Word: splashdowns
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...returned safely from his assignment, back to the newspaper office with its hundreds of square yards of carpeting. Apollo 11 was coming back, too, and everyone crowded around the six huge American color television sets for splashdown...
...with any overwhelming event, the fallout was widespread and sometimes offbeat. Scores of children born last week were named "Apollo" or "Moon," "Tranquillity" or "Luna." The Siam Motor Works offered scholarships from primary school through university for the Thai children born nearest the exact moments of lunar landing and splashdown. The Berlin Zoo christened three wildcat cubs born during the moon walk Neil, Buzz and Mike. For a "moon happening" in Vienna, a bakery produced a 300-lb., 6-ft. cake decorated with marzipan craters...
...girls, waving miniature American flags, and pushing each other -fully clothed-into pools. The kissing never stopped. The noise level was astronomical. And so it should have been: the NASA communities of Houston, Huntsville and Cocoa Beach had sent three men to the moon and back. The revelry at splashdown time was fittingly feverish...
Meanwhile, in Huntsville, Ala., site of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the moment of splashdown set off a screaming cacophony of sirens and church bells. With the town at a total standstill for two hours, there was time for a crowd of 8,000 to gather at the courthouse square to greet Rocket Engineer Wernher Von Braun. Von Braun was hoisted off his feet by the sheriff and three city councilmen and carried through the cheering crowd-an experience, he said, that "must have been as thrilling as riding one of our Saturn 5s into space...
Despite the wild enthusiasm, there was little harm done at any of the splashdown brawls. Drunken geologists in Houston paraded around with a decorative boulder they had taken from a motel courtyard, explaining that it was a moon rock. A few barefoot guests at the Nassau Bay motel poolside picked up splinters from broken glasses and bottles. And the four-man police force of the city of Webster (adjacent to the Manned Spacecraft Center) gently arrested a dozen happy drunks. The county sheriff's officers, however, seemed unable to find any wrongdoers. "This was a proud crowd," explained Captain...