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For a moment this past week the 1960s were resurrected as NASA’s Artemis rocket lifted into the Florida skies and headed for the moon. This rocket carried mannequins rather than astronauts, as the Apollo missions did half a century ago, but humans will eventually replace those mannequins and the plan is to put the first woman and the first person of color on the moon by 2025. Can lunar excursions regain the attention they drew for a brief time back in the late 1960s and early 1970s? I always considered it fortunate that my childhood coincided with one of the most daring exploration periods in history as the United States and the Soviet Union competed to become the first country to land people on the moon. Space travel and speculation about what the future would be like played a significant role in our lives in the 1960s, and it went beyond real astronauts courageously boarding those rockets. On TV we watched Star Trek and Lost in Space. Commercials promoted Tang, the official drink of the astronauts, or so we were told. Our toys included Matt Mason, a 6-inch-tall bendable-figure astronaut who came with space-exploration accessories and bendable-figure astronaut pals. On the night of July 20, 1969, my family gathered in front of our TV to watch the faint, somewhat eerie image of Neil Armstrong descending the lunar-module ladder to set foot on the moon. “It’s like watching a movie,” my mother said, perhaps in awe of how in her mere 45 years on the planet the nation had advanced from trying to survive a Depression to spending a fortune to land these men on Earth’s only natural satellite. I was 11 at the time and remember thinking that we would soon head for Mars, which in my mind was just a sort hop away from the moon. Clearly, I had no concept of planetary distances and the additional time, effort, and technology a journey to Mars required. What’s just as surprising is how quickly the excitement of that July night faded away. Soon after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin completed their historic walk, many of my friends and I grew indifferent to the Apollo missions. Going to the moon remained cool – just not “oh, my gosh, I can’t believe this is happening” cool. In April of 1972, when I was in eighth-grade, teachers pulled us from our normal classroom work to watch Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charles Duke explore the lunar surface. By now the astronauts had an electric-powered lunar-roving vehicle – essentially a moon buggy – that allowed them to drive several miles from their landing site. We jaded 13 and 14-year-olds, raised on rocket launches and lunar excursions, remained unimpressed. One exasperated teacher turned to another. “How can they be so bored by this?” she asked. “They take it for granted.” We could not argue. We did at least appreciate that Young and Duke gave us a momentary reprieve from memorizing historic dates, calculating square roots, and enduring another lecture about the placement of commas.

About three decades ago my father-in-law, perhaps in a nostalgic mood, wrote a short memoir about his childhood to share with his children and grandchildren. He paid a local printer to print 25 copies in booklet form, ensuring that for a least a while after he was gone something would be left behind as a reminder that he had once existed on the Earth. This seemed such a good idea that I approached my mother about doing the same and offered to help, but she had no interest. My father by then was many years dead, so any stories he might have shared were already lost. I made a note, though, that when I grew old, I would create something similar for my sons so they would have a record of at least a small portion of their ancestry. One day I realized I was now probably older than my father-in-law when he wrote his memoir, so I figured I should get busy. Almost immediately I knew my memoir would be different. As a former journalist, I had no interest in simply writing several anecdotes from childhood. Instinctively, I wanted to include context about the time period, about the geography and history of the Kentucky community where I grew, and about how popular culture played a role in my life and the lives of others at the time. Yes, there would be personal stories, but with that broader picture woven into the memoir’s structure. I also knew that the structure would not be chronological, an uninspired checklist of this happened, then that happened, then later this other thing happened. Instead, I would divide the chapters by subject, with each almost a standalone essay on such topics as school, religion, the town, holidays, or the coal-mining industry that dominated everything in southeastern Kentucky. This required research not only to help readers understand the place and the time, but also to help me make sure, as much as possible, that my memories weren’t playing tricks on me. Could tourists really buy baby alligators in Florida in the 1960s? Did it snow in southeastern Kentucky on Christmas Eve in 1966? What economic conditions caused my father to be laid off from the coal mines in the late 1950s? As I answered such questions, it became clearer than ever that this would be my story and my family’s story told in a larger context. The result was Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV. It is my story, but if you grew up in the same time period, or were ever a child at all, it may also be yours.

