Sunday, July 14, 2019
By ED RUNYAN
runyan@vindy.com
CHAMPION
Before Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, he first walked into Champion School to begin his formal education.
Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 mission and one of two men who dropped several feet onto the moon’s surface July 20, 1969, before a worldwide audience, was a national hero, along with his crew mates Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins.
Many events are planned to commemorate that historic day a half-century ago.
Despite the fame he achieved as an astronaut, Armstrong didn’t make a big splash among his first-grade classmates at Champion School, where he began his scholastic career in August 1936.
Edith Sampson of Champion, whose husband, Ed, was an Armstrong classmate, says she’s never heard of anyone from that first-grade class who remembers the boy named Neil Armstrong.
Sampson says she thinks the reason his classmates don’t remember him is because he spent only three months at the school before he and his family moved to Jefferson, in Ashtabula County, around Thanksgiving of that year.
Champion Schools has a “cumulative record” folder showing Armstrong being enrolled Aug. 31, 1936, and listing his parents, [S.K.] Stephen and Viola Armstrong, who were born in St, Mary’s, near Wapakoneta, according to the document.
He was one of 42 students in the first-grade class of Mary F. Taylor. Armstrong later wrote to Sampson, verifying his attendance.
Jim Valesky, founder and president of the Warren Heritage Center in Warren, said he’s not aware of any documents related to Armstrong in the center’s possession or any photographs showing Armstrong during his time in Warren. The center was founded in 2012.
The Armstrongs lived in a home on Mahoning Avenue in Champion across from Copperweld Steel Co. during the family’s time in Champion. The family also lived in an upstairs apartment on Homewood Avenue Southeast in Warren.
Another tangible remembrance of Armstrong’s time in Trumbull County is a half-sized replica of the lunar module he flew to the moon at a site on Parkman Road Northwest in Warren.
Because Warren photographer Pete Perich and Armstrong knew each other, Perich led a campaign to create the site, located near the Warren Airways landing strip, where young Neil took his first airplane ride about a month before he started school in Champion. The site was completed in 2003. Perich died in 2012.
Armstrong and his father were on their way from their home in Champion to a church service in Warren when they passed the air strip, saw the aircraft and arranged a ride as a birthday present for Neil.
Dan Mathey of Warren met Armstrong in 2005 because of Mathey’s help in creating the site, called the First Flight Lunar Module.
Mathey said Armstrong’s father’s job as a state auditor caused the family to move multiple times per year from one Ohio town to another. Neil moved 16 times before he turned 18, Mathey said.
“However, he was in Little League and was in the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts, and he became an Eagle Scout,” Mathey said. “He tried to do everything typical kids would do.”
Mathey, who maintains the First Flight site and provides tours and commentary to visitors, said Armstrong’s first flight put him on a path to becoming a pilot.
“I asked Neil if he remembered that first flight, and a big smile came across his face and he said, ‘It’s as if it happened yesterday,’” Mathey said.
Armstrong told him, “‘Now I don’t want to say anything bad about my dad. He was a wonderful father, but he was a bank examiner, and ... everything had to be perfect.’” They paid 25 cents each for the flight and went up.
“And his father got sicker than a dog, and Neil said ‘I knew right then this is what I can do better than my dad.’ He wanted to be a pilot at that moment,” Mathey said.
There are relatives of Armstrong living in the area, but Mathey said he honors the astronaut’s wishes they not be identified.
“Neil ... didn’t want any publicity drawn to the family or any inconvenience as a tourist site, and that’s why he was buried at sea rather than a grave site here in the states,” Mathey said. “He didn’t want his grave site to become a tourist attraction.”
Mathey and other volunteers involved with the Lunar Module met Armstrong in 2005, after the site had been opened for a while.
“He was very open and friendly and answered any questions we asked of him. And he told us all kinds of sidebars of his experiences.”
Edith Sampson was part of a committee of the 1948 graduating class who invited Armstrong to attend the class’s 50th reunion in 1998.
“I understand your time with us in first grade was brief, but perhaps you remember going to the big, white farm just south of the school, a quarter of a mile or so, to Jimmy McCombs’ birthday party,” Sampson’s invitation to Armstrong said.
Armstrong did not attend the reunion, but sent back a letter.
“As you know, I spent only half of the first grade at Champion,” he said. “The other half was at Jefferson. I can’t say I remember a great deal about either one, but I believed both schools pushed me to give me a good start in my education,” Armstrong said.
“I passed through Warren a couple of years ago and was delighted to see that the old school not only still existed but was apparently still in operation. Unfortunately, the house where I lived did not survive.”
Armstrong died Aug. 25, 2012, at age 82.
Champion School, later known as Central Elementary, was demolished in fall 2018 after the district replaced it and another building with a one new one.
Edith Sampson said she attended the final walk-through before the school’s demolition. She remembers standing in the first-grade classroom and telling several people this was the room where Neil Armstrong began his schooling.
In 2007, Sampson and other Champion graduates from classes in the 1940s commissioned the creation of a bronze plaque that is now mounted on a pillar in the atrium outside of the Champion High School auditorium. It explains that the first man on the moon “began his formal education in Champion School in 1936.” Below it is a photo of Armstrong in his space suit.
Also in that atrium is a large painting on a chalk board that school officials say has been there since at least 1990 mentioning Armstrong’s place in history. School officials say they don’t know who created it.
The painting includes his famous words as he took his first step on the moon:
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”