>>I think I was levitating.
I actually don't believe I was touching anything.
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The first thing you have to remember...I don't know what you've heard from other people,
but most of us didn't believe we would land on Apollo 11.
Are you...the people told you that?
In their opinion that they thought we would make it the first time;
I didn't think we would ever land the first time, but we did, ok?
And when it started getting down close, I don't think I was touching my chair.
I actually believe I was levitating somewhere over that chair.
You know, that's the way I felt.
I don't know whether...you know I wasn't levitating
because I can't do that, but that's the way I felt.
It was so intense that I don't think most people really fully realized what we did.
I know I didn't.
And I'll tell you a little story what happened to me...
I was living in an apartment up on the Gulf Freeway.
We landed and we gave a go, T1, and so on.
We went on and we did a shift change.
Well I went home and I slept for a couple of hours.
I got cleaned you and I was going back to work and I stopped to eat some breakfast.
And between Monroe and Edgebrook in those days there was a Dutch Kettle;
you know one of these little coffee shops with the round stools?
And I walked in there and you know I knew we had landed on the moon and I was proud and all that
and everything, but I didn't...because I wasn't out there with the public when it all happened,
I really wasn't that jived as to what the real effect was going
on in the world, you know what I'm saying?
You know there were people going crazy all over the world and you'll see these pictures
on the movies and the news reels, you'll see thousands of people standing
in Times Square watching this stuff and so on, you know?
So you weren't into all that, you were so intense of what was going on
and what you were looking at and so on.
Well I picked up a paper which I have today, I still have that paper,
and I walked into the Dutch Kettle and I sat down up at the counter,
flanked my paper down and I ordered my scrambled eggs.
And I'm sitting there reading the paper and so on and 2 guys walk in
and sit down on the 2 stools next to me.
They were a little bit older and they sit down and they get their coffee and they're waiting
for their breakfast and they start talking.
Well you know, they're right next to me and one of them says to the other one, he says,
"Do you know, I went all through World War II, I landed in Normandy on D-Day," and he said,
"It was an incredible day, an incredible life and I went all the way through you know Paris
and on into Berlin," wherever the heck it was he was talking about...
He said, "But yesterday was the day that I felt the proudest to be an American."
[ Pause ]
Well when he said that, I lost it.
It all of a sudden hit me as to what we had done, you know.
And I just threw my money down, grabbed my paper, walked out,
got in the car, and started to cry.
And as you can tell I'm getting a little choked up right now talking about it.
You know then I realized what we had done and what happened.
But I hadn't until that moment...it hadn't hit me.
You know it wasn't like sitting in the control center and you know,
"God we're here," you know; give it a go.
That was great and it was a tremendous experience and relief actually, you know?
That we were alive, we had made it, and so on.
But it was just a complete different feeling.
I had now joined up with the rest of the world as to what had happened.
I finally got myself together and got...drove off and I went to work you know.
But until that moment, I didn't really have the feeling effect of what had happened.