The Year I Sat Next to My Hero

1969 was one of those years that just bends culture in a new direction. In the span of about a month, we landed on the moon, the Manson killings shook California to its core, and a few weeks after that, half a million people showed up in a muddy field in New York for Woodstock. It’s wild to think all of that happened back to back. I’ve had a few brushes with fame and fortune over the years, but 1969 is the banner year of my life, and it has nothing to do with two of those headlines.

At the time, I was just a kid in the Boy Scouts. Denver used to host big scouting conventions downtown at Currigan Hall, and that summer, not long after the moon landing, word went around that there was going to be a special one: a dinner honoring Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon who was a Boy Scout. Getting to be in the same room as him was already the kind of thing every kid dreams about.

Here’s where it got even better. Each troop was allowed to pick one kid to sit at the head table with Armstrong himself. Somehow, I was the one who got picked. So just a few short weeks after he’d walked on the moon, I found myself sitting next to Neil Armstrong, talking with him like it was no big deal. I was still in elementary school, so honestly, I didn’t grasp the full weight of what was happening. To me, he was just a really nice guy who happened to be really famous.

I remember that evening as clearly as if it happened yesterday. Looking back now, I don’t think there’s anything better for a kid than getting to meet a hero up close, in person, not through a TV screen or a magazine cover. And that’s part of why the memory means so much to me now. Somewhere between then and today, I feel like we stopped having heroes in the way we used to. We still have plenty of famous people, but somewhere along the way, hero worship quietly turned into celebrity worship. Those aren’t the same thing. A hero does something extraordinary that changes how you see what’s possible. A celebrity is just someone a lot of people are paying attention to.

I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of amazing experiences in my life, and I try not to take any of them for granted. But sitting next to Neil Armstrong as a wide-eyed kid, just weeks after he stepped off the moon and back onto Earth, still ranks at the very top. It’s one thing to watch history happen on television. It’s another thing entirely to shake the hand of the man who made it.

Image created using Gemini AI