A glance at a few Saturday pages
There wasn’t quite as much to see out there in the Newseum today, regarding Apollo 11 anniversary fronts. Most papers are probably planning to run big treatments on Sunday or Monday, the actual anniversary of the landing and first moonwalk.
It’s a busy weekend in Dayton, Ohio, though. Not only is the state the home of the Wright Brothers as well as Neil Armstrong, but also it’s hosting the giant Dayton Air Show today and Sunday.
Friday, Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin attended the National Aviation Hall of Fame President’s Dinner. Daily News staffer Ron Alvey got lede art out of it:
The story about the event is a bit brief for our tastes. Find it here.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Gazette wrote about Rockwell Collins, a local company that created the communications system used by the Apollo program:
The Gazette’s Dave DeWitte reports:
[Rod Blocksome, a senior engineer and unofficial Rockwell Collins historian] says astronauts visited Collins Radio periodically to boost morale. They included Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Edward White, who later died in the Apollo 1 fire at Cape Kennedy.
Meeting the young astronauts made the work more meaningful to some employees and, in some cases, may have been more powerful than intended. Blocksome’s heard more than once that a small number of women employees with sons the age of the astronauts asked to be taken off the Apollo program after meeting them, possibly wanting to distance themselves from the fate of the astronauts.
The Repository of Canton, Ohio, talked with a local man who worked as a quality control technical writer for a plant in Louisiana that manufactured the first stage of the Saturn V rockets that put Apollo spacecraft into orbit:
The Repository has also posted its front page from the day after the moon landing. Dowload the PDF here.
For the past two days, the Houston Chronicle has anchored its daily look back on Apollo 11 in the left two columns:
Today, the Chronicle focused on prominent local people and their memories of Apollo 11. Buried way deep in todays’ story was this little gem:
BRENT SPINER, actor best known for Star Trek: The Next Generation
In 1969, before Brent Spiner traveled through space on the Starship Enterprise, he was making his professional theater debut in the chorus of a Houston musical.
That July, the Bellaire High School grad came down with mononucleosis and took a hiatus from rehearsals. When the lunar module landed, Spiner’s temperature was pushing 105.
“I was in bed and then kind of woke up in a delirium,” he said. “The television was on and Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon. I watched it for a few minutes and then sunk back into unconsciousness.”
For all Spiner knew, the moonwalk could have been a fever dream.
“I wasn’t sure I had seen what I had actually seen,” he said. “It was about two days later that I finally found out it had happened.”
Spiner, now 60, was too sick to appreciate the momentousness of the occasion; his pain was more pressing at the time.
“Tears did come to my eyes,” he said, “but mostly because my throat was so sore.”
Find today’s installment here.
Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s talk a little about that famous footprint photo Houston used at the top of its package.
For starters, the Chronicle used it upside-down. We’re not sure why:
Now, it’s a great shot. We’ve seen it used a lot this week and we expect we’ll see it a lot over the next two or three days. If you use it, keep a few things in mind:
1. It’s not Neil Armstrong’s footprint. It’s actually Buzz Aldrin’s.
2. It wasn’t the first footprint on the moon. In fact, Buzz shot this right after Neil took the famous photo of Buzz saluting the flag — a full hour or so after Neil took his “one small step.”
3. It’s one of a series of shots Buzz took to help gauge how far into the soil the astronauts’ boots were sinking.
Holding the camera in his hands — rather than putting it into his chest-mounted bracket — Buzz shot this photo of pristine lunar soil (click any of these for a larger view):
Then, he made one slow, deliberate, footprint into that same area and made two exposures of it:
The one on the right is the one you see most often, although the one on the left was used on the front of the Newport News Daily Press on Thursday and USA Today on Friday.
And you usually see these cropped. These are the full frames.
Then, Buzz tried to get a picture that included his boot. He kind of missed on the first try. This second one, though, is a photo you’ve seen before:
You can read frame-by-frame descriptions of every exposure on every roll of film shot on the moon by Apollo 11 here.
