Momentous Time

This Time magazine cover has been sitting on my desk for the last couple of months, waiting to be posted right on August 30. I've been so tied up with stuff that I overlooked it. But seeing as it's been sitting around in my image morgue for over 40 years, I'm not going to wait until next August 30 to pull it up.

1968 was a momentous time by any reckoning, with assassinations, the war in Viet Nam, the riotous conventions, world-wide protests, the capture of the 'Pueblo' by the North Koreans. And the cold war exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, as starkly and powerfully portrayed on the Time cover, from a time when Time's covers were powerful most every week.

Louis Glanzman — Time — August 30, 1968

That Was the Week That Was, July 25, 1969

People were high on the moon all week, not just for the one small step. Time magazine was still 'timely' with a cover date of July 25. But it also became a 'time' capsule of other icons of that dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Besides the cover and the moon men, I've pulled a few pages relating to us people on earth, just to show the context of the 'time'.

A really nice cover by Louis Glanzman, his 30th for Time, showing Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon . . .

' The Moon'—a catchy catch-phrase . . .

The Moon Men were photogenic and brave. The neat thing is that they weren't cocky . . .

It was a wonderful event for cameras, but it was cool that Robert McCall, and other artists for other media, were on hand . . .

In hindsight we can laugh that there was concern about bringing back 'moon bugs', but if they hadn't done the quarantine and there really were cosmic pathogens and we all died horrible blood-spitting deaths . . . wouldn't we have been pissed?

A cool Time diagram, adapted from Life . . .

Keep scrolling down to see about life on Earth . . .