Astronaut Buzz Aldrin at the 2009 Baltimore Book Festival.
By FERN SHEN
He may have earned a PhD from MIT, had a lovable Pixar space ranger named after him, recorded a rap video with Snoop Dogg and had the dubious honor of being interviewed by Ali G but, really, large parts of Buzz Aldrin’s life after he walked on the moon in 1969 were pretty crummy, the astronaut-author told a rapt audience Saturday at the 2009 Baltimore Book Festival. If only selling Cadillacs in Beverly Hills (unsuccessfully) had been the worst of it ….
The problem he had was, after you go to the moon, how do you top that?
“There was just not much to do. What do I do? There was nothing to sink my teeth into,” Aldrin said, to a standing-room-only crowd of about 250 people who came out in the rain to hear the author of Magnificent Desolation speak.
What Aldrin did was pretty much fall apart. In his toughest years, according to the memoir, right after the moon landing, he started drinking, battled clinical depression, started womanizing and saw his two marriages end in divorce. The doors to NASA were closed to him as the space program moved away from moon landings to low-orbit shuttle flights. Being the second man to walk on the moon, he discovered, did not translate into financial opportunity.
Aldrin details it all in the recently-released book, co-authored with Ken Abraham, in which describes his “more personal trials and triumphs here on earth,” as he described them Saturday.
A book (plus a cookie) went for $1 at the Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church table.
Aldrin’s festival appearance, which drew a long line of people waiting for him to autograph the book, was just one part of a literary weekend in Baltimore that included appearances by Gwen Ifill, Amiri Baraka, Ralph Nader , Farai Chideya, Maureen “Marcia Brady” McCormick and numerous others.
The Sage and Spidey.
Interviewed in the festival’s Author’s Tent by Terry Owens, of WABC2News, the 79-tear-old Aldrin explained that his propensity for depression has deep family roots.
“My mother committed suicide the year before I went to the moon,” Aldrin said, adding that his mother’s father also took his own life.
Aldrin tried to give his audience what everyone wants to hear from him, some idea of what it “was like” to walk on the moon. While it felt in some ways “magnificent,” he said, to think that man had “come down from the trees” and accomplished this technological feat and that he (and Neil Armstrong) were that ‘man,’ the sight that met their eyes was just dusty and incredibly desolate.
“I couldn’t think of a better word to describe that lifeless scene than desolation,” he said. It describes his life on earth, in its darkest days, as well.
But Aldrin’s story has a happy ending. He got sober, married his third wife, the former Lois Driggs Cannon, and found a way to reconnect with space. He has championed the democratization of space travel, pushed for a mission to Mars, written some children’s books about space travel and participated in projects and events connected to 40th anniversary of the spacewalk.
And, judging by this video, made when he was accosted last year by one of those the-moon-landing-was-a-government-hoax-theorist types, Aldrin still has a pretty good arm.
