The Moon Landing: An Original Recording

On the night of July 20, 1969, something happened that had never been witnessed in all of history: Two humans appeared on the Luna surface, clad in airtight spacesuits, bouncing about the basalt rich Sea of Tranquility in 1/6 gravity for 156 minutes while 400,000 kilometers away on Planet Earth 700 million people watched the grainy black and white transmitted images. Among those millions rapped to their televisions and radios was Pete Dawson, a sawmill foreman from Saskatchewan. That evening in the living room of his southeastern Vancouver home, Pete Dawson placed a 225-foot Allegro magnetic acetate recording tape into the left spindle of his Model RQ-156S Panasonic Solid State Tape Recorder and nudged the attachable microphone up to the speaker on his Admiral Imperial 23 Television set. For the next 48 minutes, as the supply reel fed into the takeup reel, Pete Dawson recorded history.

Pete Dawson passed away in 1997. In 2008, his wife Lillian was forced to leave the home she and her husband had shared for almost fifty years, giving her immediate family the Herculean task of cleaning out a house which two people with Depression-era mentality had stocked with more than six decades of collected memories. In 2009, during that very cleanup, I came into possession of Uncle Pete's tape recorder and a stack of his acetate tapes. The tapes, some pushing forty years, had been sitting on a shelf under the dining room window, exposed to the sun's heat and gathering a layer of dust. A couple tapes had warped around the reels; a number were still blank. The pencil writing on the cases had faded, and most of the one or two-line blurs hardly bespoke their contents. The marking on one such box simply read, "The Moon". I thought, "No Way!"

The first time I wound this tape between the spindles it slowed to a crawl halfway through the first side. I found a period guidebook from the local library for cleaning tape recorders, and used up a box of Q-tips and some rubbing alcohol to free the interior of dust and dead bugs. My uncle had saved everything: included with the tape recorder were its instruction manual, a "Directory of Servicenters", and a period catalogue of Panasonic products (including their brand new compact cassette tapes, familiar to people my age). Some of the tapes still had prices affixed to their cases from the now defunct Eaton's department store.

The quality of the proceeding recording varies and understandably so: it has changed formats no less than four times and gone through four decades of technology from television, to tape, to digital flash card, and finally into Vegas Movie Studio.
Highlights from this ten-minute excerpt of that evening's CBS Evening News broadcast with Walter Cronkite include*:
Buzz Aldrin joins Neil Armstrong in "magnificent desolation"
The Astronauts setup and read a plaque
The Astronauts setup the American Flag
President Nixon makes "the most historic phone call ever made from the White House"
*Alas, my uncle started recording too late to catch Armstrong's "one small step" on The Moon

Lillian Petterson passed away on June 21, 2009. She was 93.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• NASA
• Apollo
• 11
• Neil
• Armstrong
• Buzz
• Aldrin
• The
• Moon
• Landing
• 1969
• History
• 20th
• Century
• Space
• Exploration

[CassetteMaster]

I have that model Panasonic, but only difference is the speaker grille is tiny holes instead of horizontal line vents. Indeed a nice recorder.

[MChelada]

@CassetteMaster Indeed. Thanks for sharing. You have an impressive collection :)

[CorgiConnect]

Great story and a great clip, thank you!!!

[MChelada]

@CorgiConnect And thank you for taking the time to visit :)

[gli7utubeo]

I had that Pana. 156S machine and I recorded the coverage too on it!

[MChelada]

@gli7utubeo Awesome! But do you still have it?

[MChelada]

Thanks =^_^=

It is so tactile to feed the spools of tape through the machine and watch them spin as the recording plays; it feels more actual.

[SirFoggy2Doped]

Man this is cool! ^_^

Recording sounds good for being so old and everything:)

Seeing that old Panasonic makes me want to find one on Ebay now,I love vintage technology ^_^

[MChelada]

Thank you dear. :)

[HeartbreakersMuse]

Michael, this is awesome!!! Great post, sweetheart!!! *****