On The Fly

Podcast - The Magic of Television . . .  Time travel is possible! Dateline July 16, 2019, 6:32 a.m. PST, 50 years to the day. Once again I’m glued to my television watching the original CBS broadcast of the Apollo 11 launch live streaming on YouTube. In the 1960s NASA’s Apollo program was science fiction come to life. It was July 16, 1969, I was 13 years old, watching Walter Cronkite , on a black and white Zenith console television with complete fascination and suspense; the space program held me captive. As an avid science fiction reader, this was not fiction - but mankind’s greatest achievement. Looking back, humanity can now see the obvious advances in communications technology, medical advances, space travel, and human relations. But at the time, during those early Apollo years, people were enduring simultaneous conflicts with Vietnam, The Cold War with Russia, Civil Rights, and all the political unrest. Television news was rampant with the world’s problems. 1969 was also the...