Some moon landing memories from our CBC listeners

Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

CBC's Morning North reached out to its listeners for their memories of that big day.

Beth on Manitoulin Island was a junior counsellor at a children's camp in 1969. The camp director arranged for a black and white television to be brought in to camp to watch the landing.

"I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin with 75 8-year-olds and about 25 adult staff in a darkened dining hall," she said. "The TV had been put up on a few of the dining room tables so that the children who were seated on the floor could have a better look."

"My memory is that the TV images were very grainy and a little hard to decipher initially. Strangely enough, later that same year I went to Australia as an exchange student and it was there that I learned of Parkes, New South Wales and their radio telescope that had been the relay for the images of the moonwalk, six months earlier."

Mike Essex, from Guelph, was a camp counselor at a YMCA camp near Bancroft.

"The night of the landing we took a television outside," he said. "We put rabbit ears on top, fooling around because the signal was so terrible but there we all were. All the campers, all the counsellors looking up at a bright clear moon as the first astronauts landed there."

"It's one of those magical things," he said. "I'm almost 70 now but I can remember it as if it was yesterday. It's kind of fun remembering all this great stuff."

Tom Linklater was the superintendent of Sibbald Point Provincial Park in 1969.

"People were coming to me and asking to take a plug-in TV to our washroom," he said. "We didn't have any electricity in the park at that time except our washrooms. I didn't think ita very good idea and said 'no it wouldn't work.'"

Instead, Linklater made use of the park's outdoor amphitheatre, which had a rear-screen projection booth. He rented three televisions, put them on stage, and ran audio through the amphitheatres' system. Then he sent word to campers that the Apollo landing would be shown.

"That night had about between 200, 300 people that came and it was pretty great in that it was outdoors, and as the moon was rising just above the roof of the projection booth, that's when the man landed on the moon," he said.

"People came and said it was much better than trying to watch their television at home because the atmosphere was so great that they could see the moon, and the pictures of the man landing on it. So I was quite fond of myself for coming up with that idea."