This week, we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of man’s alleged landing on the moon.

Newsrooms across the country started firin’ off phone calls to talk to someone who was connected. One of my coworkers interviewed the mayor of Wapakoneta, Ohio, where Neil Armstrong was born.

Loyal Scaiaholics will recall I’m an Ohio native, so I sidled up to him while he was on the phone and interrupted, whispering loudly, “Call it Wapok! If you call it Wapok, you’ll sound like a local.”

I, meanwhile, interviewed Gerald Griffin, the flight director for Apollo 11. This is his NASA photo from when he was director of the Johnson Space Center a few years later.

Griffin lives in the Hill Country now, but he grew up in Fort Worth and was inducted into Fort Worth ISD’s Wall of Fame earlier this year.

He was kind enough to agree to a phone interview a few days ago. I want to emphasize “kind enough” because when I called his house, his wife couldn’t have been nicer.

She explained that he was in California at a press event at the moment, and he’d only be back briefly before he leaves for Houston for the anniversary.

“But if you call Friday about 10:30, I can make sure he has a few minutes,” she explained.

I did call back, and we talked for more than a few minutes. Turns out guiding a space ship to the moon is a very interesting subject. Some clips from the interview are at that link. We talked for about half an hour.

Griffin sounded stately, like Carl Sagan, explaining that he’s an engineer by trade. As such, he’s not worried about global warming or wasting resources; he said the issue is population growth, and there will be too many of us for the amount of resources available [Frankly, there might be too many of us now. Are ya with me, I-30 commuters?!]. He wants us to get back to the moon to set up a colony, then go on to Mars and look at interstellar travel so we can find another planet that can sustain life and spread out a bit.

I, meanwhile, sounded like an old man, questioning whether punk kids today with their cell phones would be able to accomplish anything.

Griffin countered, saying those kids are walking around with more computing power in their pocket than Apollo 11 had on the entire ship.

Funded properly, he says that generation walking into NASA now will be the ones to figure out how to set up a permanent settlement on the moon. We’ll use that to get to Mars.

He said he had no idea when he graduated college that he’d be working on a mission to the moon ten years later. Imagine, then, what a kid graduating today could figure out.

In conclusion, I grew up not too far from Wapok. I love going home at Christmas or if my brother in California and I can coordinate a trip home during the year. But after I graduated high school, I went to Indiana to attend Ball State. Then Florida. Then Oregon. Then Texas. My brother splits time between California and Montreal.

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, is from Wapakoneta. The Wright Brothers were also from Dayton and invented powered flight.

Turns out, people will do anything to get out of Ohio.

Ohioans tell that joke all the time. Feel free to use that one, gang.