The James S. McDonnell Planetarium in St. Louis opened in 1963

ALAN writes:

Why would anyone remember an ordinary pedestrian bridge?

But I have good reasons to remember one that is long gone.

Twice by chance in recent months I found photographs taken in the mid-1960s that show a pedestrian bridge over a highway between Oakland Avenue and Forest Park in midtown St. Louis. Those were precisely the years when my father and I walked up the steps and across that pedestrian bridge on our way to and from the Planetarium in Forest Park.  It seems in memory that we made those visits to the Planetarium most often on sunny Saturday afternoons. Those visits and those days in our lives are now among my fondest memories. It was the summer of his life and the spring of mine.

The feeling I remember from those days was that the splendor of the universe loomed right before us, concretized in the lectures we attended in the Planetarium Star Chamber; in the exhibits of satellites and rockets we walked among inside and on the grounds outside; in the magazines about astronomy that my father purchased for me at the Planetarium Book Counter, long-defunct magazines like The Review of Popular Astronomy; in our awareness of Project Gemini spaceflights and exploratory space vehicles on their way to the moon and the planet Mars; and in the perennial mystery of the night sky.

The exploration of space had been an idea sustained by imagination for hundreds of years, and now right in front of us, American white men were making it come true.

In May 1965 I took 30 color snapshots of exhibits on display at the Planetarium during Space Exposition month.  I still have the pictures only because my father had the good sense to save them.  One of them shows a portion of that pedestrian bridge, which was demolished years ago, as were office buildings across the street, where we stood and waited for the Forest Park bus, as was the Star Chamber, the very heart of the Planetarium where we enjoyed many lectures accompanied by classical music.

At one point in those years, I affixed luminous decals on to the ceiling in my bedroom to simulate the stars and constellations in the night sky.

On ten consecutive Saturday mornings that year, I walked across that pedestrian bridge on my way to a class on astronomy taught in a room on the planetarium’s lower level by optical engineer and planetarium lecturer Robert E. Cox.  Mr. Cox also wrote a regular column on telescope making for Sky & Telescope magazine.  He always wore a suit, white shirt, and tie.  He had a great interest in optics and astronomy, as well as a wonderful sense of humor.  During the course, I typed 23 pages of notes on paper that is now yellowed with age.  Fifteen years afterward, I sent him a letter inquiring about anomalies in photographs, and telling him how well I recalled his lectures and classes in 1965, and he responded promptly.

The texture of those days is captured in certain popular songs from those years, none more so than the clear, bright, sparkling, uplifting sound in 1962’s “Telstar,” an instrumental number recorded by the British group the Tornadoes.

In 1987, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said she remembered “Telstar” and loved it.  So did I.  I imagine she heard in it what I heard in it:  Not only a pleasant, captivating melody, but also a particular sense of life; a sense of confidence and optimism; a sense of life expressed in things like the project Mercury and Gemini manned spaceflights and the launching of artificial satellites like “Telstar”.  Not incidentally, those were achievements of white men, not feminists, diversitoids, multi-cultis, or affirmative action hires.

“Telstar” was part of my metaphysical universe in 1962-‘65 when I read paperback science fiction stories like Murray Leinster’s Four From Planet Five and Fredric Brown’s The Lights in the Sky Are Stars; when The Sky Observer’s Handbook became my constant companion; when my father and I looked through the eyepiece of our small refracting telescope and saw for the first time in our lives the golden disk of the ringed planet Saturn and the brilliant white disk of Jupiter and its four largest moons; when we watched a newly-launched satellite’s pinpoint of light move slowly and silently across a field of stars; when I visited the Hayden Planetarium in New York and the Air Force Academy Planetarium in Colorado Springs; and when I watched classic science fiction movies like Destination Moon on late night television and First Men in the Moon at the Ritz Theater in south St. Louis, long since demolished.  All those things are preserved in memory by that soaring melody in “Telstar”.

Petula Clark’s counter-revolutionary “Round Every Corner” (1965) was another song whose tone tilted upward:  “Man will soon be standing on the moon above….”, she sang with a feeling of confidence and pride that Americans today, immersed in unearned guilt mendaciously assigned to them by their most calculating enemies, could not even imagine.

Such music was the music of confident people.  Such confidence was palpable in daily life in those years, reinforced by music that projected charm, beauty, and inspiration.  I am thankful to have lived in the tail end of that era.

Americans led the way in space exploration, but both songs I mentioned above were composed and recorded in England.  The terrible irony is that neither nation now exists except in name, each having sunk into the sewers of socialism and self-abasement.

The former showed what their confidence and talent enabled white men to achieve.  The latter shows the moral-philosophical-cultural degradation they ensure when they agree instead to apologize for those virtues.

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