Neil Alden Armstrong

Neil Alden Armstrong died in Cincinnati on August 25, 2012, after complications from heart surgery. He was eighty-two. Born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, on August 5, 1930, he was in the air before he had a license for the road. Korea made him a naval aviator. Edwards made him a test pilot. NASA made him the man who had to get the first boot onto a world with no wind. On July 20, 1969, as commander of Apollo 11, he stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility and treated the hour as a checklist. He did not build a second career out of the sentence the world remembered. He taught aerospace engineering in Cincinnati, sat on the commissions that follow a disaster, and declined most of the invitations that wanted him to be a monument who could still shake hands. Wapakoneta is the hometown that kept the boy, not the city where he died. His ashes were committed to the Atlantic Ocean. The museum in the county seat still talks in a small-town voice, which is the one he preferred.