How Long It's Been: There Had Never Been a Man On the Moon

July 20, 1969, 50 years ago today: At 4:17 PM, U.S. Eastern Time, the lunar module Eagle, of the Apollo 11 mission, landed on the Sea of Tranquility, on the side of the Moon facing Earth.

The mission's commander was Lieutenant Junior Grade Neil Alden Armstrong, U.S. Navy, from Wapakoneta, in western Ohio, about halfway between Toledo and Dayton. In contact with Mission Control, in Houston, Texas, he spoke the 1st words any human had spoken from the surface of the Moon: "Houston, Tranquility Base here: The Eagle has landed."

With him, aboard Eagle, was the craft's pilot, Colonel Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., U.S. Air Force, known as Buzz, of the New York suburb of Montclair, Essex County, New Jersey. Orbiting the Moon above them, in the command module Columbia, was Colonel Michael Collins, U.S. Air Force, who grew up in many places around the world, as his father was a high-ranking U.S. Army officer.

All 3 men reached their 39th birthdays during the course of calendar year 1969, and each was taking part in his 2nd spaceflight.

At 10:56 PM, Armstrong stepped down the ladder on the side of Eagle, and put his left foot down on the surface of the Moon. He chose his 1st words very carefully, knowing that the whole world would remember them: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Except, between his Midwestern accent and the transmission of the words from the Moon to Houston, from Houston to the TV networks in New York, and from the networks in New York to the world, it sounded like he said, "One small step for man..." Which made no sense, as "man" and "mankind" were usually interchangeable.

It didn't matter. A man was standing on the Moon, and he was an American. Buzz Aldrin followed Armstrong a few minutes later. Four days later, they returned to Earth, and got a ticker-tape parade in New York City.

Every Summer, my grandparents rented a bungalow at South Seaside Park, on the Jersey Shore. This was that weekend for 1969. They, and my parents, watched the Moon landing at The Sand Bar. Not yet born, I tell people I had "an obstructed view." The bar is still there, and is now Chef Mike's Atlantic Bar & Grill, or "The ABG." It is 84 road miles south of Midtown Manhattan.

None of them ever went into space again. None had to.

Collins would be appointed an Assistant Secretary of State, and serve as the director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where Columbia is on display. He is scheduled to turn 89 in October.

Aldrin battled clinical depression and alcoholism, recovered, and has become an advocate for recovery and for the space program. He is 89.

Armstrong was, for a time, the most famous man in the world, more so than the President, the Pope, or any athlete. He could have used his fame to make gobs of money. Basically a private person, he chose not to. He taught at the University of Cincinnati, and served on the commissions that investigated the near-disaster of Apollo 13 in 1970 and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

In 1985, he was part of an expedition to the North Pole, led by a man who wanted to bring "the world's greatest explorers" together. Also on the expedition was Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who became the 1st man to reach the summit of the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest in Nepal, in 1953.

This would have been Hillary's 100th birthday, so the Moon landing was on his 50th.

Armstrong lived and worked on a farm near his Ohio hometown, and died of long-term heart trouble on August 25, 2012, at age 82.

*

Landing on the Moon. Reaching the highest mountain. Running a mile in under 4 minutes, as Roger Bannister became the 1st man to do in 1954. Flying between the mainlands of North America and Europe, as Charles Lindbergh became the 1st man to do in 1927. These were huge events. Big deals were made of them at the time.

I was born at the end of 1969, 5 months after this epochal event. My generation -- even people 4 or 5 years older than I am -- can't remember a time when there had never been a man on the Moon.

Of course, most of us can't remember there being a man on the Moon, as Apollo 17 left on December 14, 1972, and there hasn't been a manned Moon landing since, launched by any nation.

Fifty years. How long has that been?

On July 20, 1969, the Yankees defeated the Washington Senators 3-2 in 11 innings, at the old Yankee Stadium. No home runs were hit. The winning pitcher, in relief, was Jack Aker. Today, at the new Yankee Stadium, Aker was on hand, and caught the ceremonial first ball from a current astronaut, Mike Massimino.

Elsewhere in the American League: The Boston Red Sox beat the Baltimore Orioles 6-5 at Fenway Park. The Detroit Tigers split a doubleheader with the Cleveland Indians at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, the Tigers winning the 1st game 3-2, and the Tribe winning the 2nd game 5-4 in 10 innings. The Kansas City Royals swept a doubleheader with the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park, winning the 1st game 8-6, and the 2nd game 3-2 in 11 innings. The California Angels split a doubleheader with the Oakland Athletics at Anaheim Stadium: The Halos won the opener 7-3, and the A's won the nightcap 9-6. And the Minnesota Twins beat the Seattle Pilots 4-0 at Sick's Stadium.

While this great moment was occurring for all humanity, but mainly for America, the Mets weren't even in America. They split a doubleheader with the Montreal Expos at Jarry Park. They lost the 1st game 3-2, with Gary Gentry giving up 3 solo home runs; and won the 2nd game 4-3, as Ron Swoboda backed Don Cardwell up with 3 hits, including an RBI double.

Elsewhere in the National League, the Chicago Cubs swept a doubleheader from the Philadelphia Phillies at Connie Mack Stadium, 1-0 and 6-1. The Atlanta Braves beat the San Diego Padres 10-0 at Atlanta (-Fulton County) Stadium. And the San Francisco Giants beat their arch-rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, 7-3 at Candlestick Park. The Cincinnati Reds, the Houston Astros, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the St. Louis Cardinals got rained out. Why so many doubleheaders? It was a Sunday.

An urban legend says that, when he was rookie with the Giants in 1962, pitcher Gaylord Perry hit a home run in batting practice, and was told there would be a man on the Moon before he hit one in a real game, and that the landing was announced at Candlestick at around 8:00 Pacific Time, and then he hit a home run. The truth? We may never know if Perry was actually told that, but, that day, Perry did pitch, win, and hit a home run, but it was a day game.

Of the 24 Major League Baseball teams then playing, all but one, the Chicago Cubs, was playing their home games in stadiums with permanent lights. Only one, the Houston Astros, was playing on an artificial turf field, and only the Astros were playing under a dome (retractable or otherwise). There was no designated hitter, and no regular season interleague play.

Of the 24 ballparks used by MLB teams that year, only 5 are still in use by the teams then using them: Fenway Park in Boston, Wrigley Field in Chicago, Dodger Stadium and Angel Stadium in the Los Angeles area, and the Oakland Coliseum. The Astrodome in Houston and Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington are no longer in use, but still stand.

There were 16 teams in the NFL and 10 in the AFL, and they were in the process of merging. Of those 26 teams, the only ones in the same stadiums they were in for the 1969 season are the Oakland Raiders (who left Oakland and returned), the Los Angeles Rams (who left Los Angeles and returned, and will leave the Coliseum a 2nd time next year, for a new stadium) and the Green Bay Packers (Lambeau Field).

From the NBA and the NHL combined, 1 one arena remains from the 1969-70 season that was about to begin: Madison Square Garden in New York, then billed as "the New Madison Square Garden Center," but now older than the "Old Garden" that it replaced. The Brooklyn Nets were known as the New York Nets, and were playing home games at the 5,200-seat Island Garden in Hempstead. It was demolished in 1973. The New York Islanders and the New Jersey Devils did not yet exist.

