This week The Extraordinary Times caught up with Auburn University historian and author James R. Hansen. Hansen has written on the history of science and aerospace technology for the past 30 years. His New York Times-bestselling authorized biography First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong (2005), was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film First Man (2019).
On Thursday, April 22 at 7pm (Eastern Time) Hansen will speak via Zoom on Neil Armstrong’s life and legacy for Miami University’s Michael J. Colligan History Project. This Earth Day 2021 presentation is free. To register, visit: MiamiOH.edu/Regionals/RSVP. To purchase an author-signed copy of Hansen’s First Man biography, go to: https://mrevak.com/product/first-man. * What led you to become Neil Armstrong's authorized biographer? I had been researching and writing about the history of flight—both aeronautics and space—for about 20 years when I got the idea in 1999 of writing Neil’s life story. He had an impressive career as an engineering research pilot before becoming an astronaut. He also had flown 78 combat missions in Korea. Then, of course, he was the most famous, yet least known, of the early American astronauts, and that intrigued me. Also, he became a global icon when he became the First Man on the moon—so I knew the book would not just be a biography, it would be an iconography. With all the different cultural meanings that had been projected onto Neil over the years, the book would also be a study of “us” not just of him. I contacted him by letter; his reply was very cordial but was basically a polite no—he was still active with some of his corporate responsibilities and told me he wouldn’t have the time to invest in my project. A few months later I sent him a box with a couple of the books I had published, as a gift for his 70th birthday, in 2000. He thanked me in a letter and said he liked how I approached my subject matter—not sensationally or over-dramatically but as a committed scholar in aerospace history and the history of technology. He concluded by saying, “let’s stay in touch.” Several months later he invited me to his home in suburban Cincinnati. We chatted all afternoon, and, although it still took another year before he gave me the green light, I knew that we were on the same wave length and that things were probably going to work out. Neil was a very private man, and it wasn't easy to get his permission to do the book. The keys were that I was about 20 years into my career when I approached him, and I had been writing and teaching about aerospace history, both aeronautics history and space history. When I approached him, I had a body of books and articles. All of my books prior to approaching Armstrong had really dealt a lot with the history of engineering and how engineers think. I think Neil knew that I would take his technical side seriously. A lot of authors who had approached him before didn't have that kind of background, so I think that was really essential. * What was Neil Armstrong like in private? There was nothing in Neil's personality that tried to find the limelight. After Apollo 11 he didn't like the celebrity that went with it. Of course, he had become a global icon, the first of our species to step on another heavenly body. It was never about fame or fortune for him. It was about the flying. The most important thing to him about Apollo 11 was, "Let's fly this lander down to the successful landing and not kill ourselves." The act of stepping out onto the lunar surface was, for him, almost an afterthought and very secondary. Later he did everything he could to try to lead a normal life. It was kind of hard to do that once you had become first man. For a while after Apollo 11 he was getting 10,000 fan mail letters a day that he did his best, with some help from NASA secretaries, to answer. To the end of his life, he was getting requests for signatures and photographs and appearances at all kinds of events. He went to many of them, so he wasn't really reclusive. He had to be kind of selective about what he agreed to do. In terms of our personal relationship that developed, I found Neil very friendly, with a great sense of humor. He enjoyed telling corny jokes, walking our way pleasantly around a golf course, and talking about ideas (not so much people) over a beer or a glass of wine. * How did Armstrong's Ohio upbringing shape his worldview? I'm a strong believer that you don't understand any adult unless you understand their childhood—and Neil’s childhood took place entirely in Ohio. And not in Cincinnati, Cleveland, or Columbus. His family lived in different small towns in very rural parts of the state. His parents in fact had both grown up on farms. So the values of the farming life were very much a part of who Neil was. He grew up in small towns like St. Marys, Upper Sandusky, and Wapakoneta, surrounded by fields of corn and soybeans. My published biography of Neil deals a lot with him as a boy and as an adolescent and the character of the Ohio communities in which he grew up. From an early age he was passionate about flying. He nagged his mother when they visited dime stores in these little Ohio towns that the family lived in to get little balsa wood airplane models