Just after midnight on August 5, 1930, Neil Armstrong was born in the Ohio farmhouse that belonged to his grandparents.
Neil was the oldest of Stephen and Viola Armstrong’s three children. He had a younger sister named June and a younger brother named Dean. Neil was always his mother’s pet. She once wrote that he was “a pleasure for us to raise” in every way. Maybe that was because Neil was a lot like his mother—calm, serious, and determined. Neil never had trouble making friends. Still, he was shy and not as fun-loving as Dean.
Neil’s mother stayed at home caring for the children. She also taught Sunday school. Neil’s father worked for the Ohio state government. Because of his job, the family had to move many times—in fact, they moved sixteen times before Neil was thirteen! Finally the Armstrongs settled in the little Ohio town of Wapakoneta.
In the 1930s planes were still thought of as unusual—and exciting. Many people had never flown in one. Only three years before Neil was born, in 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop across the Atlantic. He was the first person to make a transatlantic flight, and it took thirty-three and a half hours! To get to Europe, people from the United States still traveled by ship, which took four days on a luxury liner. For long trips across the country, people took trains. In 1930 it took about a week to get from New York to California by railroad.
From the time he was a little boy, Neil was fascinated by airplanes and flying. When he was just a toddler, he saw an air show in Cleveland, Ohio, with his dad. Neil took his first plane ride when he was only six. The plane was called the Tin Goose. It wasn’t really made out of tin. Its strong body was made of aluminum. The Tin Goose could carry up to twelve passengers, who sat on scratchy wicker seats. Its engines rattled and roared as “the goose” reached a little over a hundred miles an hour. Later on, Neil’s father confessed that he had been “scared to death.” As for Neil, he had enjoyed every minute.
Neil loved building model planes out of balsa wood, wire, and tissue paper. They were powered by wound-up rubber bands. In the basement, he set up a wind tunnel with a fan so he could see how well his models flew. According to his brother Dean, sometimes Neil would fly one of his old model planes out the window. He thought it was exciting to watch it crash on the driveway.
Neil belonged to a Boy Scout troop for many years. In fact, Neil became an Eagle Scout, the highest level in scouting. It was the 1940s by this time, and the United States was fighting against Germany in World War II. Neil and the other scouts made models of different enemy planes. No warplanes ever came anywhere near Ohio. Still, if one had, Neil could have identified it right away!
Neil read airplane magazines; he drew detailed sketches of his favorite planes. Learning about planes, however, wasn’t the same as learning to fly planes. And that’s what Neil wanted to do most of all.
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