The boys were in bed; I was sitting on the den floor watching the TV as the lunar module landed on the moon. It was a beautiful clear night in Nassau Bay, and I could see the moon big and bright out my large kitchen window. My husband, George I. Pettitt, worked for NASA in Flight Control/Simulations. I forget which shift he was on for this mission, but he was not watching with me. Unfortunately, he is not around for me to ask since he died in 1990.
Nassau Bay (just across the street from NASA) was a busy little community during that time. Walter Cronkite in his perch above the Nassau Bay Hotel, reporters from all over the world came to the NASA area, TV people crowding into our little neighborhood was something we were getting used to, but this time was over the top.
Nassau Bay was a peaceful place to raise a family. We lived on a short street that had two cul-de-sacs. Sandy and Gerry Griffin were our next-door neighbors, and Gerry was a flight director for this mission. At the other end of the cul-de-sac was the Bostick’s (Jerry and Linda). Jerry also worked in Flight Control. Their son Michael Bostick is a producer in Hollywood and was responsible for the mini-series “From the Earth to the Moon.” He worked for Ron Howard at the time and suggested that it would make a good series.
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Life in Nassau Bay in the sixties was like that of a small town, even though Houston was just to our north, it did not have the big-city atmosphere that Houston had. No one locked their back doors, and the only repercussions of that habit could be finding a little neighbor girl on a Saturday afternoon named CASSANDRA sitting on your couch eating a banana. There were times of crisis if you had thrown your son’s first gold star paper in the trash and when he went out to get it to show his dad, he cut off his middle finger below the knuckle. Then it was crisis time. Rush to the Medical Center in Houston to get the finger sewn on by a talented young doctor who was hanging out at the hospital to try to build his practice. Lots of trips into Houston to keep a check on the finger’s progress - meeting the young doctor’s partner, the infamous Dr. John Hill who was in the process of growing bacteria in Petri dishes to put in eclairs to poison his beautiful, rich wife, Joan Robinson Hill. Life was good in Nassau Bay take away a few crises.
As I sat in front of the TV watching Neil Armstrong step out on the moon, I looked out the window at the moon and then back to the TV – this event went from surreal to real. I remember saying, “We did it – we did it!
Mary Nell Pettitt
Japanese company invests in mine near Mount Lemmon