that he would build, and then he advanced to gasoline-powered models. He would train his little brother and sister to toss them out the upstairs window of the house in just a certain way so they would glide the best. Neil would be outside—he would have Popsicle sticks, and placed the Popsicle stick in the ground where that particular model airplane had landed. Even as a 10-year-old he's essentially doing test flying. He's doing research. He's studying. He had a little notebook as to how far each one of the models flew. He was kind of a proto-engineer even as a boy. Then, of course, he got his pilot's license on his sixteenth birthday. He hadn't even started to drive, or even try to drive an automobile. He was already flying airplanes. * How closely were you involved in director Damien Chazelle's film adaptation of your book? I was involved in virtually every aspect of the making of the film, but most particularly with the development of the screenplay or script. I was on set for most of the time the film was being shot. I had a lot of back-and-forth with Chazelle, screenwriter Josh Singer, and with Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy who played Neil and Janet Armstrong. I also answered a lot of technical questions about the flights of the aircraft and spacecraft and the Moon walk itself. Although it was a very exciting experience for me to help bring this brilliant film to fruition as its Co-Producer, it was also full of stress. I worked hard to keep the movie as genuine and honest to the real characters and historical events as possible, especially as they related to Neil himself, as I had been entrusted by Neil to serve as his only authorized biographer. It was my first experience turning on of my books into a motion picture and I learned many important lessons—some of them hard lessons—along the way. First and foremost, I learned that the goal of even a history-based film is not to create a documentary but rather to produce a moving, entertaining, and emotionally provocative theatrical experience for an audience sitting in a darkened room before a large silver screen. A beautiful film requires a great deal of artistry and must allow for some dramatic license with the actual historical events. As our screenwriter Josh Singer told me early on, movies are entertainment. If they aren’t entertaining, nobody shows up. And if nobody shows up, it doesn’t matter how interesting or thought-provoking your historical thesis is. You can’t get people to engage if you don’t get them into the theater. But I also learned that these two goals, good story and good history, are not mutually exclusive. Dramatic fictions can be kept to a minimum and used only when absolutely necessary for the purposes of the film. Damien Chazelle is a brilliant, creative filmmaker and a wonderful man. We exchanged a lot of ideas, most of them privately. He always responded thoughtfully and generously whenever I offered ideas, which happened pretty often, as I was on set virtually every day. It helped that his mother is herself a university professor and historian, so he was accustomed to the kind of ideas I would offer. I was totally impressed with how he handled the actors and the entire crew, never a harsh word. He seemed to me very playful, very artistic, a true genius. He is our next Stanley Kubrick, I believe, in terms of the range, power, and diversity of the film he will give the world over the next half century. * Armstrong passed away in 2012. What new developments in space exploration do you imagine he might have been most enthusiastic over? Neil would be most excited about the potential of exciting young people about the potential of space exploration, but his ideas would be more fundamental than just being charged up about going back to the Moon, planning for a Mars mission, or promoting the idea of space tourism. Neil would make it clear that space is not just all about astronauts and rockets. He would not just try to excite young people about STEM (the study of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) but, more specifically, he would stress the all-important role that engineers and the technically-minded have played in the story of space travel. Many kids want to grow up to be astronauts. That’s fine. But he would want more young people to grow up to be engineers. Without the people on the ground, nothing about the eventual triumph of the space program, Moon landings, Space Shuttle, Space Station, Mars Rovers, or anything else, could have happened. He would want those engineers of the future to be well educated in a broader, literate way, also. They need to be sensitive to values and ideas that come out of a study of history, literature, philosophy, and the arts. Neil would not want a two-culture society where one culture is technical and the other is not. He would want better integration of those two cultures, and that only comes through proper education.
https://cranberries.medium.com/interview-james-r-hansen-author-of-the-first-man-book-about-neil-armstrong-8596a1bfa3e7 https://entertainment-focus.com/2019/02/19/interview-james-r-hansen-discusses-first-man-the-life-of-neil-armstrong/
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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