55 YEARS AGO: THE MOON LANDING IN A MIDWEST MIGRANT CAMP

 By Juan Montoya

To the migrant workers picking cherries at the Lester Southwell farm between Omena and Peshawbestown, Michigan, July 20, 1969 was just another muggy day made bearable only by the cool breezes blowing over the chilly, clear, blue  waters of Omena Bay across Michigan Highway 22 from their labor camp.

They were picking black cherries after they had gotten done with the napoleons (light red) sweets, and toward the end of the season in August, would move on to the tarts, or sour cherries favored by pie makers all over the world.

Today was special.

Not only were they picking their favorite cherries, large lumpy syrupy blacks, but the kids and teenagers in the camp had rigged a black and white television they had bought at one of those garage sales that seemed to sprout each Friday and Saturday along the Suttons Bay to Traverse City route where local residents knew migrants passed on their weekend runs for food and other household necessities.

They had pitched in and paid $10 for the set and rigged it with aluminum foil and wire clothes hangers to acquire a somewhat discernible image from nearby television broadcasters, most notably the Traverse City CBS affiliate Channel 9-10.

The kids would watch cartoons and sitcoms during the day when the teens and adults were out in the orchards with their ladders and pails, and in the evenings the young adults watched the prime-time comedy shows. By maneuvering the wire hangers and the aluminum wrapped around them, they could get a good image.

But today, July 20, they knew that man was set to land on the moon. That night, the moon waxed near three-quarters and reflected off the clear waters of Omena Bay as it merged with Grand Traverse Bay to the south. The night was clear and cool, hovering in the 60s. As the kids gathered closer to the set Walter Cronkite was narrating the play-by-play as the astronauts made ready their descent toward the lunar surface. 

They were all enthralled at the prospect of a man landing on the moon. It would have been even more relevant to them then if they had known the Neil Armstrong, the first man who landed on the moon, knew something about field work having grown up in a farm in Wapokaneta, Ohio, south of the Michigan-Ohio state line below Lima, where they would travel next to pick tomatoes.

When the first frosts singed the edges of the tomato leaf and sleet arrived in early to mid-October, they'd return to Brownsville, in the Rio Grande Valley.

Outside, in the grassy parking area of the labor camp, the adult males stood in a small circle around their cars parked in front of their respective cabins and talked adult talk about how much their families picked today, what was coming tomorrow, and where they would travel at the end of the cherry season when the sour cherry trees in the orchard had been plucked clean. These were the days before the tree-shaking automatic machines replaced agricultural labor. It had been a profitable year.

Then Cronkite and CBS switched to the NASA transmission from the lunar surface as Neil Armstrong (just a white blurry, bouncing image on the set against the darkness of space), pronounced his famous words, "One small  step for man,..." Cronkite had to cut in and translate the staticky slurs pronounced some 250,000 miles away and finish the sentence..."one giant leap for mankind."

The kids burst out in shouts and screams and ran out of the small cabin in celebration to the amazement of the adults gathered in front of the camp.

"Que tienen?" asked one of the adults.

"La luna!" they shouted jumping and pointed at it. "El hombre is on the moon!"

The men looked up at the moon, bright and distant in the sky.

To some of them, who had never finished elementary school and some who had spent their entire lives without getting a chance to get near one, their claims must have seemed ludicrous.

"Tan locos," they said turning back to subjects that really mattered.