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."