What were the defining baseball players of my childhood doing in July 1969? Reggie Jackson was in the middle of his 2nd full season, in which he hit 47 home runs. Thurman Munson and Carlton Fisk were about to make their big-league debuts. Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan were helping the Mets to their Miracle – but, 20 days later, after it was completed, if you had bet then that neither one would ever win another World Championship, people would have laughed at you. (Of course, they also would have laughed if you had then bet that Ryan would win more games in the majors than Seaver.)

Pete Rose won his 2nd straight NL batting title, and his Cincinnati Reds teammate Johnny Bench had a pretty good season, but they hadn't yet won their 1st Pennant -- that would come the next season. Rod Carew was forging his 1st AL batting title, and there would be 6 more. Carl Yastrzemski hit 40 home runs and drove in 111 runs, but his Red Sox had already changed significantly from their "Impossible Dream" Pennant team of 2 years earlier. Steve Carlton was about to set a new NL record with 19 strikeouts -- but would still lose the game to the Mets. Willie Stargell had recently become the 1st player to hit a home run completely out of Dodger Stadium. Four years later, he would do it again.

Mike Schmidt was still playing at Ohio University (not to be confused with The… Ohio State University), and had yet to face a professional pitch. George Brett was still at El Segundo High School in Los Angeles County.

The current managers and head coaches of New York Tri-State Area teams? Barry Trotz of the Islanders and Domènec Torrent of NYCFC were 7 years old, Pat Shurmur of the Giants was 4, David Quinn of the Rangers was 3, Kenny Atkinson of the Nets was 2, and the rest weren't born yet: Chris Armas of the Red Bulls was born in 1972, Aaron Boone of the Yankees in 1973, David Fizdale of the Knicks and Katie Smith of the Liberty in 1974, Mickey Callaway of the Mets John Hynes of the Devils in 1975, and Adam Gase of the Jets in 1978.

The defending World Champions in the 4 major sports were the Detroit Tigers in baseball, the New York Jets (believe it) in football, the Boston Celtics in basketball and the Montreal Canadiens in hockey.

There was no official Heavyweight Champion of the World, as Muhammad Ali had been stripped of the title for refusing to be drafted, an unconstitutional measure that would take until October 30, 1974 to be fully rectified. Joe Frazier and Jimmy Ellis would soon fight in a "unification" bout to decide who was the official champion.

The Olympic Games have since been held in America 4 times, Canada 3 times, Japan twice, Russia twice, Korea twice, and once each in Germany, Austria, Bosnia, France, Spain, Norway, Australia, Greece, Italy, China, Britain and Brazil. The World Cup has since been held in Mexico and Germany twice each, and once each in America, Argentina, Spain, Italy, France, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Brazil and Russia.

There were then 25 Amendments to the Constitution. There was, as yet, no Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, Title IX or legalized abortion. The Stonewall Riot had happened just a few weeks before. The last Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969 to still be on it was former football star Byron "Whizzer" White, in 1993. They are all dead now.

Richard Nixon was President of the United States. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson were still alive. So was the widow of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had died earlier in the year. Gerald Ford was the Minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Jimmy Carter was a former State Senator in Georgia, about to run his second, much more successful, campaign for Governor. Ronald Reagan was in his first term as Governor of California.

George Herbert Walker Bush was a Congressman from Texas, and his son George had entered the Texas Air National Guard. Apparently, it was okay for him and his father to support the Vietnam War even if he didn't have to actually fight in it.

Bill Clinton was at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and Hillary Rodham was about to be named valedictorian at Wellesley College. Al Gore was in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, while Dan Quayle was in the Indiana National Guard. Guess which one supported the war, and which one didn't.

Joe Biden was about to be admitted to the Delaware bar, and was too old to be drafted. Mitt Romney had just gotten married, and had gotten a draft deferment as a Mormon missionary. His father, George Romney, was President Nixon's Secretary of Housing & Urban Development.

Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich both had teaching deferments. Rudy Giuliani got a deferment as a law clerk. John McCain did not have a deferment, and the Navy pilot was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Mitch McConnell enlisted in the U.S. Army, and John Boehner enlisted in the U.S. Navy, but each later discharged for medical reasons. Barack Obama was not subject to the draft, being just 8 years old. Donald Trump claimed bone spurs.

The Governor of New York was Nelson Rockefeller, having made 3 unsuccessful runs for President. The Mayor of New York City was John Lindsay, who had just been denied renomination by the City’s Republican Party because of his poor handling of snow removal during the blizzard earlier in the year. But he would win a 2nd term as a 3rd-party nominee.

The Governor of New Jersey was Richard J. Hughes, about to wrap up his second term. Former Governor Robert B. Meyner would try to get the office back, but would fail, losing to South Jersey Congressman William T. Cahill.

Nancy Pelosi was about to move to San Francisco, where her brother-in-law was on the Board of Supervisors. Andrew Cuomo and Phil Murphy were 11 years old, and Bill de Blasio was 8.

There were still living veterans of America's Indian Wars, the Mahdist War, the Boer War and the Spanish-American War. There were still living survivors of the Johnstown Flood of 1889, the competitors of the 1st modern Olympics of 1896, and the players of the 1st World Series of 1903.

The Pope was Paul VI. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, was about to be ordained as a priest. Canada's Prime Minister was Pierre Trudeau. He was young (50), dashing and charismatic. It was as if John F. Kennedy was singing lead for the Beatles -- in French. Canada had just gotten the Expos, their 1st Major League Baseball team. And a group called The Guess Who had just become Canada’s biggest rock band ever (to that point). For the first time ever, Canada was hip. Especially if you were an American worrying about being drafted. 

Elizabeth II was Queen of England -- that still hasn't changed -- but she was just 43 years old. Britain's Prime Minister was Harold Wilson. There have since been 9 Presidents of the United States, 9 Prime Ministers of Britain (soon, there will be a 10th), and 4 Popes.

The English Football League had just been won by Leeds United, and the FA Cup was won by Manchester City, the defending League Champions, beating Leicester City 1-0 on a goal by Neil Young – no, not that Neil Young. AC Milan, led by perhaps Italy's greatest player ever, Gianni Rivera, won their 2nd European Cup by beating Ajax Amsterdam, led by 21-year-old wunderkind Johan Cruijff. Ajax and their "Total Football" would be back, big-time.

Major novels of 1969 included The Godfather by Mario Puzo, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, Rich Man, Poor Man by Irwin Shaw, and The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace (about a novel, of the same title, that was "the most banned book in history," containing a woman's thoughts during 7 minutes of sex).

Also published that year was Naked Came the Stranger by Peneleope Ashe. This was a name used for a composite of 24 authors, conspiring to see if a novel could be really, really bad, but still sell big if it had a lot of sex scenes in it. This was a truly late-Sixties kind of experiment – and, for better or for worse, it worked.

Major non-fiction books included the career-launching memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and the career-launching historical work Mary, Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser.

J.R.R. Tolkein was still alive. So was Jack Kerouac, but he died 3 months later as a result of his excessive drinking. Stephen King was at the University of Maine, George R.R. Martin was at Northwestern University, and J.K. Rowling was 4 years old. No one had yet heard of John Rambo, Spenser: For Hire, George Smiley, The Punisher, Rocky Balboa, T.S. Garp, Arthur Dent, Jason Bourne, Hannibal Lecter, Celie Harris, Kinsey Millhone, Jack Ryan, Forrest Gump, John McClane, Alex Cross, Bridget Jones, Robert Langdon, Bella Swan, Lisbeth Salander or Katniss Everdeen.

