‘Neil Armstrong’s mum gave me lemonade while her son was blasting off to the moon’

Wapakoneta, Ohio, wasn’t much to look at in the 1960s.

People played poker at the Elks Club, grabbed coffee at Rhine and Brading and said ‘good morning’ to their neighbours.

Among them was Bob Wayne, then a 21-year-old camera operator for theLima-based TV station, WIMA.

In early July 1969, his boss gave him a job – camp outside the home of Stephen and Viola Armstrong.

Yes, that Armstrong. Wapakoneta man Neil Armstrong was about to become the first human on the moon – that lonely grey orb in the heavens.

‘Once we started doing all the work around their house, through their yard and in the July heat, the excitement disappeared and it became just a difficult job that we had to do right,’ Bob tells Metro.

On one of these muggy days, not that any day back then wasn’t humid, Viola stepped outside.

She carried a tray of lemonade glasses, telling Bob and the other reporters she was worried about them frying in the heat.

‘Viola didn’t know whether she would ever see her son again, and yet she was still concerned about the total strangers who were outside working around her house,’ Bob says.

‘That explained to me how he became the man that he was.’

While the astronauts Neil, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were making history above, Walter Fruland was also playing his part on the ground.

Walter was the Nasa protocol officer assigned to support Neil’s wife, Janet, and their two sons during the moon landing, his cousin, Gary, tells Metro. He lived with them in their home in El Lago, Texas.

‘He was the only one allowed in their house and his reputation, confidence, caring ways and knowledge with other astronauts’ families in prior Nasa launches were why the Armstrong family and NASA selected him to be with the family, in case anything went wrong,’ Gary says.

Gary, from Newark, Illinois, Walter saw the boys sitting ‘goggle-eyed’ on the sofa in front of their boxy TV as the bug-shaped Eagle module touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Then, a hazy black-and-white image flashed on the screen of Neil floating down a ladder.

There their dad was, in a chunky white spacesuit, on the moon. Going ‘above and beyond’ wasn’t just an adjective anymore.

‘Neil and Janet’s boys were so excited about their dad but too young to realise what the immensity of the moment meant to humanity,’ Gary says.

After the astronauts picked up rocks, planted a flag and left footprints, they headed home.

The literal moonwalkers spent two weeks in quarantine, with Nasa requesting Walter stay with Neil’s family until the dad was home.

‘Walter told me that Neil was a man of few words but a tremendously talented airman,’ Gary recalls.

‘Neil was comfortable with him because Walter was calm and kind and with what Neil was about to go through with the press and the public.

‘He was the calm before the storm.’

‘You seemed like a fine young gentleman’

Bob and Gary’s stories came to light after MyHeritage, a genealogy company, encouraged Americans to share tales of their family playing a part, however small, in the country’s 250-year-long history.

‘The moon landing is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century,’ the DNA testing service’ ‘s head of research, Roi Mandel, tells Metro.

‘And the beauty here is that we captured two completely different family perspectives of the same event.’

Another story Bob remembers was how, in 1972, he greeted his friends from Germany and gave them a tour of Wapakoneta. Now, a town filled with shops displaying Apollo 11 mementoes and Eagle models on street corners.

Bob showed his friends the Armstrong Museum on the edge of town, dedicated to Ohio’s contributions to the space age, and Armstrong’s home.

‘While we were eating lunch in town, there came Viola into the restaurant to eat,’ he says.

‘When we finished our meal, I walked over to her and reintroduced myself to her and introduced my cousins from Germany, and as always, she was very gracious and charming.’

Bob later posted the couple a cutting of his article in the Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune about his time working on the Armstrongs’ porch.

Bob never thought the Armstrongs would reply, let alone remember him.

‘I just wanted to tell her how much I remembered,’ he says, ‘even 10 years later.’

But to his shock, Viola did remember him. She replied with a handwritten card, which he shared with Metro.

‘I remember you, you seemed like a fine young gentleman,’ she wrote, ‘and you wrote a very nice article.

‘I shall keep it always.’

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