Neil Armstrong -the reluctant hero

Neil as taken by Buzz Aldrin.

(I wrote this post seven years ago)
August 25, 2012 -The reluctant hero has died.

Neil Armstrong, has died at the age of 82.  The former Navy pilot and engineer   was the first man to walk on the moon.  Hey, but you knew that...

What always struck me is that didn't really want to be a hero.  Of course, many of the astronauts were like that, they knew that they were just glorified space monkeys.  The rocket ship could be sent up without them, or with them either way it  would still get there.  The astronauts were just a small part of a large team of people getting those rockets to the moon. Indeed, a whole nation can take credit.  As Paul Simon once put it, America, was "the ship that sailed the moon." Twenty Five Billion  (1969) dollars had been spent in pursuit of the goal.

 Armstrong  was more than a space monkey-he actually had to pilot his ship,the lunar module, called  the Eagle,  to safety.   They were  having trouble with the original planned landing site, and Armstrong, ended  up having to  improvise a landing site.  The fuel supply on the Eagle was getting to the point where the landing would have to be aborted, but Armstrong finally found a good spot to land. So, he was not just a space monkey.  Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin  spent less than a day on the moon   and returned home to Earth.  The Apollo 11 mission  was  the first  of six successful landings on the moon.  

Many people who were alive then,  remember where they were  when they saw  the landing on July 20, 1969. I don't  remember exactly where I was.  I remember that sometimes they brought all the kids in school together to watch some of the space missions. Since it was summer, I was  probably watching the TV that been set up in my brother's room.  Neil actually put his foot on the moon at 9:56 PM EST. The landings were  conveyed on TV in B&W  and were  blurry, but they were  still impressive.

In light of our current day culture where you can be famous just for being famous, it is important to remember that fame is fleeting, but true  accomplishment is not. I salute Neil Armstrong and all the  brave men and women of the American Space Program!

Published August 25, 2012 by J.C.Bernhardt

Jerome Bixby's Man from Earth

Imagine what it would  be like to be a man that lived on Earth, but never died.   It's a concept that the late science fiction writer Jerome Bixby explored twice.  

His first go at this idea was in the script for the 1969 Star Trek episode, "Requiem for Methuselah".

The Enterprise encounters, Flint, a character played with eloquence by James Daly. They discover, that his character, is effectively immortal, and that over his many life times has actually been many  famous men, including, among others,"Solomon, Alexander, Lazarus, Methuselah, Merlin".

The episode itself, is flawed  by low production values, and with it's focus on a silly fight over a android female,  but the concept of an immortal man is wonderful, and  Bixby and Daly capture the  arrogance, and  grace of  a man who has seen it all.   There is some elegant dialogue in the piece, including a little noted scene at the end where, McCoy and Spock are seen  reacting to a sleeping but emotionally distraught Captain Kirk, who has become heartbroken from seeing  the android woman he loved die of confusion.  

McCoy tells Spock that  he feels more sorry for the unemotional Vulcan than  the heartbroken Captain.

"You see, I feel sorrier for you than I do for him...
because you'll never know the things that love can drive a man to :
the ecstasies, the miseries,
the broken rules, the desperate chances,
the glorious failures, the glorious victories.
All of these things you'll never know...
simply because the word "love" isn't written into your book"

But actually, Spock does understand  as he as half-human, and at the end Spock  is seen using the Vulcan mind meld, to make the Captain forget. 

The concept of an almost  immortal character, was clearly something that needed to be explored  further, and Bixby came back to it as his last project.

Right before Jerome Bixby died in 1998, he finished a script called"Man from Earth" about a similar character,  to Flint. A movie, was made of the script in 2007.  The script is actually very simple, it features a professor, named John, revealing the  secret of his near immortality  to  a group of  mostly college professor  friends.  They are quite skeptical of his claim, but nonetheless, humor John  long enough to  allow the group to explore the  idea.  It is rare for a script to just let characters sit down and talk and  analyze one idea. 

The movie has  been well received by those who have seen it,  which so far has not been  too many people, since the movie, has had only a  limited theatrical release.    I do recommend that you see this movie  if you like intellectually stimulating movies.   The movie is  of interest to  Star Trek fans since not only did Bixby write it  but also  since it stars at least four actors who have appeared in recent Star Trek series; most notably, John Billingsley (Dr.Phlox) and Tony Todd (Worf's brother)  The only irritating thing about the movie, is that has quite a atheistic slant, but that's a minor criticism.  

Additional note: Trekkies will know this of course, but Jerome Bixby was one of the most important script  writers of  the original Star Trek series , he wrote four episodes including the famous  2nd season episode,  
"Mirror Mirror" which introduced a parallel universe to the Star Trek myth, and brought us the fascinating idea of Spock with a beard. 

A sequel to Man from Earth came  out in 2017.

Man from Earth Holocene

Roy Rogers Restaurants back in the day

In the mid-1970's my family and I used to go every Sunday to Roy Rogers Restaurant. It was one of the  bonding activities, that my father chose to do to  keep us together after my mother died.   We usually went to a midday Sunday  mass, and then  we would drive to the Congressional Plaza in Rockville, MD to the Roy Rogers there. I would always  have a Coke, Fries and a burger. My brother would always get the Roast Beef Sandwich. I don't remember what my sister would get. Originally, the chain had girls in fancy cowgirl  miniskirts out on the floor, cleaning the tables, that was kind of cool.

Vintage  Roy Roger Commercial from Youtube

Roy Rogers Congressional Plaza -1960's

The 1970's and 1980's  were the golden age of Roy Rogers Restaurants. The chain was  assembled by the Marriott Corporation  in  1968, it  used  the name of Roy Rogers,   moderately well known   star of movie Westerns  to sell fast food . Many of the original  locations were rebrandings of RoBee's House of Beef, and  some   Junior  Hot Shoppes locations.  

Roy's food was a cut above other fast food chains, and I think that  was true of most of the food I ate there, though the chicken was not as good as Kentucky Fried Chicken. They were most known for their incredible Roast Beef Sandwiches  which the staff cut by hand, and could be added to at a fixing bar with whatever condiment you wished. The very salty french fries were also of high quality, and were apparently cooked in vat of beef tallow and vegetable oil, a mixture which was later changed.

 Roy Rogers  were owned by the Marriott Corporation, which started as the owner of Hot Shoppes  restaurants in the Washington area  but over time expanded into food service, hotels and bad airline food.     Marriott  managed to bring Roy Rogers to 600 locations until in 1990, Marriott sold Roy's to Hardee's, a lower quality fast food restaurant, that excelled at breakfast and little else.   Not a good idea.

Hardee's  quickly switched most of the Roy Rogers Restaurants to  the Hardee's brand name, which was greeted with wide disdain, to the point where many of the switched Hardee's had to be switched back to the Roy Rogers nameplate.  But the damage was done, and eventually most  of the Roy  Rogers leases and franchises   were sold off to other restaurant chains, notably McDonalds's.   Fortunately, the tattered remnants  of chain survived. at first with just  13 stand alone  restaurant franchises   and  some over-priced highway rest stop locations, run by HMS travel hotel. Roy Rogers  Restaurants is now run by son  of one of  men who created the chain, and they have slowly brought back  to almost 50 locations.


Roy Rogers Restaurants -official site

Also from Felpin's Pond_
How Rockville, Maryland changed over time

An article about Hot Shoppes...

The Hot Shoppes

Posted originally April 2012 by J.C. Bernhardt