Major films of the Summer of '69 included the Westerns True Grit and The Wild Bunch, Easy Rider, Woody Allen's directorial debut Take the Money and Run, and a film that told the story of Arlo Guthrie's song Alice's Restaurant. And Charlton Heston played an aging quarterback in the film Number One.


James Bond was about to be played by George Lazenby for the 1st and only time, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Adam West's TV version of Batman had recently been canceled. Bob Holiday, in the 1966 Broadway musical It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman, was the most recent live-action Man of Steel. The Doctor Who franchise was in the process of regenerating from Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee. Michael Douglas (in his 2nd movie) and Peter Strauss (in his 1st) were about to premiere in Hail, Hero! Douglas' future wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, was about to be born.

Star Trek had recently been canceled, and Gene Roddenberry had moved on to directing a sexploitation film, Pretty Maids All In a Row. George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola had co-founded the film studio American Zoetrope, but Lucas had not yet directed a feature-length film. Nor had Steven Spielberg.

Television shows that debuted in the 1969-70 season that was about to begin included Room 222, Marcus Welby, M.D., Medical Center, The Brady Bunch, and kids' shows Sesame Street, H.R. Pufnstuf and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? From Britain came the debuts of Monty Python's Flying Circus and The Benny Hill Show. Robert Kardashian was in law school, Bruce Jenner was playing college football in Iowa, Kristen Mary Houghton was about to turn 14, and none of them knew each other yet.

No one had yet heard of Carol Brady, Mary Richards, Keith Partridge, Archie Bunker, Kwai Chang Caine, Fred Sanford, Bob Hartley, Theo Kojak, Arthur Fonzarelli, Barney Miller, J.R. Ewing, Mork from Ork, William Adama, Arnold Jackson, Ken Reeves, Bo & Luke Duke, Mario & Luigi, Sam Malone, Christine Cagney & Mary Beth Lacey, He-Man, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Thundercats, Bart Simpson, Zack Morris, Hayden Fox, Dale Cooper, The Seinfeld Four, Buffy Summers, Fox Mulder & Dana Scully, Andy Sipowicz, Ross Geller & Rachel Greene, Doug Ross, Xena, Ash Kethcum, Carrie Bradshaw, Tony Soprano, Olivia Benson, Jed Bartlet, Master Chief, Jack Bauer, Omar Little, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Michael Bluth, Michael Scott, Don Draper, Walter White, Jax Teller, Richard Castle, Leslie Knope, Sarah Manning, Jane "Eleven" Hopper or Maggie Bell.

The Number 1 song in America was "In the Year 2525" by Denny Zager & Rick Evans -- but it wasn't projecting a hopeful future. Brian Jones was fired from the Rolling Stones, and died just 2 days before the band's concert in London's Hyde Park. It went forward anyway, and 500,000 people attended. Another 500,000 attended the Woodstock Music and Art Festival on a dairy farm in the Catskill Mountains in Bethel, New York.

Frank Sinatra released "My Way." Elvis Presley was about to begin his live-in performances -- what would now be called a residency -- in Las Vegas. The Beatles were recording Abbey Road, and took the famous crosswalk picture on August 8. Bob Dylan had just released Nashville Skyline. Johnny Cash had just debuted his variety show, and Dylan was his 1st guest.

Michael Jackson and his brothers were about to make their national debut as the Jackson 5. He was 11 years old. So was Madonna, but she wouldn't have a hit for another 13 years. Billy Joel's 1st band, The Hassles, had just released its 2nd album, but was about to break up. Bruce Springsteen had just formed a band named Child, which would become Steel Mill, and would evolve into The E Street Band. Elton John was about to release his 1st album. David Bowie had released "Space Oddity," but had yet to suggest the legend he was to become. And Bryan Adams, who famously had a hit with a song titled "Summer of '69," was 9 years old.

Inflation was such that what $1.00 bought then, $6.96 would buy now. A U.S. postage stamp cost 6 cents, and a New York Subway ride 20 cents. The average price of a gallon of gas was 35 cents, a cup of coffee 42 cents, a McDonald's meal 79 cents (49 cents of that being the recently-introduced Big Mac, plus fries and a shake), a movie ticket $1.20, a new car around $2,300, and a new house $28,100. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the preceding Friday at 845.92.

The tallest building in the world was the Empire State Building in New York. Credit cards were still a relatively new thing, and there were no automatic teller machines in America. Nor were there personal computers or home video games. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee were all 14 years old. There were heart transplants, liver transplants, lung transplants, kidney transplants and artificial kidneys, but no artificial hearts. There were birth control pills, but no Viagra.

In the Summer of 1969, in addition to the preceding, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne makes a mistake in joint maneuvers with the U.S. Navy, and crashes into the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans, killing 74 men. Fighting known as the Battle of the Bogside broke out in Northern Ireland. Britain removed the halfpenny coin from circulation. The Canadian Parliament made French equal to English throughout the nation. Honduras and neighboring El Salvador fought a 4-day war, sparked by a soccer game between their national teams. And President Richard Nixon made the 1st reduction in U.S. troops in Vietnam, giving the nation hope that he might actually keep his promise to end the war there. That hope wouldn't last.

In America, Warren Burger was sworn in to replace the retiring Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Hurricane Camille killed 248 people along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. A militant faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) broke away, and renamed themselves the Weathermen, after a line in the Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The Cuyahoga River, in downtown Cleveland, caught fire due to decades of pollution, helping to spur the creation of the EPA. The fish-based fast food chain Long John Silver's and the clothing chain The Gap opened their 1st stores.

Senator Ted Kennedy took a wrong turn driving a woman home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, and she died. His failure to report the accident for several hours damaged his reputation, and probably prevented him from ever becoming President. Members of a cult led by Charles Manson killed several people in Los Angeles, including actress Sharon Tate. And former Heavyweight Champion of the World Rocky Marciano was killed in a plane crash in Iowa.

Frank Loesser, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Bill Carrigan, who managed the Boston Red Sox to win the 1915 and 1916 World Series, died. Jennifer Lopez, and Troy Percival, and Joe Sakic were born.

July 20, 1969. Neil Armstrong becomes the 1st Earth person to walk on Earth's Moon. Never again would we be able to say no one had done it.

Of course, we've spent the last 50 years saying, "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we (do something comparatively simple)?"

And we haven't been back to the Moon for 47 years. When will it happen again? There's talk of it happening by 2024, but I wouldn't bet on it. Not without a better President than either Nixon or Trump.

10 Historical Moments That Were a Lot More Cynical Than You Realized

These are listed in chronological order.

1. 1200 BC (or thereabouts): The Ten Commandments. The late great comedian George Carlin, known for his antipathy to organized religion spelled it out:

"I am The Lord, thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me." "Thou shalt not take the name of The Lord, thy God, in vain." "Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath." Right off the bat, the first three, pure bullshit: "Sabbath day," "Lord's name," "strange gods." Spooky language! Spooky language, designed to scare and control primitive people.

"It's a political document," he said earlier in the bit. He eventually boiled the Commandments he thought humanity needed down to 2: "Thou shalt always be honest and faithful" -- a positive, rather than negative, combination of the prohibitions against adultery, stealing and lying -- and, "Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless, of course, they pray to a different invisible man than the one you pray to."

