If you're over the age of 50, you probably remember where you were and what you were doing on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and said, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Indeed, the Eagle had landed. Who could forget the sight of Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin walking — it seemed like they were skipping — across the lunar surface?

The first lunar landing rates as one of those events one remembers for the rest of his or her life, right up there with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Stephen Hatch, now of North Andover, was at Mission Control in Houston when Aldrin and Armstrong landed on the moon. Hatch, a space engineer with a degree in astrophysics, trained many of the people at Mission Control who guided the flight to the moon.

He said when the Lunar Excursion Module landed, the mission was close to being aborted.

"They had 28 seconds of fuel left and they landed 20 feet per second too fast," he said. Armstrong overrode the computer and made a safe manual landing.

"They had nerves of steel," he said of the astronauts, as well as the people at Mission Control.

Tom Devaney of Derry, N.H., said he still vividly recalls the events of that historic day.

"My family and I spent our summers at Seabrook Beach, and I can recall that day being very hot," he said. "Our anxiety grew as the time for the landing grew closer. While waiting for the landing, I can recall listening to the Red Sox game on the radio and Ken Coleman noting that many of the fans at the game were listening intently to their transistor radios. Ken doubted very much that they were listening to him."

He remembers waiting tensely as the Columbia and Eagle separated and the Eagle began its descent to the moon.

"I think I held my breath as Buzz Aldrin counted down the LEMs altitudes as it approached the Sea of Tranquility," Devaney said. "Then finally, it happened. They landed. I think we were all speechless. I can recall my late father telling us all that this event was something you would remember all your lives."

Richard D'Agostino, assistant city attorney for Lawrence and a former alderman in charge of engineering, remembers having his picture taken by an Eagle-Tribune photographer for his unique way of commemorating the Apollo 11 flight.

"I had a GI Joe space capsule," explained D'Agostino, who was 15 at the time. The capsule was a model of the type of space vehicle used in the Gemini program, which preceded the flights to the moon.

He also had a doll, maybe about a foot or foot and a half tall, that looked like a hippie, with pieces of yarn to represent the long locks.

"That was also the summer of Woodstock," D'Agostino noted. He attached the hippie doll to the side of the capsule, then added a sign reading, "Good luck, Apollo 11." He illustrated the sign with a flame-spewing rocket and put his creation on the awning over the front door of the family's house on Chestnut Street, where they lived on the second floor.

Frank Skusevich, 55, who has worked as a Lawrence firefighter for 21 years, was swimming at Forest Lake in Methuen, where his family had a summer cottage, when his mother told him and seven friends to come in and watch the lunar landing.

Ordinarily, he and his friends would have been told to dry off before entering the living room because, "We were dripping, dripping, dripping." Because it was such a historic event, however, "She made a concession, so to speak," he recalled.

"It's been 40 years and I remember it vividly," recalled Alberto Suris of Lawrence, who was living and working in Madrid at the time of the lunar landing. "When I walked into the office the next morning, I was greeted by my co-workers with mockery."

The Spaniards, he said, believed the moon landing wasn't real, that it was a "made in Hollywood story."

Douglas Halsted, a retired teacher living in Andover, was on his honeymoon with his wife in Europe when Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the moon's surface.

"We had spent the whole day traveling to the island of Mont St. Michel, off the coast of Normandy in France," he said. "We had dinner at the wonderful Restaurant MÄóre Poulard, and, with all the staff and other customers were watching, on the restaurant's one tiny TV screen, the preparations for the lunar landing. It got to be very late. We went to our campsite, just off the island, and went to bed, not having seen the actual landing, which hadn't yet occurred.

"About five hours later, we were almost rudely awakened by the cries of the young boys hawking their early-edition morning newspapers around the campsite: 'L'homme sur la Lune! L'homme sur la Lune!' (Man on the Moon! Man on the Moon!) I think I might possibly still have the first page of that newspaper stored somewhere in my attic."

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