It was the summer of 1973, and I was a seventeen-year-old Boy Scout who seemed destined to “age out” at First Class rank unless I could earn one final merit badge, which would advance me to Star. I decided to pursue one of the newest badges, Space Exploration.
Unfortunately I discovered that in my rural southeastern Ohio Scout district, there were no qualified counselors for this badge. When I went to my Scoutmaster for advice, he offered the response he always gave to a problem he didn’t have an answer for: sarcasm. “You claim you’ve written to all these astronauts and gotten their autographs,” he said. “Get one of them as a counselor.”
America was just completing the Apollo moon-landing program. We had met the challenge that John F. Kennedy had set for us in the early 1960s. The summer I was seventeen, one astronaut towered above the others: the first man to set foot on the lunar surface, Neil Armstrong.
Armstrong, an Ohio native, had left the space program and purchased a farm in southwestern Ohio. He consistently refused lucrative endorsement offers and commercial ventures in order to avoid the appearance of taking advantage of his place in history. Instead he accepted a teaching position with the University of Cincinnati and did his best to blend back into everyday life, enjoying his family and farm.
With a little amateur detective work, I was able to find out where he lived. One Saturday I drove my car 150 miles to the town of Lebanon. Mustering every ounce of bravado I had, I pulled into his dusty driveway and parked behind an Opel Kadett station wagon. Another vehicle, a four-door Chevrolet, stood in front of the equipment shed that doubled as a garage. Not the automobiles you would expect an astronaut to drive. The century-old farmhouse was in obvious need of repairs, and there were signs of remodeling and construction all around it, but no crew. Could it be that the first man on the moon was actually fixing up his own place? Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the back door. In a moment my hero appeared, wearing jeans and a torn shirt, with sawdust in his hair.
I introduced myself as a Boy Scout who had driven across Ohio to ask his help. I said a silent prayer that Neil Armstrong, the Eagle Scout from Wapakoneta, would look on this intrusion from a First Class Scout from Marietta in a favorable light. Mr. Armstrong paused for a moment and then said that since the house was being renovated, he would prefer to talk outside.
We settled against the fender of his Chevrolet, and he listened as I explained my need for a merit-badge counselor. With a skeptical grin he agreed to take a look at whatever work I had brought with me. Elated, I ran to my car and opened the trunk, where I had my paperwork and even a model of the Saturn V launch rocket ready for demonstration. For more than half an hour, this great space pioneer listened while I did my best to fulfill the list of badge requirements. He stopped me a few times and asked a question. When I was done with my presentation, he gave me a list of things he wanted me to complete and send to his office at the university. (To this day I still have the pen and paper he used to write his name and address.)
Thanking him for his time, I then headed my car onto the country road that would take me to 1-71. Once back in my hometown, I worked on my assignment for Mr. Armstrong as diligently as if it had been a doctoral thesis and put it in the mail.
A few weeks later, when I still had not heard from my hero, my elation began to bottom out. I began to wonder if he had just been being polite. But at the next Tuesday-night Scout meeting my Scoutmaster greeted me by waving a letter in my face. “You went and did it! You really went and did it, didn’t you?” he said. Unfolding the letter, I saw the University of Cincinnati’s logo and quickly scanned to the signature at the bottom of the page: “Neil A. Armstrong, Professor of Aerospace Engineering.” Hastily reading the text, I discovered Mr. Armstrong was confirming that I had completed the necessary work for the badge. He went on to say that while he was not an officially recognized counselor, “in my opinion, [Scout Ken Drayton] has completed all requirements satisfactorily.” In Neil Armstrong’s opinion! Who could possibly question that opinion? I spent the rest of the evening floating as high as a lunar module.
As much as I cherished being the first Scout in my district to qualify for the new badge, nothing compared to the feeling I had for the man who made it possible. Thirty years ago this summer Neil Armstrong made that “giant leap for mankind” as he placed his foot onto the lunar surface and stepped into the history books. But my best memory of him comes from four years later, when the former Eagle Scout took the time to help another Scout achieve a goal.
—Ken Drayton lives in Pensacola, Florida.
Ringside
On June 22, 1938, Joe Louis was scheduled to fight a rematch against Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium. (Schmeling had unceremoniously knocked out Joe two years before.) Both fights had political and racial overtones: Hitler was arming Germany and screaming about the master race; Joe Louis was black. Some people were patriotically hoping Joe would win; others wanted the “white hope” to “put Louis in his place.”
My interest was neither patriotic nor racial; it was simply financial. Since we lived only a few blocks from Yankee Stadium, some of my neighborhood friends and I worked selling programs and refreshments there and at the adjacent Polo Grounds. We got to see lots of Yankee and Giants games and still go home with money. How we bragged in the lunchroom. Who wouldn’t play hooky to do what we were doing? Whatever I earned would help me buy clothes and books for college in the fall.
The day of the fight I was able to attend school because I had morning classes. About three in the afternoon I went down to the stadium to pick up my white uniform and my assignment: I was to sell programs before the main event and soda at ringside while the fight went on. (You couldn’t sell beer in the stands in those days.) If memory serves me correctly, the programs were fifty cents; for each one I sold, the Harry M. Stevens Company got fortyfive cents and I got a nickel.
Inside the massive stadium with its sixty thousand seats, a ring had been constructed over what was ordinarily second base. Temporary ringside seats had been set up on all four sides. For the rest of the afternoon, my friends and I sat in the stands, munching the sandwiches and fruit we’d brought from home and watching the crowd pour in. The cheaper seats filled up first. Around dusk the reporters arrived and began setting up typewriters. Those of us selling programs fanned out to wherever we thought we could earn the most. We were never allowed near the entry gates; those spots were reserved for the regular employees who worked every game.