Then again, "Thou shalt not commit adultery" was originally a guard against one man stealing another man's property, because wives were considered property.

2. 1453-1564: The Renaissance. I chose the dates as follows: The former for the Fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), a convenient ending date for the Middle Ages, and also for the start of the Age of Exploration; and the latter for the death of Michelangelo Buonarotti, the last survivor of the big names of the Renaissance.

A lot of what the great artists did was pandering to their patrons, most of whom weren't dark-skinned Italians from Rome, Naples, Apulia (the "heel" in "the boot of Italy"), Calabria (the "toe" in the "boot"), or Sicily. Rather, they were from Northern Italy, places like Venice, Florence, Milan and Turin. They were "white," more Germanic than what we would now consider "Italian."

To put it into a modern perspective, which wouldn't have made sense then, but it does give you an idea: Central Milan, in Lombardy, is 34 miles from Italy's border with Switzerland; while Turin, in the Piedmont, the Italian Alps, is 60 miles from the border with France. Florence is a bit further south, in Tuscany, about halfway between Milan and Rome.

But that geography is why we have a light-skinned man with long blond hair as our defining image of Jesus, rather than a swarthy man with short hair and bushy eyebrows, as most Jewish men living in "The Holy Land" would have been in the 1st Century AD. And Michelangelo's statue of King David, now in the Gallery of the Academy of Florence (Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze), sure doesn't look Jewish, even though David is the leading hero of the people of the modern State of Israel.

3. 1590-1613: The Plays of William Shakespeare. Presuming he actually existed, and his plays were not written by someone else (as many have alleged, with flimsy evidence), Willy Shakes could pander with the best of them.

From his 1st staged plays, his cycle about King Henry VI (reigned from 1422 to 1461), until the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, his acting troupe was known as The Lord Chamberlain's Men, and his plays made Elizabeth's family, the House of Tudor, and their predecessors, the House of Lancaster, look like heroes, or at least well-meaning in their failures; and made their arch-rivals, the House of York, especially King Richard III (1483 to 1485), look like villains.

When Elizabeth died, making King James VI of Scotland also King James I of England, Shakespeare turned coat faster than you can say, "Benedict Arnold." He renamed his troupe The King's Men. And Macbeth (the real one, apparently not a villain, reigned over Scotland not for a few weeks as the play suggests, but from 1040 to 1057) suggested a more noble lineage for James' family, the House of Stuart, than anyone had yet publicly alleged.

4. December 16, 1773: The Boston Tea Party. Was the dumping of the tea in Boston Harbor a patriotic act? Yes. Was it also a protest against taxation without representation? Yes. But it was more than that.

Keep in mind the science of the era. Water could be easily tainted, by man or nature (or, through improper sewage treatment, both). There was no real way to refrigerate liquids. The advent of pasteurization was about 90 years away, so milk did not last long before spoiling. Fruit juice, as we know it now, was not advisable, either.

So what did people drink back then? Liquids that did not need to be refrigerated. Tea. Coffee. Beer. Wine. Hard liquor. That's why they were so angry about the tax on tea: It wasn't just that it was done without their having a voting representative in the Parliament in London to weigh in on it, it made the stuff too expensive for them, and essentially took one of their few options away.

But who led the Boston Tea Party? Samuel Adams, the leading brewer of beer in British America at the time. And who was his best friend? John Hancock, the richest man in the colony of Massachusetts at the time. And how did Hancock get so rich? Shipping. Specifically, transporting liquor.

In other words, Adams was helping himself, and his pal Hancock, strike at their competition. The Boston Tea Party wasn't just good patriotism, it was good business. At least, until the British Army arrived. In that case, war was not good for business.

5. 1860-1865: Abe Lincoln and Slavery. Elected President in 1860, leading to the secession of 11 Southern States from the Union, Abraham Lincoln's goal in the American Civil War -- which the Confederacy, the South, started -- was to save the Union. The man's own words, in a letter to Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune and one of the nation's leading advocates for the abolition of slavery, dated August 22, 1862:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. 

Sounds like "Honest Abe" should have kept the truth to himself.

A month later, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, to take effect on January 1, 1863:

On the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free. 

There was just one problem: At the time, the Confederate States of America was, however despicable its reason for existence and its operation may have been, a sovereign nation. Lincoln had no legal authority to free the slaves in those States.

In those States that still had slavery, but remained in the Union -- Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri -- Lincoln left it alone.

Now, he did lobby for Congress to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which it did, and then passed on to the States for ratification, which they did -- the restored Georgia being the necessary 27th State to do so, on December 6, 1865, leading to Secretary of State William H. Seward declaring on December 18 that three-quarters of the States had done so, making the Amendment part of the Constitution, and it was on that date that slavery in America was abolished.

But Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, dying the next day. In other words, 8 months after he died, slavery was still not officially banned by the federal government. It can be argued that "the Great Emancipator," Abe Lincoln, never freed a single slave -- that it was the U.S. Army and Navy, and the Congress, and the States, that did so.

But they wouldn't have done so without him. Not without the words of his Inaugural Addresses in 1861 and 1865. Not without his Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. Not without his Gettysburg Address of 1863. Not without his re-election in 1864. And not without his lobbying for the Amendment.

6. 1933-1941: The New Deal. Accepting the Democratic nomination for President at Chicago Stadium on July 2, 1932, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York told the delegates, the spectators, and a nationwide radio audience, "I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people."

"A new deal." It was a great phrase, embracing the reforms of his cousin, the late Republican President of a previous generation, Theodore Roosevelt; but also those of his own political mentor, the late Democratic President of a previous generation, Woodrow Wilson.

TR had called his platform the Square Deal, and his programs were still popular. Wilson had called his the New Freedom, and, while America's membership in his League of Nations was soundly rejected, his domestic reforms remained successful and accepted.

In fact, when FDR wrote down the words "New Deal," he had no idea of what specifics it would entail. He just knew he had to do something, and to be seen as willing to do something, because his Republican opponent, the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, was largely seen as having done nothing.

When he was sworn into office on March 4, 1933, he and his advisors, the so-called Brain Trust, essentially made things up as they went along. Some of what they did was, in fact, based on the achievements of TR and Wilson. Some of it was based on what FDR, and before him Alfred E. Smith, had done as Governor of New York.

And some of it was even based on the reforms of Hoover. Anyone who says Hoover did nothing to alleviate the Great Depression is wrong, although it is completely fair to say he didn't do enough. FDR recognized that some of what Hoover did had worked a little bit, and that, if Hoover had done more of it, the Depression would have eased and possibly ended sooner, and FDR himself wouldn't have had a chance in 1932.

Furthermore, a lot of what FDR did required compromises with the Southern Democrats who ran key committees in both houses of Congress. This required him to back off on civil rights measures that might really have helped. FDR might have had the political clout to move civil rights forward, but he didn't think he could, because he needed those Southern barons too much. He didn't even try to move civil rights forward that much during World War II, when he had more political clout than any president has had, possibly ever.

7. 1945-1947: The Signing of Jackie Robinson. Branch Rickey, then president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, knew by 1945 that racially reintegrating Major League Baseball was now possible, with the death of racist Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, and his replacement by the more amenable, though Southern, Albert "Happy" Chandler. Rickey knew it was the morally right thing to do. He also realized that it was the competitively right thing to do: Get the best possible players, regardless of race, and you'll win more games.

