• Watching the lift off of Apollo 11, live. Yup. We lived in Tampa, Florida. My father, the fighter pilot, drove the family out to the Cape that morning -- well, towards the cape. You couldn't get very close. Man, was it crowded! Cars everywhere, pulling off into the grass alongside the highway. The rocket appeared as a distant white stick on the horizon. Coleman coolers, stationwagons, hot morning weather, cameras and binoculars etch my memory as much as the bizarre sight of that mysterious (to a 5 year old!) rocket blazing into the sky and disappearing behind the clouds as it arched away from us towards its orbital trajectory. The noise, an impressive, dull rumble, hit us long after the world's first moon landers had raced into the sky aboard the Saturn V moon rocket.
  
  
• Sending Live Mice up in Estes Model Rockets. Do I really need to say more?
  
  
• My Elvis Sighting. In fact, yes, I really did see Elvis! Around the same time-frame Apollo 11 was lifting off, my mother whisked us away one day to the International Inn down the road from our house. We gathered with a bunch of young girls and press photographers by the back door of the hotel, then out came this handsome man dressed in a fancy white outfit. He was shielding his eyes from the flash bulbs popping off. Girls shrieked. My mother approached him and said, "Elvis you're a living doll!". He got into a limousine and off he went. I was confused.Who is this man and why does he reduce my mother and all these girls to jello? Years later while listening to my radio and working in my garage, the radio DJ interrupted the music and said, "The King is dead." Again, I was confused. (I was about 11 years old) I walked inside, asked my mother "What King? I thought we had a president?" Mom's mood was noticeably sullen. She told me it was Elvis that was the King of Rock and Roll, and he had died.
  
  
• The Cincinnati Reds (and their groupies) Go Swimming. One day the famed baseball team stayed at the International Inn in Tampa, and took over the place. While my mother was playing tennis with catcher Johnny Bench, my friends and I were swimming at the hotel's pool. The Reds and their girls were very playful. The girls would dive into the water and their bikini tops would peel off. They'd swim around looking for the tops, all the while my friends and I were enjoying the underwater show thanks to our swim masks. We saw our first topless ladies.
  
  
• Watching President Richard Nixon Resign. Oh, so this is the president? I was young enough to grasp that, of course, but at first clueless as to why my older cousins were audio tape recording Nixon's televised resignation speech. I asked him why he was recording. He said that Nixon was resigning, and this was a historic event. I asked what "resigning" means. He said, "He's quitting."
  
  
• The Big Teletype Message. One night in the late 1960's, or very early 1970's, my father called my family into his radio room to watch as his radio received and decoded a teletype message sent by another ham. No home computers back then, so we had to listen to his huge surplus teletype clatter away. Right away I saw something odd about the print-out; it contained no words, only strategically arranged rows of the letter "x". Several long minutes later my father tore off the print-out and held it up, laughing. My mother wasn't amused, and my brother's and I had no clue what it meant. It was the Playboy rabbit head. Hams will be Hams...
  
  
• The Lift Off of Apollo 15 from the Moon. This is the first mission with the lunar rover. At the end of the mission, the moonwalkers, Jim Irwin and Dave Scott, parked the rover far away from the lunar lander so that Houston could remotely control the rover's TV camera and record the lander's lift-off from the moon. My family sat in our living room watching this countdown and lift off. The moment the lander blasted off, the Air Force theme song was broadcast on the radio loop, and into the TV homes of millions. My father, a USAF fighter pilot, howled with laughter. I asked where the music was coming from, and he said, "from inside the limb". Actually, he had said, inside the LEM -- Lunar Excursion Module, the lander. Years later I wrote astronaut Charlie Duke (Apollo 16) and asked if I had imagined this memory with the USAF theme song. He said no; that had been Apollo 15, the first all-USAF crew to go to the moon. The Command Module pilot orbiting the moon overhead had transmitted the song in a pre-planned stunt that had startled and pissed off some of the flight controllers back in Houston.
  
  
• Flying in a Vietnam Huey Helicopter -- When the Vietnam war ended, I was a Civil Air Patrol cadet, flying weekly "sundown patrols" in a Cessna 172 along the Florida coast. Two surviving Army war-weary helicopters had just been purchased by our county to serve as fire and air rescue helicopters. The helicopters looked as though they had just been plucked from a hot zone in 'nam; missile pods on one, an empty pack of cigarettes on the floor, full army paint schemes. They arranged for us CAP cadets to get a ride in one. That was the noisiest machine I've ever been inside.
  
  
• The USS Nimitz comes to Miami. The time: the mid 1970's. The USS Nimitz was the first in its class of nuclear powered aircraft carriers. One day it made a stop off the coast of Miami. We young Civil Air Patrol cadets were given a guided tour of this ship. The ship anchored off the coast. Liberty boats took us out to her. As we approached, we saw that an armada of civilian pleasure craft had surrounded the massive ship. Riding in some of the boats were young ladies in bikinis. Some of them stripped-off their bikini top's for the sailors -- many of whom had gathered on a lowered flight deck. The informal show's highlight came when one girl disrobed completely, and a sailor jumped into the water. "Man overboard!" came the call, and that was the end of the show-- for us cadets, anyway. I remember thinking, "Man, I need to join the navy! Look what they get to see!" Then I got aboard and saw what life was really like aboard an Aircraft Carrier. I never did join the navy. Click here to see two of my photographs from this day.
  
  
• Not Recognizing My Brother. The time, 1986. The place; Pensacola, Florida. I went to visit him when he was about halfway through Navy AOCS -- Aviation Officer Candidate School -- at Naval Air Station, Pensacola. Earlier at the base bar, a crusty Chief Petty Officer had warned me that I might not recognize my brother after he'd been through his first few weeks of training. I laughed. About a half hour later I walked right up to my brother --shorn of his hair and about 20 lbs --and ask him where I might find Candidate Bill Starr. I truly didn't recognize him. Some weeks later he was a newly commissioned US Navy Officer.

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