The Armstrong Myth

I recently received - for the umpteenth time - the story about a famous quote attributed to astronaut Neil Armstrong while he was on the moon in August of  1969.  No, not the one about "one small step..." but the one that goes, "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!"

I'm not going to repeat the story here; if you don't know it, it's of little consequence, since it is one of those "urban legends" anyway.  Suffice it to say, it's a joke, and a dirty one at that, but it was never uttered by Mr. Armstrong.  It was actually one of Buddy Hackett's many off-color jokes, and I believe it might have been first used on The Tonight Show in concert with Johnny Carson. I can't prove that since both are now deceased.

Though Neil Armstrong never said those four words on the moon, there is another single word that he was supposed to say and didn't.  It was part of that truly famous quote that he spoke just after he came down off the ladder from the moon lander.  And no, it was not a spur-of-the-moment statement, but rather a canned and planned speech that he had probably rehearsed many times before.  The trouble was, he misquoted it.

The actual words he was supposed to speak at that momentous time were, "That's one small step for a man - one giant leap for mankind."  However, he neglected to say the word, 'a' between 'for' and 'man', so it made the phrase contradictory and meaningless.  After all, without the article between those words, it gives the word, 'man', the same meaning as the following word, 'mankind'. 

I always wondered why Mr. Armstrong hesitated for so long between the first words, "That's one small step for man..." and the last part, "...one giant leap for mankind." I think he had realized that he said it wrong, and was contemplating starting over to get it right. In the end, he simply completed the quote.

There might have been a good reason for Armstrong's misquote, too.  In the many, many times I've watched that first moon landing, it has always struck me as odd that Armstrong didn't so much step off the ladder.  He jumped down about three feet, actually bouncing after he touched ground.  Maybe his mind was trying to differentiate between a step and a jump.

Well, as the late Paul Harvey used to so famously say, "Now you know . . . the rest of the story."