Neil Armstrong came by his fame the old-fashioned way

It is difficult to separate the man from the mission.

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, is dead. But what he did and the familiar words he spoke remain embedded in the minds of those who witnessed his small step and giant leap on July 20, 1969. They will remain engraved in history for as long as there is recorded history.

Armstrong, who died at 82 of complications from heart surgery, didn’t seek fame, and for decades he actively avoided it, living quietly in southwestern Ohio, where he died Saturday. But he couldn’t avoid being famous, because he earned it. In a day when vacuous people are famous (and become rich) for simply being famous, Armstrong represented the best of a more authentic age. He was a college student who became a Navy fighter pilot in the Korean War. He returned to college, then embarked on a career as test pilot, astronaut and commander of the first U.S. mission to the moon. After which, among other things, he returned to college, as a professor at the University of Cincinnati.

John Glenn, the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth and much later a crewman on the space shuttle Discovery, once said Armstrong was the only human being he envied. There was a time when Armstrong was quite possibly the most envied man on Earth. He had walked on the moon.

A different era

His death comes at a time when space travel outside of Earth’s orbit is being conducted exclusively by robots. It is good science, to be sure, but no one envies even the most sophisticated rover in our solar system, Voyager, as it begins to explore Mars.

Neil Armstrong was anointed as a U.S. hero and was feted from coast to coast and in a dozen foreign countries after the triumphant return of the Apollo 11 crew. But in 2001, in one of the few extensive interviews Armstrong gave, he described the pressures of his mission: “I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation’s hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could.”

Armstrong well knew that he did not get to the moon and back on his own. But what he never said is something that the rest of us sensed: He wasn’t the only man who could have succeeded, but was a member of a select few. He succeeded because he was smart, coordinated, dedicated, educated and cool under pressure. He was all those things in measures that most of us could only dream about or, well, envy.

Neil Armstrong, who spent some of his inquisitive early years in Trumbull County, emerged as an historic figure in 1969, and then spent the most of the rest of his years trying to live an ordinary, private life.

That won’t be what he’ll be remembered for, but it is an inspirational legacy.