My Grandmother and the Moon Landing

I've just been in a Facebook discussion with a young friend of mine. He's 30, and I referred to him as a 'lad'. He took umbrage at that, pointing out that he was born in 1988. My response was that I was born in 1947 and he would always be a lad to me.

At that point, he mentioned that his grandparents were married in 1949! My Dad's parents were married in 1892, and my Mum's in 1918. I  I told him he had  made me feel old when he posted that his great grandfather was in the 1914-18 War, because my uncle, my Dad's brother, fought on the Western Front! He then corrected me, that whilst that great grandfather had been old enough to fight in the Great War, he had stayed on the farm whilst his two brothers went off to war.

This was the point at which he posted this,

But the maternal grandfather of my paternal grandmother did fight in the Great War, with the 10th Battalion CEF, the Fighting Tenth.

So just sit back and imagine my great-great-grandfather sharing a trench with your uncle! 

I then answered him with this comment, which brings me to the point of this post,

 My family is so spread out in time that some people have difficulty believing it. Last year, on St Patrick's Day, I mentioned it was my Grandfather's 154th birthday. A friend of mine said that couldn't be right, that I must mean my great grandfather.When I pointed out that my father was born in 1910, he got the point

For the record, my Dad's father was born the year of the Battle of Gettysburg, and his mother the year Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

My Grandmother Weismiller was born Pitronella Fredrika Peterson in  Västergötland, Sweden, just five months after Bell 'called' his assistant, saying, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you', the first successful telephonic transmission in history. So, needless to say, she had seen a lot of technological development in her long life!

On 20 July 1969, I was visiting family in Spencer, Iowa. As those of my readers old enough might remember, that was the day that Neil Armstrong took 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind', when he stepped on the surface of Luna. I had been fascinated by the space program and the whole concept of space travel since I first read Jules Verne, so I was following the whole thing very closely.

After my visit, I was hitchhiking back to Topeka, KS, where I lived at the time, and I stopped to see my Grandmother on the way. I arrived on 24 July, the day the astronauts of Apollo 11 returned to Terra. We were watching the recovery on TV when I asked her what she thought of men getting to the moon. She shrugged!

I wasn't overly surprised. Within her lifetime, she had seen the development of telephony, the invention of a practical automobile, the airplane, the radio, television,  the beginning of the computer age, and sliced bread! The fact that men had made it to the moon and back was not particularly exciting to her.

However, I had mentioned that Colonel Aldrin was of Swedish descent. About ten minutes after I had asked her opinion, she turned to me and said, 'Johnny, you mean there was a Swede on the moon?' The fact that men in general had gone into space was no big deal, but the fact that one of her people had gone to the moon was impressive!

She died four years later in a house fire at the age of 97. We buried her in the plot she had bought in 1916 to bury her husband, and under the gravestone that she had had engraved, 'Maximilian Weismiller, 1863-1916, Nellie, His Wife, 1876-....'. We had 1973 engraved on it, and there she rests, gone but never forgotten. Rest in Peace, Grandma!