When it was nearly time for the main event, I ran down to the loading station, turned in my unsold programs, and freighted up with soda pop. I was on my way to ringside (might as well work the swells) when I heard the announcer introduce the contestants. Not wanting to miss a thing, I jumped up onto the Yankee dugout to see over the ringside seats. It’s a good thing I did. From the opening bell Joe Louis tore into Schmeling. In just two minutes and four seconds, it was all over. Joe knocked him out and dealt a blow for the U.S.A., Nazi supremacy be damned. He also dealt a blow to my finances. Selling soda was out of the question.
After the fight the stadium was a funny sight: people on the way out, people on the way in, everybody bumping into everybody else. The police were everywhere; officials had feared there would be a race riot if Joe got punched out or, worse yet, lost the fight on a bad decision.
It was well after 11:00 P.M. before we could turn in our uniforms and get our clothes back. I went home with about three dollars in earnings for my eight hours at Yankee Stadium. Still, I considered the night a big success.
—Seymour P. Gersten is a retired lawyer living in Lake Worth, Florida. He currently writes about antique shows in southern Florida.
News From Nanking
In early 1937 I arrived in Nanking (as it was then called), China. I was twenty-four years old and knew no one, but I was armed with letters of introduction. My purpose: adventure. I wanted a Pearl Buck’s-eye-view of China and believed that actually living there was the way to get it. I hoped to find a modest secretarial job to keep me going.
Smith College had a campus in Nanking, and my letters introduced me to members of the faculty there (some called them missionaries), an elite group of families among whom Pearl Buck had lived.
At teas to which I was invited, I met women whose husbands were seeking office help, and a job turned up that exceeded my wildest dreams. The Chinese government’s Ministry of Railways, looking for Western investors, was publishing a magazine, The Quarterly Review of Chinese Railways, to showcase its achievements. I was hired to edit the manuscripts submitted by Chinese writers. I worked at the ministry among English-speaking Chinese without another foreigner in sight.
In July the Japanese invaded; they came in at the Marco Polo Bridge in the north and began to seize the railways. The ministry evacuated Nanking for Shanghai. My job ended. But not my adventure. Under wartime conditions I married H. J. Timperley, an Australian who had lived in Peking for many years and was a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. We proceeded to set up housekeeping in Shanghai. Heady stuff. He was in constant touch with the Chinese and the British as he sent his dispatches to the Guardian. At Thanksgiving I had dinner with Edgar Snow and his wife while Tim was in Hong Kong.
Since my husband was now traveling so much and conditions were so uncertain (in August, Shanghai was inadvertently bombed by its own Chinese planes), it was decided that I would go home as soon as a ship was available. In February 1938 I boarded the Empress of Russia en route to Vancouver.
The next part of the story I described in a letter to my parents written aboard the Canadian Pacific Railway as I headed for Des Moines, Iowa:
“Now I come to what should probably have come first since it is by all odds the most startling part of this letter, namely the enclosures. You can talk about the letters as much as you please, but do be careful that nothing goes down in black and white. The same thing has already been sent to men who will handle the publication if any publishing is to be done. While the Japanese are ruling with such an arbitrary hand in Nanking, it is not safe to have the record appear in black and white that these men are letting out these true but damaging tales about them. It’s to Japan’s best interest that no such word escape, and no one believes that the military would hesitate at putting the whole group of foreigners ‘out of the way’ if necessary since it could be so conveniently laid to a Chinese plot and there would be no one to gainsay them. In other words, you are protecting the men in Nanking.”
I went on to explain that these were copies I had made of letters that had been written in Nanking and given to a fellow passenger aboard the Empress to mail in the United States. Her missionary friends had urged her to open and read the letters, since they were intended for a wide audience. “In this way,” I wrote my parents, “you are getting the lowdown straight from the lion’s mouth as it were. The manuscript without any heading was written by George Fitch, the YMCA representative in Nanking, and the other by Bob Wilson, who is one of the foreign doctors in the mission hospital there. I know both of these men, and all of this can be believed implicitly. It is a ghastly tale.”
Today we know it as the Rape of Nanking.
I no longer have copies of the letters I was carrying, but in her recent book on the incident (The Rape of Nanking, Basic Books, 1997), Iris Chang quotes George Fitch and Dr. Robert Wilson repeatedly as she gives this grim chronology:
December 14
“It was now all too obvious what they were going to do. The men were lined up and roped to- gather in groups of about 100 by soldiers with bayonets fixed; those who had hats had them roughly torn off and thrown to the ground—and then by the lights of our headlights we watched them marched away to their doom.”—George Fitch.
December 18
“Today marks the 6th day of modern Dante’s Inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape. Murder by the wholesale and rape by the thousands of cases. There seems to be no stop to the ferocity, lust, and atavism of the brutes. At first I tried to be pleasant to them to avoid arousing their ire, but the smile has gradually worn off and my stare is fully as cool and fishy as theirs.”—Dr. Robert Wilson
December 24
“Complete anarchy has reigned for ten days—it has been hell on earth … to have to stand by while even the very poor are having their last possession taken from them- their last coin, their last bit of bedding (and it is freezing weather), the poor ricksha man his ricksha; while thousands of disarmed soldiers who had sought sanctuary with you together with many hundreds of innocent civilians are taken out before your eyes to be shot or used for bayonet practice and you have to listen to the sounds of the guns that are killing them; while a thousand women kneel before you crying hysterically, begging you to save them from the beasts who are preying on them; to stand by and do nothing while your flag is taken down and insulted, not once but a dozen times, and your home is being looted, and then to watch the city you have come to love and the institution to which you have planned to devote your best deliberately and systematically burned by fire—this is a hell I had never before envisaged.”—George Fitch
I can only surmise these accounts are the ones I helped bring out of China.
