Journal Contributor Gary Schroeder writes:
Born just three months before the first Saturn V flew in November of 1967, I have no direct recollections of the Apollo program. 'Though I'm pleased to
say I was alive when Neil Armstrong first set foot upon the moon, I've
always felt cheated that I 'missed' the whole affair by just a few years.
I suppose my intense interest in Apollo began when I was in sixth grade and accidentally discovered that there had been additional landings beyond Apollo 11. (To kids of my generation, almost no history of the space race was ever taught. If you learned it at all, you learned it on your own.) I hit the school library shortly after that searching for information. I was quickly frustrated by what was available. Most books in my library were written before Apollo 11 occurred. Those few that were written post-1969 gave no information on subsequent missions. For a long time, the best info source I could find were the wonderful issues of National Geographic bound for posterity in the dusty periodicals section. NG gave terrific coverage photo coverage of the later missions. From then on, I was hooked on all things Apollo.
The frustration with the lack of anything other than the most commonly repeated basic facts and pictures from Apollo continued well into the late 1980's. And then... an information explosion occurred not only through new books, but that strange invention called the world wide web. The advent of the web unleashed a torrent of rare images, texts, manuals, and other goodies. One of those gems was the ALSJ. It was the first authoritative on-line Apollo reference that I ever managed to stumble across. I recall e-mailing Eric early on (in 1995), gushing about what a wonderful project I thought he had undertaken. Indeed, my awe at what he accomplished has only increased in the years since then. I'm very proud to have contributed in some small way to this effort. Finally, all those kids out there who want to know all there is to know about mankind's greatest adventure will have that opportunity.
Gary Schroeder 6 July 2001