November 1957, I was 2 and ½ years old. It was the North Shore of Long Island, we lived at 2 Haven Court, in Centerport, our backyard was on the water and my parents and some other people were sitting in a circle, late in the evening outside under the stars. It was a beautiful evening, hauntingly beautiful and the dark was so lovely and mysterious to look through, through my little child eyes. My mother sat with a dress on, on an Adirondak chair and the other adults sat in chairs like this too and some metal ones also. The adults were all talking together and stood at my mom’s chair, in front of it and put my hands on the broad flat arm of the chair for a little extra balance. If I remember I was wearing a little pinafor and mary janes … My mom asked me to look up and she pointed back behind me into the night sky. There was a star moving quickly along a straight path across the darkness, right past all of the other stationary stars in the sky. She told me that it was Sputnick and it was the first satellite to be put into space and it was done by Russia, that they had beat us and we were in a cold war against them. And this made them somewhat ahead.

Oddly, my two year old brain completely “got it”. I had questions in my mind about just who these Russians are and just how much of an enemy are they, and when are we going to be ahead … but otherwise, I somehow think I pretty much got the idea about what a satellite was and it’s significance in the Space Race.

Sputnick wrote indelibly it’s image on my little 2 year old mind.


Two years later, I have a little sister, and we are living in North Bellmore, NY. My Uncle Donny is living in the little apartment next door … He is like having a second Daddy and I love him very much. He is great fun. Very smart and quick and lovingly good with us kids and is sometimes left to babysit us. Which is fine with me. Uncle Donny works for Grumman and loves planes and we sometimes go with him and mom and sit underneath the planes coming in at the airport. We pull up in the car with lawn chairs and sit near a tall chain link fence right under the landing pattern for the planes and sit and play while mom and him talk. There is a sense of excitment when a plane comes in and we look up overhead at the landing gear and tail and wings and stuff. Uncle Donny loves those planes. Uncle Alli did too. But he is another story.


So, one evening, my sister and I are being babysat by Uncle Donny (Uncle Knock Knock) and he gets pretty serious and starts to explain something to us. That we are, the United States, planning on sending a man to the moon. And that Uncle Donny was going to have to design the legs that would hold it up when it lands. And he had a lot of decisions to make about how those legs would work and we didn’t even know what the moon surface was like. It may be really soft and the landing module would just sink into it and disappear. We just didn’t know.


So, he wanted us to think about it and what it was going to take to make the legs safe for it to land safely. He explained to us that the number 3 made for a pretty stable number. That engineers often when they build a bridge use triangles in the design much the way we would when building a house out of a deck of cards. That a table with 3 legs is more balanced than a table with 4 legs and less likely to rock.

There was a hassouk with 4 screw in wooden legs with brass feet. Uncle Donny showed us to put our stomacks over it and try to make it unstable by rocking it … first with all 4 legs, then he unscrewed a leg and asked us to try it with 3 legs. It was an interesting exercise. I my little brain was already working on the problem; and I didn’t want to say but the hassok landing gear wasn’t really working for me. So, I explained to Uncle Donny. First, you need legs that flex, they can’t be stiff, they need to flex in case it lands where the ground is bumpy or there is a tilt or a hill or a boulder or something. Or even a hole … and for that reason you need 4 legs not 3 because with the flexing you don’t have to worry about 3 being more stable because the flexing would take care of that. And with 4 legs if one leg landed over a crater or hole or something you would still have the other 3 to stand on.

Are you sure that is the right answer?, he asked me.

Yes, because, if you think of a pogo stick with one leg, it is very unstable, but if you think of a Daddy Long Legs with 8 legs, it most certainly is not going to fall over.

He seemed to like what I said,

and later many years later … that is how it was when the Landing gear was made and we landed on the moon.

Uncle Donny died some time after that and I never thought to ask him much more about that day when Gloria and I were being baby sat. But, I wonder, I just wonder, ….

If a pre-schooler had anything to do with the design of the landing gear on the Lunar Landing Module?