The Enterprise of Brockton, Mass., ran a centerpiece story about what local libraries are doing to observe the anniversary:
We love it when folks find a local angle to a story like this. Good going, Brockton.
Next is a series of three papers that chose the famous old photo of Buzz Aldrin peering at his wrist-mounted checklist — perhaps one of the most-used photos of all time.
We really wish folks would stop using this picture. It’s been altered from the original shot.
We have to admit, though, the Daily News of Bangor, Maine, used it really well today:
And we should also point out that this entire package is labeled as a “photoillustration” by staffer Eric Zelz. Which kind of gets them off the hook for using that lede photo.
We’re seeing a lot of nice touches here: The little lunar module shot dropped into the top of the text box. The gold trim around the text box and the package itself. The little vignetted photos across the bottom.
We’d suggest two minor changes. First, we find the multicolored gradient running across the top of the bottom rail a little distracting. That would work better as a simple transition from photo to black box, we think.
Second, the label across the top of the package is a little crowded. And it’s crowded because the designer used a photo of Earth as the zero in “40.” Take out the Earth, reduce the size of that label a bit and you’ll reduce the minor logjam up there.
The story is a collection of memories from local folks. Find it here.
The Herald of Everett, Wash., used that same lead art but in a much more straightforward way:
In her story, reporter Gale Fiege talked to local residents and even a few who worked on building components for the rocket. It’s a shame Everett didn’t dig into its archives to find a photo of that work from 40 years ago instead.
And the black sky that some anonymous NASA public relations staffer added to the original photo wasn’t enough for the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass. So they simply added more sky, extending the photo even taller:
The Courier of Findlay, Ohio, displayed a three-column photo and an Associated Press story about the nation’s space priorities.
There’s nothing wrong with that. We found their choice of art a bit odd, though:
That’s an AP shot of a piece of rocket-shaped playground equipment at Moon Park, Moon, Pa. It’s a different choice than most papers are making, so that’s good. But perhaps a little too different.
And speaking of different, here is the page topper from today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer:
It’s awfully hard to read that at 400 pixels wide, so click for a much, much larger view of the photo, the text on the right and the little running chart below.
Sunday, the little spacecraft icon be further along on its path to the moon. And on Monday’s front, we expect the Plain Dealer will show a little lunar module landing on that moon icon.
Very interesting idea.
We like today’s Plain Dealer a lot, in fact. We had considered putting together a collection of Walter Cronkite front pages but found the overall selection so disappointing today — so few caught our eye as being creative or different — that we pretty much gave up on it.
Today’s Plain Dealer was one of the best, though:
We also liked this one from the San Jose Mercury News:
You see what we mean, right? Both of those are quite nice. But both are very similar.
The Orange County Register also used a black-and-white shot but faded the background and used a headline that we found appealing:
That’s exactly the way we’d like to remember Cronkite. In that pose, at that desk. And with that epitaph: History’s Narrator. Nice.
We’ll leave you today with this one — a number of papers used this AP file photo of a very relaxed Cronkite just before his final Evening News broadcast in 1981. Hardly anyone ran it as large — or with as big a headline — as did his hometown paper, the News-Press of St. Joseph, Mo.:
Nicely done, News-Press.
And that’s the way it is…
—
UPDATE
Completely forgot to mention…
Tonight is the 40th anniversary of the incident in which Sen. Ted Kennedy drove a car off a bridget on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., killing a woman who had worked in his late brother’s presidential campaign. Because of the poor way Kennedy handled the incident, most political scientists consider it the single biggest reason Ted Kennedy never became president.
It’s a huge date in the history of U.S. politics, up there with the Watergate break-in and Bill Clinton’s hookup with Monica Lewinsky.
But no paper we could find put the anniversary of Chappaquiddick on their cover today. Not the Boston Globe, not the Cape Cod Times. No one.
Very interesting…