#lost moon

Sometimes the lost moon hangs in the sky, the skull that watches, a melancholy reminder of the glories of the true world.

I started flipping to the publication page to see if this edition was printed before or after the movie came out, and I saw this

Wait a second...

No way...

ah of course!!

so in the early fifties, jim lovell, still a navy officer and not yet the astronaut we know and love, was attending an army/navy game when he met a young west point cadet at a party. now, he never got the cadet’s name, but as per tradition at games such as these, the two decided to exchange a memento of some kind. since jim had nothing else handy, he decided to give the cadet one of his navy cuff links, and in kind, the cadet gave him an army cuff link.

years later, after jim had joined nasa, he recounted this little tale to ed white, and as jim recounts in lost moon:

“White’s jaw dropped. He was the West Pointer; he, like Lovell, had told the story numerous times over the intervening years; and he, like Lovell, still had the cuff link. The two astronauts became fast friends.”

Apollo 13 Launch, April 11, 1970

On this day 49 years ago, Milwaukee native Jim Lovell captained the launch of Apollo 13 toward the Moon with fellow astronauts Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, on a fateful mission that would meet with life-and-death disasters, and a near-miraculous recovery and return six days later. Fourteen years later, Lovell, along with Discover magazine staff writer Jeffrey Kluger (who is now a senior writer at Time magazine), recounted in harrowing detail for the first time the devastating ordeal of the mission in their 1994 book Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 published by Houghton Mifflin. 

The copy shown here is the first printing of the first edition from our aviation and aerospace history collection. This book was the basis for the 1995 film adaptation Apollo 13, directed by Ron Howard, with Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell. In Milwaukee, Jim Lovell is revered as a local hero, and a five-block stretch of 7th Street in downtown Milwaukee is named after him, in a city where he and his wife Marilyn, his high school sweetheart, lived the majority of their lives.