He also realized that it was the financially right thing to do: Do the preceding, win more games, and you'll get more fans. But even before the winning gets rolling, black fans will want to come out and see black players. It was good citizenship. It was good baseball. And it was good capitalism. Or, as Rickey himself, about whom it was once said, "He had money and he had players, and he did not like to see the two mix," might have called it, a Triple Crown.

8. September 24, 1957: Dwight D. Eisenhower and Civil Rights. When "Ike" sent the 101st Airborne, one of the most elite units of the U.S. Army, for whom he had once been Chief of Staff, to protect the 9 black teenagers attempting to enroll in, and thus racially integrate, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, everyone who wasn't a bigot agreed that it was the right thing to do.

But Ike didn't do it because it was moral. He actually disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous decision, 3 years earlier, striking down all State and local laws segregating public school students. But, as President, he had taken an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Ike considered himself a man of his word, and he would protect the law, even though, in this case, he disagreed with it.

9. 1961-1963: John F. Kennedy and Civil Rights. JFK sent U.S. Marshals to Oxford, Mississippi to integrate the University of Mississippi in September 1962. When Governor Ross Barnett sent the Mississippi National Guard to stop them, JFK used his powers as Commander-in-Chief to federalize the National Guard, and there wasn't a damned thing Barnett could legally do.

In June 1963, another Southern Governor stood in the way, and he decided to make it literal: Governor George Wallace of Alabama made his "stand in the schoolhouse door," blocking the entrance to Foster Auditorium, the University of Alabama's basketball arena and registration building in Tuscaloosa, to prevent 2 black students from officially enrolling, which, under federal law, they had the right to do.

JFK's Attorney General, also his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, sent his Deputy, Nicholas Katzenbach, and some U.S. Marshals, down there, and Katzenbach told Wallace to get out or he would be arrested. Everyone remembers that Wallace stood there, but they tend to forget that, rather than be seen as a criminal, taken away in handcuffs, he backed down.

By this point, the Kennedy brothers had realized that assisting the progress of civil rights was the right thing to do in its own right. But they didn't always see it that way. They were Cold Warriors. JFK once said, "If we offer the developing world freedom, and the Communists offer them food, who are they going to turn to?"

It's worth going back to a speech that RFK made at the University of Georgia on May 6, 1961. That school's racial integration wasn't nearly as heated as would be "Ole Miss" the next year and "'Bama" the next. It was Law Day on the Athens, Georgia campus, and "UGa" wanted the nation's highest law enforcement official to speak. They got him, but they got something they hadn't bargained for: He framed integration as being not the product of interference from Communists abroad, as American racists had alleged, but as a weapon against such interference:

The time has long since arrived when loyal Americans must measure the impact of their actions beyond the limits of their own towns or States. For instance, we must be quite aware of the fact that 50 percent of the countries in the United Nations are not white; that, around the world in Africa, South America, and Asia, peoples whose skins are a different color than ours are on the move to gain their measure of freedom and of liberty.

From the Congo to Cuba, from South Vietnam to Algiers, in India, Brazil and Iran, men, women, and children are straightening their backs, and listening to the evil promises of Communist tyranny, and the honorable promises of Anglo-American liberty. And those people will decide not only their own future, but ours; how the cause of freedom fares around the world. That will be their decision.

In the United States, we are striving to establish a rule of law instead of a rule of force. In that forum, and elsewhere around the world, our deeds will speak for us.

In the worldwide struggle, the graduation at this university of Charlene Hunter and Hamilton Holmes will, without question, aid and assist the fight against Communist political infiltration, and even guerilla warfare.

When parents send their children to school this fall in Atlanta, peaceably and in accordance with the rule of law, barefoot Burmese and Congolese will see before their eyes Americans living by the rule of law.

It is possible to be noble and cynical at the same time. The Medicis proved it. So did Shakespeare. So did Samuel Adams, Lincoln, FDR, Branch Rickey and Eisenhower. Now, the Kennedys had proved it as well.

And John F. Kennedy would prove it one more time, although he would not live to see the final product, 50 years ago today:

10. July 20, 1969: The Moon Landing. On May 25, 1961, 43 days after Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin became the 1st human in space, and 20 days after Alan Shepard became the 1st American in space, JFK delivered an address to a Joint Session of Congress -- officially, not a State of the Union Address:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

On September 12, 1962, he went to Rice University in Houston, Texas, the hometown of the space center that directed America's manned space missions, which took off at Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic Coast of Florida:

Why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, Why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard! Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

In other words, "If we, as a nation, as a people, can do this, then we can do anything." Or, as we so often said after doing it, "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we (do something comparatively simple)?"

On July 20, 1969, at 4:17 PM U.S. Eastern Time, as part of the Apollo 11 mission, the lunar module Eagle landed on the lunar surface, on a part of the Moon that humans had named the Sea of Tranquility. Mission commander Neil Armstrong said, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." At 10:56 PM Eastern Time, Armstrong climbed out, went down the Eagle's ladder, and put his left foot on the Moon's surface, saying, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Over the next 3 and a half years, a total of 6 missions would land on the Moon, and many scientific advancements would result. But on December 14, 1972, Apollo 17 left the Moon, and no human has been back since. We've talked about it, but we haven't done it.

Why? Because, as big as it seemed, landing on the Moon wasn't just an achievement. To Kennedy, it was a message. Not so much to us, as to them. As the greatest astronomer of the 20th Century, Carl Sagan, put it in a CBS documentary on the event's 25th Anniversary in 1994, "The whole point of landing on the Moon was to beat the Russians. Once we beat the Russians, there was no point to it."

Of course, Sagan, one of the most imaginative men of his time, disagreed with that principle. But he had to accept it as fact. The American space program stalled, because Richard Nixon was now President, and he didn't seem to care about the next step, whatever that might have been. His successors seemed to care little, too. By the time we got another genuine science guy in the White House, Bill Clinton, the program had already been set so far back that all momentum had been lost.

Maybe if JFK had lived, he could have put the next step in place. Or, if Nixon had pursued space exploration as much as he had pursued, say, Détente with the Soviet Union and China, then, by the time he died in 1994, we could have had a permanent base on the Moon (as seen on the TV show Space: 1999, hopefully without the tragic result of that show's pilot), and we might even have landed on Mars.

But it didn't happen. And we may well be considerably poorer, in resources and in morale, for it.

UPDATE: In 2022, I read an article that said that the slogan, "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" was designed by the farm industry to sell more eggs. The slogan is true, especially in regard to protein, with which eggs are loaded. So the slogan is both good health and good capitalism.

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame NBC for Canceling Star Trek

L to R: James Doohan as Scotty, Walter Koenig as Chekov,

DeForest Kelley as McCoy, Majel Barrett as Chapel,

William Shatner as Kirk, Nichelle Nichols as Uhura,

Leonard Nimoy as Spock, and George Takei as Sulu.

September 8, 1966, 50 years ago today: The TV series Star Trek first airs on NBC, with the episode "The Man Trap" -- a.k.a. "The Space Vampire."

