📍Wapakoneta, OH 45895, USA
1944 – 1947“My father was a state auditor, so we moved around Ohio a great deal when I was small, through more than a dozen towns. In 1944, when I was thirteen, we settled in Wapakoneta, my parents' home area, in a house on West Benton Street. My father had taken me on my first aeroplane ride, in a Ford Trimotor, when I was six, and I had been building model aircraft and reading about flight ever since. In Wapakoneta I finally had the chance to learn. I worked after school at the Rhine and Brading drugstore downtown, sweeping floors before school and stocking shelves and serving customers afterwards, to earn money for flying lessons at nine dollars an hour. Every spare day I cycled out to Port Koneta, a grass airfield a couple of miles north of town, to fly an Aeronca Champion. I earned my student pilot's licence on my sixteenth birthday, before I had a driving licence. I was also an Eagle Scout, played baritone horn in the band at Blume High School and served on the student council; I was quiet, but I liked being part of things. I graduated in 1947 and left for Purdue to study aeronautical engineering, then flew as a navy pilot in Korea and as a test pilot before joining NASA. In July 1969 I became the first person to walk on the Moon. Wapakoneta welcomed me home that September with a parade that filled the town. I never thought of myself as a hero, just an engineer who had been lucky enough to fly. The Armstrong Air and Space Museum in Wapakoneta tells the story, beginning with a small-town boy pedalling out to a grass airstrip.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today