This past week Patty Loveless and Chris Stapleton captivated the audience at the CMA Awards by performing You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive, which could have served as a theme song for Eisenhower Babies, except that I did leave Harlan County, Kentucky, alive and in good health (thanks for asking) many years ago. But the song and its lyrics do serve as a reminder of the county’s reputation – established in the early half of the 20th century – as a violent place, as well as a region where toiling in the coal mines can take years off a person’s life. The song’s writer, Darrell Scott, has said he saw the title phrase on a headstone during a trip to Harlan County to research his great-grandfather. Certainly, the song’s title can be considered fitting to the place, because Harlan County’s violent clashes between coal miners and coal operators drew national attention in the 1930s. New York Times headlines from that era included: “Kentucky Troops Mobilize in Harlan” and “Bomb in Auto Kills Kentucky Official.” The latter referred to the 1935 murder of County Attorney Elmon Middleton. The violence also caught the attention of literary stalwarts such as Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson. They and other writers launched a journalistic investigation into the brutal way in which coal companies treated miners and their families, and in 1932 released a book titled Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields, which detailed their findings. Anderson, best known for his book Winesburg, Ohio, was especially incensed about conditions in my home county, writing: The eyes of the whole country had become focused on that little spot. It had become a little ugly running sore, workers being beaten, women thrown into jail, American citizens being terrorized, newspaper men trying to investigate, being shot and terrorized. When you have got a disease inside the body it has a nasty little trick of breaking out in little sores of that sort. I did not arrive on the scene until 26 years after Anderson wrote those words, and by then our county was no longer an “ugly running sore.” As a geographic location, Harlan County is central to my memoir, but I must confess that I never felt in danger growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, or spent anxious nights worried I would never leave the place alive. We kids roamed the hills, swam in rivers, and followed the railroad tracks from one end of town to the other, unperturbed by the area’s notorious reputation. Our equally unworried parents would go hours without knowing our whereabouts, grumbling only if we did not arrive home by the time the streetlights flickered on. But pride of place bubbles up when moments happen like the one at the CMA Awards as Loveless and Stapleton sang You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive. Across the country, former Harlan County residents could sing along, putting great feeling into those haunting lyrics, even if they did leave Harlan years ago, more or less serene and largely intact.

My mother had no idea when she squinted through her Polaroid instant camera and snapped a black-and-white photo in 1965 that she would be providing cover art for a book nearly 60 years later. She just wanted to capture a moment in time of her three children – my sister, Shelia, my brother, Ricky, and me – visiting an attraction called Six Gun Territory during a Florida vacation. But that photo, faded and crinkled, survived long after my mother and Six Gun Territory were gone, and now graces the cover of Eisenhower Babies as an appropriate art element inside the image of an old-fashioned television. I like to think she would be proud of her work and the memories her photo kept alive long after that day in the theme park had passed. I was an excited 7-year-old when I learned our vacation that year would include a visit to Six Gun Territory. The cowboy-themed attraction opened near Silver Springs in 1963 at a time when TV Westerns such as Bonanza, Rawhide, Wagon Train, and The Rifleman dominated prime-time viewing. Six Gun Territory was the inspiration of a man named R.B. Coburn, who had enjoyed success with a similarly themed attraction called Ghost Town in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. I had seen TV commercials for Ghost Town and longed to visit. Six Gun Territory served as an acceptable substitute. The park included 40 Old West buildings, an Indian village, and can-can dancers in the saloon. A 2010 Ocala Star-Banner article that reminisced about Six Gun Territory included this description: “The train ride from the entrance … was routinely ambushed. Bank robberies happened daily, followed by shootouts between good guys and bad guys. Digger, the town's comical undertaker, was kept busy.” Admission cost $2 for adults and $1 for children. For a boy who engaged in his own Old West shootouts in the back yard, Six Gun Territory was nirvana. I drank in the ambience, covered my ears during the gunfights, and waited apprehensively to learn whether the train would be ambushed while we were aboard. Near the General Store, Shelia, Ricky, and I clambered atop an unhitched buggy so Mom could take that photograph. Six Gun Territory entertained tourists like us for two decades, but closed in 1984. By then TV Westerns had faded in popularity, and competing theme parks had risen to steal away tourists’ dollars. When my family returned to Florida for a 1974 vacation, we gave the cold shoulder to Six Gun Territory and turned our sights on Disney World, opting for animatronic singing bears over gun-slinging cowboys.