Here's the affiliates you could have watched it on, if you were in what would now be considered a "major league" city (note that not all of these are still NBC affiliates, or operating under the same call letters):

* Channel 2: WGRZ, Buffalo; WSB, Atlanta; KPRC, Houston; KUTV, Salt Lake City

* Channel 3: KYW, Philadelphia; WKYC, Cleveland; KSNV, Las Vegas; KCRA, Sacramento

* Channel 4: WNBC, New York; WRC, Washington; WBZ, Boston; WDIV, Detroit; WTMJ, Milwaukee; WSMV, Nashville; WDAF, Kansas City, KFOR, Oklahoma City; WOAI, San Antonio; KCNC, Denver; KNBC, Los Angeles; KRON, San Francisco

* Channel 5: WLTW, Cincinnati; WMC, Memphis; WMAQ, Chicago; KSDK, St. Louis; KXAS, Dallas; KING, Seattle

* Channel 6: WFBM, Indianapolis; WDSU, New Orleans

* Channel 7: WSVN, Miami

* Channel 8: WFLA, Tampa; KGW, Portland, Oregon

* Channel 9: WSOC, Charlotte

* Channel 10: KGTV, San Diego

* Channel 11: WBAL, Baltimore; WIIC, Pittsburgh, WTVD, Raleigh

* Channel 12: WTLV, Jacksonville; KPNX, Phoenix

The series depicted the USS Enterprise, a Starfleet starship with a crew of 430, representing the United Federation of Planets, a galactic version of the United Nations, headquartered on Earth, at some unspecified point in the future.

Since they didn't want to be locked into an exact time, they obscured this with the clever use of "Stardates." Despite at least 2 episodes suggesting that the series took place around 200 years later, later series would place it 300 years in the future -- i.e., the 1st episode took place in the year 2266.

The ship's mission -- partly invoking the late President John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" -- was written by series creator Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991), a former combat pilot in World War II and Los Angeles police officer, who pitched it to the network as "Wagon Train to the stars," in essence a Western in space. But with his ship's Captain, he was inspired by C.S. Forester's novels about Captain Horatio Hornblower, and he liked to call his adventures "Hornblower in space." Here is the mission, written by Roddenberry, and recited near the start of each episode by William Shatner:

Space: The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!

When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, Patrick Stewart, playing the Captain of the 24th Century edition of the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, adjusted it to say, "Its continuing mission" and the gender-non-specific "where no one has gone before!" Since Stewart is British, and Shatner is Canadian and thus has the British influence on language, they pronounced "civilizations" as "Siv-il-igh-zay-shuns," instead of "Siv-il-iz-ay-shuns," as Boston-born Leonard Nimoy, as Spock, said it in the movies.

The main cast:

* William Shatner (born 1931 and still alive at this writing), as Captain James Tiberius Kirk, Commanding Officer. (The 2nd pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," shows his middle initial as R., but this was changed.) At the time, Kirk was said to be the youngest starship captain in Starfleet history, but a list of his commendations in the episode "Court-Martial" shows his heroism to already be long-established. His idealism and his devotion to duty occasionally come into conflict, but he always ends up doing the right thing.

He needs both Spock for his logic and McCoy for his humanity. His devotion to his crew leads to some unorthodox thinking, which always works. And women of all kinds, human and otherwise, find him irresistible -- and vice versa. (Despite Eddie Murphy's comedy routine, he did not actually go beyond kissing a green woman. At least, not onscreen.)

* Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015), as Commander Spock, First Officer and Science Officer. (He had a first name, but he said the human mouth "couldn't pronounce it.") A native of the planet Vulcan, the son of the planet's Ambassador to the Federation and his human wife, he (as we would say today) self-identified as Vulcan, and worked toward their philosophy of seeking logic and repressing emotion, but struggled with his human half: "I survive it, because my intellect wins out over both." In spite of his detachment from emotion, he and Kirk confirmed to an outsider that they viewed each other as "brothers."

* DeForest Kelley (1920-1999), as Lieutenant Commander Leonard H. McCoy (it is never said what the H. stands for), Chief Medical Officer. From Georgia (the American State, not the former Soviet "republic"), his devotion to science is every bit as strong as Spock's, but his emotional outlook is a counterweight to Spock's logic. While they admire each other, they often argue.

Kirk calls him "Bones," short for "Sawbones," an old term for a doctor. The censors of the 1960s would never have let him say, "Damn it, man," or, "Damn it, Jim," as later portrayals of the character have,but, on 7 separate occasions during the series, he does say, or say a variation on, "I'm a doctor, not a (fill in the blank)!"

* James Doohan (1920-2005), as Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Edward Scott, Chief Engineer. From Aberdeen, Scotland, "Scotty" thinks of the Enterprise as his baby, and will do anything to protect it and its reputation. Fortunately, he might be the smartest human on board, and, as both engineer and as acting commanding officer when Kirk and Spock are down on a planet, he got the ship out of some serious jams.

The stereotypical Scotty line is, "I'm givin' it all she's got," but I don't think he ever said that during any of the show's 79 episodes. And the stereotypical line spoken to him, by Kirk, is, "Beam me up, Scotty," but that was never said, either. Usually, it was, "Energize," or, "(Number of personnel) to beam up."

* Nichelle Nichols (born 1932 and still alive), as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, Chief of Communications. (Her first name was never mentioned on the show. Despite lots of speculation, it was never confirmed until the 2009 reboot.) Although her specific place of origin has never been mentioned, she said that Swahili was her native language, thus suggesting she was born and raised in Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda in East Africa.

While a horribly underused character, and unfairly relegated to the role of the ship's "telephone operator" (a stereotypical job for women up until the 1970s), the fact that she was both a woman and a black person among the ship's senior officers, and didn't take any crap from anyone, was revolutionary for the 1960s. Indeed, in the episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion," she successfully fought off a rape attempt by a much larger man.

As Nichols had a professional music background, she was allowed to sing in 3 episodes. Despite having to wear a skimpy outfit in the episode "Mirror, Mirror" -- almost certainly, the most black female skin exposed on U.S. TV to that point -- that episode also showed Kirk's confidence in her, his respect for her, and her ability to make that confidence and respect pay off. The episode "Plato's Stepchildren" showed her having to kiss Kirk, usually cited as the 1st interracial kiss on U.S. TV. (Some Southern stations refused to show that episode.)

She wanted to quit after the 1st season to go back to music, but no less than Martin Luther King told her she needed to stay on, as an example. Both comedian Whoopi Goldberg (who went on to play Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation) and Dr. Mae Jemison (America's 1st black woman in space, who played a transporter operator on ST:TNG, making her the 1st real-life astronaut to appear on a Star Trek series), have cited her as a tremendous influence.

* George Takei (born 1937 and still alive), as Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, Chief Helmsman (His first name was never revealed until the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.) Like Star Wars creator George Lucas, Roddenberry was long fascinated by Asian culture, and wanted an Asian character among the bridge crew. Sulu was assigned to the ship's "astroscience" department in the 2nd pilot, but was moved to the helm for the main series.

Like Uhura, the other nonwhite character in the main cast, Sulu was grossly underused. So much so that, based on the original series alone, we probably know less about him than anyone else on the show. (Indeed, it wasn't until Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home that we found out that he was from San Francisco, rather than Japan as was long presumed.)

At least he wasn't a stereotype: Although the episode "Shore Leave" showed him facing a simulation of a samurai warrior, it also showed his interests in more modern firearms and botany. And "The Naked Time" showed he preferred a fencing foil to a samurai sword.

