Monthly Archives: July 2009

False Alarm

Ok, I could have sworn I wrote about the lunar landing and walk, but it seems like I didn’t find it worthy of documenting.

Diary entry from July 16, 1969

I suppose what I remembered writing about was four days earlier when Apollo 11 took off from Earth:

Diary entry from July 16, 1969

Wed July 16 1967

Dear Diary,
What next! The moon now, mars next? Saw the flight of Appolo [sic] 11.

Penny and I had a Seance to day & we brought back Hitler & Lenin we think. We didn’t see D.S [Dark Shadows] today. Saw Michel J. Burke! Didn’t read Dracula to-day.

Penny and I were honestly not budding skin-heads. We’d just learned about Lenin and Communism in school and confused him with Hitler who we’d heard might not be dead. We wanted to try to bring him back to see if he really was dead. I guess he was. I think the explanation needs its own post. (oh, and the v with two dots over it was my secret vampire symbol.) Ok — I was a little weird at 13.

Man walks on the Moon! Dona documents it!

I remember 40 years ago today. Not necessarily because I cared that the USA had put men on the moon, but because I documented it in my diary. I’d been given a leather diary with a lock and key for Christmas the year before and sporadically wrote bits and pieces of my life in it.  I know that diary is somewhere in this house, but it is not with my journals, so I cannot write exactly what I wrote 40 years ago, but I remember writing it and thinking that someday I’d look back on what I wrote and be interested.

The mere fact that I wrote it for the future kind of ruined it. Man walking on the Moon was either too much for my small brain to handle, or too little for my nearly 13 year old brain to bother with.

Damn. Having my actual words would make this a far better post.

Never mind. Maybe I’ll find the diary in time for the 50th anniversary.

Update: Found the diary.

Happy 100th Birthday Frances Lide

Cue music from The Writer’s Almanac and imagine Garrison Keiller reading this:

Today is the 100th birthday of journalist Frances Marie Lide, born in South Carolina (1909). Frances and her younger sister, Dora, were raised by their mother after their father left. Frances attended Converse College for a year before deciding she wanted to work for newspapers. She found a job with The Greenville Piedmont and stayed with them for 3 years writing stories about churches and schools.

After The Greenville Piedmont she worked as telegraph and society editor for The Greenwood Index-Journal.

Frances wanted more out of her life and career so she saved up $200, packed her belongings  and took a train to Washington DC to find work there.

Despite having her luggage stolen when she arrived at Union Station, Frances inquired at several newspapers, but no one had a job. She didn’t give up, however and returned to one of the newspapers (The Washington Evening Star) where she was hired to cover Eleanor Roosevelt’s press conferences. Frances worked for The Washington Evening Star covering first ladies’ press conferences and other topics from 1935 through her retirement in 1970.

Continue reading Happy 100th Birthday Frances Lide