraordinary mark he left on ordinary Americans."

Armstrong commanded the historic landing of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the moon July 20, 1969. His first words after stepping onto the moon are etched in history books: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Armstrong insisted later that he had said "a" before man, but said he, too, couldn't hear it in the recording.

Armstrong and Aldrin spent nearly three hours walking on the lunar surface while Collins circled above the moon. In all, 12 American astronauts walked on the moon before the last moon mission in 1972.

Armstrong was a U.S. Navy aviator. He joined NASA's predecessor agency in 1955 as a civilian test pilot and later, as an astronaut, flew first in Gemini 8 in 1966. After the moon landing he spent a year in Washington as a top official at the space agency, but then he left NASA to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He later was chairman of two electronics companies, but mostly kept out of the public eye.

A private service was held earlier in suburban Cincinnati for Armstrong, who will be buried at sea.

In her homily Thursday, the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop for Washington, talked of how Armstrong sought to encourage young people to do even more, go even further.

Among the crowd in the cathedral was 14-year-old Shane DiGiovanna of Cincinnati, a young man who has spent his life grappling with an incurable skin disease and hearing loss. Shane idolized Armstrong and had always wanted to meet the first man on the moon, but it never happened.

But the eighth-grader met Cernan and former Apollo 13 commander James Lovell when they recently announced a memorial fund named for Armstrong at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital Medical Center, where Shane has been treated.

The Armstrong family invited Shane to join them at the Washington memorial service, something Shane called a "really big honor."

Just as Armstrong was working on the lunar lander after the Kennedy speech, Shane said he is now working on drawings of a lander for Mars. He wants to be an aerospace engineer.

"I'm hoping," Shane said, "to definitely contribute a lot to the next step."

(Copyright ©2012 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) Get more Local »

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Texas marks 175th anniversary of becoming nation

  LA PORTE, TX -- As significant battles go, the size of the armies involved in the decisive clash that allowed Texas to become its own nation 175 years ago this week was relatively modest. More compelling was the meager duration of the fighting at San Jacinto -- just 18 minutes.

But in true Texas fashion, the monument that marks the short battle is 536 feet tall -- the world's tallest war memorial.

To some historians, the April 21, 1836, engagement between the ragtag 900-man Texian army and the more formally trained 1,300-man Mexican army is a metaphor for the Lone Star State.

"We'll make something big out of something small," says Larry Spasic, president of the San Jacinto Museum of History Association, peering through a narrow rectangular window near the top of the San Jacinto Monument that marks the battlefield.

The climax of the Texas Revolution immediately cost Mexico nearly 1 million acres. The Republic of Texas was annexed by the United States about a decade later and an ensuing border dispute became the U.S.-Mexico War in 1846. In the context of history, the Texians' victory is seen as ultimately paving the way for the westward expansion of the United States, fulfilling the nation's Manifest Destiny.

As they have for generations, Texans will gather Thursday, a state holiday, to mark the anniversary at the battleground, a state park just east of Houston and along the Houston Ship Channel. On the site, Gen. Sam Houston's forces surprised Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and his Mexican soldiers who were taking a late afternoon siesta, and quickly routed them. A re-enactment this weekend drew thousands of spectators.

Historians see the annual celebrations now as a monument to efforts by boosters and lawmakers building up Texas during the progressive era of the early 20th century, promoting the state as a place for heroes and downplaying its participation on the losing side in the U.S. Civil War, which this year marks a milestone anniversary, No. 150.

"We wanted a story of winners and San Jacinto was a battle where it was clear cut, ain't no question about it, by God the Texans kicked some ass," said Rick McCaslin, history department chair at the University of North Texas. "They gave us a usable history, one that makes us feel good about ourselves, one that embraces a winning legacy.

"These people were geniuses."

To this day, Texas school children learn to celebrate San Jacinto and the Alamo, perpetuating the Texas identity.

"It works, doesn't it?" McCaslin said. "Go overseas and people want to know how many oil wells you own, how many cattle you run and how come you're not wearing boots. And that Davy Crockett, wasn't he something? But don't remind them he wasn't from Texas."

State historian Light Cummings, a history professor at Austin College in Sherman, agrees Texans respond more to celebrating the Texas Revolution, their attachment and love for the state, and have little interest in the Civil War or its impact on Texas.

"Texas today is no longer a southern state in the classic sense," he said. "We are urban and industrial, and many Texans of our era do not descend from those who fought the Civil War on the southern side."

The San Jacinto Monument, the limestone-faced obelisk built intentionally about a dozen feet taller than its look-alike Washington Monument in the nation's capital, is a tribute to the boosterism of Tennessee-born Jesse Jones, whose family moved to Texas in the late 1800s and who gained fame in Houston as a banker, entrepreneur, developer and member of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration.

"He didn't want the importance of this site forgotten," Spasic said. "This was a remarkable effort. It fits Texas history."

Construction of the monument put an exclamation point on the Texas centennial in 1936 and promotional era that initiated the 20th century.

Its foundation was a unique engineering feat for the time, requiring a 57-hour continuous concrete pour of 100 cubic yards per hour. The foundation floor is 15 feet at its thickest point and tapers to 5 feet. Footprints from workers' boots in the wet concrete remain permanently etched on the surface of the floor in the basement beneath the structure. Exhibit halls directly above the foundation and surrounding the obelisk eventually became the museum and a library.

Head librarian Lisa Struthers has 24,000 volumes, including manuscripts dating back to 1502. Among items is an 1836 folding map belonging to Stephen F. Austin that shows the Nueces River as Texas' southern boundary; a letter from one of Sam Houston's soldiers, written two days after San Jacinto and providing an eyewitness account of the battle; and an 1836 letter from the imprisoned Santa Anna thanking the Texas army for treating him well.

"My friends," he wrote. "I have been a witness to your courage on the field of battle."

In the adjoining museum, Liz Appleby, curator of the monument's San Jacinto Museum of History, has 18,000 items in her self-described "odd but diverse collection."

"We ended up being Texas' basement," she laughed.

Tight exhibit space allows only less than 1 percent of all the artifacts to be displayed in the museum at any one time. Her treasures include everything from pre-Columbian art and a wax bust of Sam Houston sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, the man responsible for Mount Rushmore, to a knife carried by Crockett; a rocking chair belonging to Lorenzo de Zavala, the Texas Republic's first vice president; and a nutcracker that belonged to Texas patriot Jose Antonio Navarro.

"It's interesting what people treasure," she said, describing how personal items that clearly meant something were passed down by "the son of a son of a son" before winding up at the museum.

Spasic said he hopes monument visitors on the anniversaries and also at other times of the year get a perspective of time and Texas, "understanding there is more to lives than here and now."

"There is a past, and future," he said. "This is Texas what we're talking about. I think Texas is special, to some extent just because we say so, but also because we believe it. When you leave Texas, you feel it, and when you come back, you know it.

"There is something about a state of mind that reflects Texas that is uniquely ours."

(Copyright ©2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) 

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