* Walter Koenig (born 1936 and still alive), as Ensign Pavel Andreievich Chekov, a young navigator introduced at the start of the 2nd season, because Roddenberry wanted to include a Russian character. To appeal to teenage viewers, he was given a hairstyle similar to Davy Jones of The Monkees. As Koenig said, "When people thought I was 22, Russian and single, I got more fan mail than anybody but Spock. When they found out I was 30, American and married, it dried up."

Brilliant but raw, his immaturity occasionally undermined his great capability. He was proud of his heritage, but mistakenly believed that many historical advancements and cultural icons were "invented in Russia."

* Majel Barrett (1932-2008), as Ensign Christine Chapel, McCoy's nurse. She later completed her studies, and was a full-fledged doctor in the movies. She has a hopeless crush on Spock.

Barrett was Roddenberry's girlfriend at the time, later his wife. She had played the First Officer, named only "Number One," in the show's 1st pilot, "The Cage," but the network balked at having a female officer ranked so high. She also voiced the computers on every Star Trek TV show and movie until the 2009 reboot, and played Ambassador Lxwana Troi, Denna's mother, on ST:TNG.

Shatner had appeared in 2 episodes of The Twilight Zone, an earlier series that dealt in fantasy: "Nick of Time" in 1960 and "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" in 1963. Nimoy had 1 line on the 1961 episode "A Quality of Mercy." Doohan was in the 1963 episode "Valley of the Shadow." Takei starred in the 1964 episode "The Encounter." But none of these episodes dealt with space travel.

In 1964, Shatner and Nimoy actually appeared onscreen together very briefly in "The Project Strigas Affair," an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Nimoy, Kelley and Doohan had appeared on the Western series Bonanza, where they caught the attention of Gene L. Coon, who wrote for that series, and wrote and produced for Star Trek -- he and Roddenberry often being called "The Two Genes."

Nimoy, Nichols, Koenig and Barrett had appeared on an earlier military-themed TV series created and written by Roddenberry, The Lieutenant, which starred Gary Lockwood, who was cast as the ill-fated First Officer, Lieutenant Gary Mitchell, in the 2nd Star Trek pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before." Lockwood's character, U.S. Marine Lieutenant William Rice, had the same middle name as Kirk: "Tiberius."

*

Today, it's easy to call Star Trek, especially the original series created by Roddenberry that ran from September 8, 1966 to June 6, 1969, a legend. Today, it's very difficult to see why such a groundbreaking, often wonderful (though also often campy and occasionally even ridiculous) show was nearly canceled after just 2 seasons, and was finally canceled after 3 seasons. Easy to see why it was brought back in movies and had later series based on it, yes; easy to see why NBC gave up on it originally, no.

Surely, there must be good reason why the Peacock Network dropped this ball...

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame NBC for Canceling the Original Star Trek Series

5. The Sale of Desilu Productions. Lucille Ball and her then-husband and then-costar Desi Arnaz founded this company in 1950, combining their names. It was very rare then -- and even in the Sixties -- for a woman or a non-Anglo to be in charge of a Hollywood production company, but Desilu had both. In 1962, after their divorce, Lucy bought out Desi's shares in the company.

Lucy loved Star Trek. After the first pilot, "The Cage," didn't get picked up in 1965, she stood up for it, and used her influence at NBC to tell the suits to give it another chance.

And Lucy loved Star Trek. And, being the boss,

she didn't have any 'splaining to do.

They did, and a second pilot was commissioned. With an entirely new cast except for Leonard Nimoy as Spock -- although, as I said, Majel Barrett would be cast in a new role -- "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was written and filmed. Jeffrey Hunter, who played Captain Christopher Pike in "The Cage," was not available, so William Shatner was cast as a new Captain, James T. Kirk. NBC liked the new version, and set it up for the 1966-67 season.

In February 1967, Lucy sold Desilu to Gulf & Western, which had just bought Paramount Pictures. G&W turned Desilu into Paramount Television. Paramount, on screens both small and large, has run Star Trek ever since.

Paramount Television's original logo

Without its biggest backer, Lucy, on hand to speak up for it, Star Trek lacked the star power it needed. It would be as if, today, Jerry Seinfeld, a star of the era of TV before the current era, were now running a TV studio, and had backed a groundbreaking new show, but split with his wife, and sold off his shares in order to pay her a settlement, and it died without him to watch over it.

4. 2001: A Space Odyssey. It changed the rules for special effects in science fiction. Before Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, Star Trek was considered a big leap forward over the sci-fi films of the 1950s, and also over the biggest sci-fi TV series before it, Captain Video and His Video Rangers (1949-55) and Lost In Space (1965-68).

Once people saw 2001, with all its flaws -- including its long, wordless, classical-music-backed montages that made the film at least 15 minutes longer than it needed to be (and ended up inadvertently inspiring Star Trek: The Motion Picture a decade later) -- people saw Star Trek's red skies, papier-mâché boulders and rubber-masked aliens, and realized, "Hey, they could have done a lot better."

A still from 2001

Of course, they couldn't -- because, in the days before computer-generated imagery (CGI), science fiction cost a hell of a lot of money to produce. This was also a reason that neither the original Battlestar Galatica or the 1970s version of Buck Rogers (which was so campy it made the 1960s Batman series look like The Dark Knight) only lasted 2 seasons each. If Star Trek could have been made even more cheaply, NBC would have done it.

Kirk fighting a Gorn captain in "Arena"

In fact, they did, in the 3rd season, 1968-69. Which certainly didn't help things for...

3. Fred Freiberger. He had produced Ben Casey and The Wild Wild West with few problems. But when Roddenberry quit as, as we would say today, showrunner after the 2nd season, 1967-68, NBC hired Freiberger, and dealt him a rotten hand -- which he completely misplayed.

He looks more like a villain that Kirk had to take down

than an admiral (or a director) fit to give him orders.

He proved himself a well-meaning incompetent, particularly where science fiction was concerned. The 3rd season of Star Trek included few good episodes, and some laughable ones. The season premiere was "Spock's Brain." It was the only original series episode to have a character's name in the title, and when people talk about how ridiculous Star Trek was, this is the 1st episode they mention.

It actually got worse: "The Paradise Syndrome" ("Behold: A god who bleeds!"), "And the Children Shall Lead" (a ghostly Melvin Belli leads super-powered children to take over the ship), "Wink of an Eye" (a society moving at superspeed needs fertile men), "The Mark of Gideon" (a story about overpopulation that could have been a great one, but was totally blown), "The Lights of Zetar" (another interesting idea that bombed), "Requiem for Methuselah" (the crew encounter Methuselah, King Solomon, Alexander the Great, Lazarus, Merlin, Johannes Gutenberg, Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Brahms, and they're all the same guy), "The Way to Eden" (space hippies, Chekov's girlfriend, "Herbert!"), "The Cloud Minders" (a story about the class gap between rich and poor, another good idea made ridiculous), "The Savage Curtain" (meeting Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, and the founders of Vulcan and Klingon civilization, and, no, they're not all the same guy, and this was a great idea that was absolutely butchered), and, the last episode to air, "Turnabout Intruder" (a story rendered stupid by the rise of feminism in the next few years, and by later Trek shows and films that showed female starship captains).

