Man on the Moon!

Oh, boy!

That was Walter Cronkite's reaction to the landing 40 years ago July 20. No doubt it was the reaction of all of us who were lucky enough to live through and experience the apex of mankind's achievements to date.

I'm sure it was my Dad's reaction as well. On that Sunday evening, sometime after the actual landing and before Neil Armstrong's journey down the ladder to the surface, Dad came in from the farm early.

Dad never came in from the farm early. If us kids didn't know it already from Walter Cronkite and CBS News, we knew it was a momentous occasion just from Dad's behavior.

I don't recall a lot of our family's banter or interactions on that evening, probably because I was the "space nut" of the family and so totally engrossed in what was happening that I simply tuned out everything except the foggy black and white images coming from a quarter million miles away. (With respect, Tom was a space fan as well.)

What I do remember is my favorite newscaster's complete loss for words that afternoon when the lunar module settled down on the surface of another planet. I am deeply saddened that Cronkite didn't quite make it to the 40th anniversary; I would have loved to hear his reminisces about this golden age of spaceflight, which coincidentally was also the pinnacle of his own career.

Then, in the evening, Armstrong made his famous "giant leap for mankind" speech and we kids were enraptured by the pictures, by the commentary, by the concept: Man on the moon!

As the decades have rolled on (the years keep comin' and they don't stop comin', to borrow from Smash Mouth), I have come to see man on the moon not only as the greatest achievement of mankind to date, but also as a kind of benchmark of the "American Way" that, sadly, we seem to have strayed from. What I mean is: Kennedy gave us a vision to do the unthinkable in a very short period of time, and guess what? We did it. We did what we said we would do.

I hope that we re-learn this fundamental aspect of the American Way, and well before another 40 years passes.