If you look closely, you can spot something very interesting in the NYTimes on the jump page of John Noble Wilford’s obituary for Neil Armstrong. The online and print editions of the Times show an image of the front page from July 21, 1969, the day after the Apollo 11 crew landed on the moon and Armstrong took his famous first steps. Take a magnifying glass and check out the byline for the story on the right, headlined A Powdery Surface is Closely Explored. It’s by John Noble Wilford. You can read the entire text of that story here:
That’s quite a span of writing from the well-known Times correspondent. Another thing you might notice about the obituary is that it’s extremely detailed considering how little time had elapsed between the announcement of Armstrong’s death and the deadline, which must have been Saturday night. Readers can learn about Armstrong’s military service, 78 combat missions in the Korea War, his work as a test pilot, and the outstanding qualities that catapulted him into the astronaut corps.
There’s also a fascinating interlude from one of Armstrong’s biographies about his disappointment that we was born too late to break the sound barrier first. And he feared that Chuck Yeager’s feat left no history-making contribution for him.
The key point here is that you don’t have to wait until people die before you write their obituaries. Much of yesterday’s story could easily have been reported and written long ago. There’s nothing wrong – or morbid – about writing obituaries for people who are perfectly healthy. Additional details and updates can always come later and in most cases, the part about the actual death is a very small portion of the entire story.
Writing advance obits is standard practice at newspapers. It would be downright disrespectful for the paper of record to cobble something together at the last minute for Neil Armstrong. Good obituaries are stories about a life, after all.
*UPDATE:
Science writer Seth Borenstein of AP adds that he updated his Armstrong obit two weeks ago. While he can’t boast that he’s old enough to have covered the original moon landing in 1969, he did co-write a detailed, fascinating obituary for the first man to walk on the moon. The detailed AP version, he said, came out before the Times version. It also includes Armstrong’s recent plea to continue government-funded manned space exploration:
A man who kept away from cameras, Armstrong went public in 2010 with his concerns about President Barack Obama's space policy that shifted attention away from a return to the moon and emphasized private companies developing spaceships. He testified before Congress, and in an email to The Associated Press, Armstrong said he had "substantial reservations."
Along with more than two dozen Apollo-era veterans, he signed a letter calling the plan a "misguided proposal that forces NASA out of human space operations for the foreseeable future."
There’s also a clarification of that famous quote: Armstrong says it should be “one small step for a man…” which makes much more sense than the quote as commonly heard.
– Faye Flam
Leave a Reply