In 1972, Freiberger became the producer of the cartoon Josie and the Pussycats -- already a dumb idea, since it was a teenage rock band that solved mysteries, essentially a combination of The Monkees and Scooby-Doo. He made it Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. No, I'm not making that up. He made it up.

In 1975, he was handed the reins of Space: 1999, to make the British series (albeit with American stars Martin Landau and Barbara Bain) more accessible to Americans. He changed the cast, and, as was the problem on Star Trek, it became less about the story and more about the action. That 2nd season was the last.

He was handed the reins of The Six Million Dollar Man for its 5th season, 1977-78. Let's just say that, unlike Colonel Steve Austin when he got his bionic body parts, it was not better than it was before. It was canceled. He had the Reverse Midas Touch: Everything he touched turned to crap.

In her memoir, Nichelle Nichols tried to absolve Freiberger for the demise of the show:

I know that some fans hold him responsible for the show's decline, but that is not fair. Star Trek was in a disintegrating orbit before Fred came aboard. That we were able to do even what we did is a miracle and a credit to him. 

William Shatner has also gone out of his way to say Freiberger shouldn't be blamed. But, in an interview for a book about the show, James Doohan ripped him: "Fred Freiberger had no idea what he was doing. He was just a line producer, suddenly handed creative control over a show that was like nothing else on television."

And Martin Landau wasn't forgiving of what he did with Space: 1999, telling him:

I'm not going out on a limb for this show, because I'm not in accord with what you're doing as a result... I don't think I even want to do the promos. I don't want to push the show any more as I have in the past. It's not my idea of what the show should be.

Contrary to what I had previously thought, Freiberger had nothing to do with Mission: Impossible, which was also a Desilu/Paramount production, and premiered on CBS just 9 days after Star Trek, running until 1973. Like Space: 1999 later would, it featured Landau and his then-wife Barbara Bain. After Star Trek was canceled, Landau and Bain left M:I. Nimoy was hired, as "The Great Paris" (real name never revealed), a magician and master of disguise like Landau's character Rollin Hand.

2. Political Correctness -- 1960s Style. Since the term first gained wide usage in the early 1990s, "political correctness" has come to mean "liberalism." But the backlash that came at it during the Space Age was much more effective than what conservatives have been able to do it in the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama years.

After 15 or so years of the Civil Rights Movement, 8 years of the New Frontier of JFK and the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, 4 years of inner-city race riots, 3 years of protests against the U.S. military effort in Vietnam, and the previous year's "Summer of Love" with its hippies and its so-called free love and its drugs, tempered by the worst of the riots, by late 1968, people were tired of being preached to about peace and harmony and brotherhood.

With Robert Kennedy dead, Gene McCarthy's supporters demoralized, and people who would normally have supported Hubert Humphrey not convinced he was going to end the war, millions of Democrats either stayed home, or voted for Richard Nixon because he promised to end the war. Many others left the Democrats over race, and voted for Nixon or George Wallace because of their pledges to "restore law and order."

The 1968 election can be viewed as close, as Nixon won by only 520,000 popular votes, 43.4 percent to Humphrey's 42.7 percent. But that was good for 301 Electoral Votes to HHH's 191, and Wallace's 46. Throw in the people who voted for Wallace, and, of the people who actually showed up to vote, just under 58 percent of the popular vote, and 347 Electoral Votes, went to candidates who voted to crack down on blacks and student demonstrators, and thought the way to end the Vietnam War was to win it, and thought the way to win it was to escalate it.

Does this look like someone who would

willingly watch Star Trek? No, he looks like a "Herbert."

The general public was no longer interested in hearing Jim Kirk talk about man reaching for the stars and peaceful coexistence, or Spock talking about logic. They were more likely to listen to Scotty say one of the few lines of the main cast that could be considered conservative: "The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank!"

The cancellation of Star Trek was unfortunate. But it was not a tragedy. An actual tragedy is Reason Number 1 why you can't blame NBC for canceling it:

1. The Apollo 1 Fire. In the Star Trek episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" -- 1 of 10 episodes written by Dorothy Fontana, who had to use her initials, "D.C. Fontana," because studios either didn't want women writing TV shows, or didn't want it known that they were writing them -- the Enterprise is accidentally hurled back in time.

Uhura intercepts a TV broadcast saying that the first manned mission to the Moon will be launched on the following Wednesday. (It was, indeed, launched on a Wednesday: July 16, 1969. Granted, Fontana had a 1-in-7 chance, 14.3 percent, of getting that right, and those aren't especially long odds, but she did guess right!) Kirk heard this, and said, "But that was in the late 1960s!" Spock answered, "Evidently, so are we."

Fontana couldn't possibly have known in late 1966 exactly when the 1st successful mission would be launched. She only knew of what JFK said in his address to Congress on May 25, 1961: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to Earth." So she wrote, "in the late 1960s."

This looks like a man who would would watch Star Trek

-- if not a cosplaying "Trekkie."

"Tomorrow Is Yesterday" was broadcast on January 26, 1967. The very next day, astronauts Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom (one of the original "Mercury 7," whose name would be used for a ship in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock), Edward H. White II (the 1st American to make a spacewalk), and Roger B. Chaffee (a Navy pilot and engineer who was preparing for his 1st spaceflight) were undergoing a rehearsal for the launch of Apollo 1, meant to launch on February 21. An electrical fire spread through the capsule, killing them. (Grissom was 40 years old, White 36, Chaffee 31.)

L to R: Ed White, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee

The tragedy set the U.S. space program back. The 1st manned Apollo flight, Apollo 7, wouldn't get off the ground until October 11, 1968 -- almost 2 years later, and putting JFK's end-of-decade (December 31, 1969) goal in serious jeopardy.

The last episode of Star Trek to get a first-run airing, "Turnabout Intruder," got it on June 6, 1969. Everyone figured that was the end. On July 20, 1969, just 44 days later, during Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. As Roddenberry put it, "Suddenly, people going into space and exploring strange new worlds didn't seem so far-fetched anymore."

"That's one small step for a man,

one giant reason to believe in Gene Roddenberry's vision."

Star Trek caught on in syndication, airing on what were then "independent" TV stations, like New York's WPIX-Channel 11. NBC didn't want the show anymore, so it was cheap for these stations to air. Low risk, and any reward was nice. The reward turned out to be huge: As with 1950s shows The Honeymooners and The Adventures of Superman, the late 1960s Batman series, and, later, the original, early 1970s version of The Odd Couple, Star Trek brought those stations higher ratings than did the old movies they were airing. Star Trek got a new life, making possible not only its movies and its later series, but Star Wars and the other sci-fi film epics of the late 1970s and afterward.

But had the Apollo 1 fire not happened, the 1st Moonwalk might have happened months or even a year earlier, during Star Trek's 3rd season. It might have made people hungrier for a show about the exploration of space, boosted the ratings, and saved the show.

We'll never know what kind of episodes we would have seen had "its five-year mission" been completed. The show's legacy clearly didn't need it. But, as fan series such as Star Trek: New Voyages and Star Trek Continues have shown, it would have been nice to find out. And so, we can speculate.

Kirk: "Is that the logical thing to do?"

Spock: "No. But it is the human thing to do."

The main cast during filming of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,

1991, the last film with all of them together:

Koenig, Takei, Kelley, Nichols, Shatner, Doohan, Nimoy

And what we do have has served us well.