Late on the evening of July 20, 1969, Susan J. Clements sat in her pajamas on a bench in the dining hall at Camp Seven Hills in Holland and watched the grainy footage on TV.

Ernst Both, then an astronomer at the Buffalo Science Museum, was in Ocean City, N. J., watching the broadcast at a neighbor’s house because his vacation home didn’t have telephone or television service.

Rita LoTempio was in a delivery room at Sisters Hospital, hours away from giving birth.

Jacek Wysocki was glued to the TV, though he had to get up early the next day to take the New York State bar exam.

“Everybody was up so late. Of course, after it was over, you couldn’t fall asleep because you were so excited,” said Wysocki, a North Buffalo lawyer who remains a fan of space exploration to this day. “It was surreal.”

These are just some of the stories local residents shared as Western New York and the rest of the nation prepared to celebrate today, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.

Watching Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon created an indelible memory for everyone, but for some it inspired a life-changing passion.

“That was when I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. That shaped my whole life,” said Allison O’Connor, who never made it into space but is an aerospace engineer today.

Ties to local firms

The Apollo 11 mission — which was the first to send a crew to the moon and bring it safely back to Earth — was a staggering scientific achievement, and several local firms played key roles.

Engineers at Bell Aerospace, Moog, Taylor Devices and Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, among others, helped design, test and build everything from sections of the rocket to the soles of the astronauts’ boots.

“Doing that with 1960s technology is really remarkable,” said Hugh M. Neeson, who joined Bell in 1955 and is now director of development for the Niagara Aerospace Museum. “They say a cell phone has more computational power than was used on the flight of Apollo.”

America’s exploration of new interplanetary frontiers was set against this country’s bitter Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, which had taken the lead in the space race.

The mission to the moon is remembered as a unifying touchstone that came during an era in which the country was rocked by the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the hippie counterculture.

“As a nation, to some degree, that’s what we needed at the time,” said Cherie Messore, who was 10 years old then and today is director of development for Adoption STAR, a not-for-profit adoption agency.

The Apollo 11 mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s bold vision for the country outlined eight years earlier.

The United States had struggled to keep up with its bitter Soviet rivals, who were first to launch a satellite and, later, a person into space.

Some worried a trip to the moon was something that could not, or should not, be done.

“My grandmother, who was elderly at the time, said, ‘Billy, I don’t think God meant us to go to the moon,’ ” said Bill Shempp, a Bell engineer.

But the task motivated the people working on the space program and made them feel part of a patriotic mission.

Many of those engineers worked at local companies, including Bell Aerospace, which helped

design both the ascent engine that lifted the lunar excursion module (LEM) safely off the moon

and a lunar landing training vehicle that allowed the astronauts to get used to piloting the

LEM.

“We had a lot of spirit. Nobody was taking vacations,” said Shempp, who was director of Minuteman engineering for Bell in 1969 and retired from the company in 1986.

Moog Inc. of Elma designed some of the controls that helped stabilize the Saturn rocket.

Kintex Inc. of Cheektowaga produced the corrugated metal soles on the boots worn by Armstrong as he took his small step.

And a North Tonawanda firm, Taylor Devices, designed shock absorbers on the seven large arms that connected the Saturn rocket to its gantry as it waited on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The shock absorbers ensured that the arms wouldn’t cause damage as they fell away during lift-off.

“My dad liked to say, ‘We were the last to touch the rocket when it left the launch pad, and we made sure to give it a gentle kiss as it left,’ ” said Doug Taylor, president of Taylor Devices, referring to his late father, Paul.

‘Like rock stars’

Every launch was highly publicized and covered live on the three major networks.

“The astronauts then were like rock stars. We knew all their names,” said Clements, who watched the landing at camp.

The eight-day Apollo 11 mission was followed closely from the beginning, and excitement grew as the nation prepared for the landing of the “Eagle” lunar module — carrying Armstrong and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. on July 20. Michael Collins remained in the command module.

Both, the astronomer, was on vacation in New Jersey and had to go to a neighbor’s home to watch the landing and conduct a phone interview with a radio host back in Buffalo.

“It was overwhelming, because I’d always dreamed about people going to the moon,” said Both, a North Collins resident.

LoTempio, who was then living in North Buffalo, went into labor on the evening of July 20.

“I remember listening to [the build-up] on the radio on the way to the hospital,” said LoTempio. “My husband watched it in the waiting room.”

She gave birth to a son at 5 a. m. July 21 — choosing the name David instead of Apollo or Neil—and she watched a replay of the landing afterward.

Clements was 13 and in the middle of a two-week stay at the camp in Holland. She and 200 or 300 other girls carried flashlights as they walked to the camp dining hall in their pajamas to watch the landing.

The distracted campers sat in rows on wooden benches and sang songs as they waited for the landing, which took place at 10:56 p. m. local time.

“At one point, while we were waiting, someone spotted a bat flying in the rafters,” said Clements, now publicity coordinator with Niagara University’s Castellani Art Museum.

Viewers remember the poor quality of the video, the shadowy black-and-white footage and the grainy snow that rippled across the screen as they watched the historic moment.

An estimated 500 million people worldwide watched the landing, the largest TV audience up to that time. Locally, Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. reported a surge in electricity use from all those TV sets.

The Buffalo Evening News screamed the news of the landing in a giant banner headline, “We Walk on Moon: ‘A Leap for Mankind.’ ”

“I think it was a very symbolic thing that we’d finally done it, we’d beaten the Russians and proven our prowess,” said Elayne Rapping, a University at Buffalo pop culture expert.

The mission came at a time of great social and cultural upheaval, Rapping noted. It was set against a backdrop of assassination, war, riots and protests on college campuses and in inner cities and the hippie movement defined by Woodstock.

Uplifting event

“It was a very substantially uplifting event for the country. It was unifying,” said Wysocki, the lawyer.

For others, Apollo 11 had a personal impact, inspiring some to become astronauts, astronomers or rocket engineers.

O’Connor was 9 and enthralled as she watched from her family’s Cleveland-area home.

She got an internship with NASA in Ohio that later led to a full-time job there, then spent 11 years at Calspan before moving to AMPAC In-Space Propulsion, a company with a facility in Wheatfield that shares an engineering heritage with Bell.

She never became an astronaut—“ I didn’t have enough of the ‘Right Stuff’ ” she said—but now is AMPAC’s director of engineering.

For those who hoped the Apollo program would lead to permanent colonies on the moon and more extensive manned space exploration, the past 40 years have been mildly disappointing.

A shift in national priorities and funding limits led NASA to turn instead to unmanned probes, the space shuttle program and the international space station, experts said.

“The country’s needs changed,” said Taylor, the president of Taylor Devices.

No one has set foot on the moon since the last Apollo mission in December 1972.

But NASA is replacing the shuttle with a new generation of launch vehicles and spacecraft that should, over the next decade, take astronauts back to the moon and beyond.

“We lost 20 years,” said O’Connor, “but I think we’re getting back to it now.”