Like many of you, I was fascinated by the recent Artemis 2 trip around the moon in anticipation of mankind, and now womankind, reestablishing our long delayed relationship with our 4 ½ billion year old celestial neighbor. It's been 53 years since the last astronauts, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, left their last footprints on the lunar surface and apparently it will still be several years before another man or woman gets moondust once again on their pricey footwear.
I read that only 25% of Americans alive today were around on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong first took that “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” I’m one of those 25 percenters (Whoop! Whoop!) and the time that stretches between Neil’s first tentative step and our latest foray to old Luna has been long enough to serve as bookends of entire lives lived and lost. I was a mere lad of 12 in 1969, my lovely wife of most of those in-between years was only 3, and here we are today in our sixties.
There are some folks who don’t believe we ever landed on the moon. Not quite sure what they make of the latest trip. Maybe one day when they can book a flight to the moon and find themselves gallivanting about in 1/6th of the earth’s gravity that will make believers of them. Or when they tee off at the first ever Trump Lunar Towers golf course and see how far their slice careens off into the lunar rough. They say golf is but a good walk ruined and that may be doubly true in the not quite zero gravity of the moon.
When I was a kid my parents got me a subscription to Life Magazine which was perhaps the combination TikTok/Instagram/Facebook of its day. If you wanted to know what was happening, Life was the place to find out, at least once a week which is how frequently it came out. I remember clearly looking forward to it arriving in the mailbox. Life Magazine probably taught me as much about, well… life, as did sitting in a classroom. Although to be fair, I probably paid as much, if not more, attention to the magazine than to some of my teachers.
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I still have a couple of those 50+ year old Life magazines, including the three weeks leading up to and including the first manned landing on the moon. Up until the Artemis 2 mission I really hadn’t given them any thought but just for grins I pulled them out the other day for a look back at 1969 through a 2026 set of eyes.
As I browsed through the three issues I was more intrigued by the other news of the day. The scientific facts, figures, and details of the first moon landing are well documented so I focused on the cultural context in which the flight took place - what else was going on, who else was in the news, what were Americans fascinated with beyond just going to the moon. After all, this momentous human achievement that would ripple through time was framed by the world around it when it took place.
In 1969 America was at war as we still are in 2026. Vietnam and Iran serve as bookends for all the conflicts that have occurred in between. While few servicemen and servicewomen have died in the latest Iranian conflict, back in 1969 the average monthly death toll was more than 900. It was within this context that State Farm Insurance ran this ad highlighting another challenge of the times - the nation’s deadly highways. Bear in mind that it was only one year before, in 1968, that seatbelts became mandatory in all new American cars (not that you had to use them; mandatory seat belt usage did not become widespread in the U.S. until the 1980's). Today’s Iran conflict has much to do with highways as well, though now we seem more concerned with the price of gas than the price in human lives.
Our love affair with soft drinks, alcohol, and tobacco was alive and well in 1969. Pepsi and Coke were advertising their product in ice cold bottles though by the end of the year canned soda would outsell bottled for the first time. Celebrities were hawking hard liquor - Johnny Carson pushing Smirnoff and Telly Savalas (prior to his becoming television’s ‘Detective Kojak’ in 1973) plugging Johnnie Walker. I wasn't quite sure so I asked AI to identify the celebrity in the Johnnie Walker ad and it told me it was indeed Mr. Savalas.
My trust in AI would soon get challenged however when I asked it to identify the two wholesome young people telling me that L&M was the cigarette for me. Can you identify this cute couple? I thought they looked familiar, which after all is part of the point of the advertising but when I queried AI I got interesting answers. At first AI identified the young lady as Twiggy who at the age of 16 became one of the world’s first supermodels. It's not too far of a stretch to see Leslie Hornby, AKA Twiggy, being an influencer if she had come of age in today’s TikTok/Instagram world but then perhaps I’m not giving enough credit to Miss Hornby as influence the world she indeed did.
As for the good looking young lad AI easily came up with a name, at least at first. You'll know him in today’s world, if he is who AI says he is, as he’s had a long and illustrious film career spanning hits like American Graffiti, Witness, and The Fugitive. Not to mention some minor blockbusters like Indiana Jones and Star Wars. Yup, AI identified the man in the ad as a young Harrison Ford. Trying to verify what AI was telling me proved far more problematic - asking AI “Has Harrison Ford ever appeared in a tobacco ad?” elicited the following response: ‘There is no record of Harrison Ford appearing in a tobacco advertisement. While he has starred in numerous international commercials, none have been for cigarettes or tobacco product.’ Hmmmm… ‘no record’ is not quite the same as ‘never did’ so I then turned my attention back to Twiggy and asked the same question about her. Once again, the answer was somewhat ambiguous: ‘Based on available records, there is no evidence that the British model and icon Twiggy (Lesley Lawson) appeared in tobacco advertisements, particularly during her rise to fame in the 1960s.’
Bearing in mind that this L&M ad appeared in an issue of Life Magazine with a circulation of over 8 million I pushed a little deeper and AI (at least Google’s Gemini) finally changed its mind telling me the female model was not Twiggy but was instead Sally Struthers before she rose to fame as Gloria on ‘All in the Family’: ‘In the late 1960s, before she became a household name on All in the Family, Sally Struthers worked as a model and appeared in several tobacco advertisements. The image you shared is one of the most famous examples, featuring her alongside a young Harrison Ford for L&M cigarettes in 1969.’ Who, and what to believe? I guess the term “GIGO” or Garbage In, Garbage Out” applies as equally in 2026 as it did when it became widely used in the ‘60’s. Bookends.
If some of AI’s answers were slightly malodorous then Life in ‘69 had the answer from an advertiser most of us will still recognize. No matter we were rocketing men to the moon it was still a good time to ‘Take a vacation from odors and household germs’. Just like today. The July 4th Special Issue had a lengthy article on the ‘Lunar Laboratory’ which would house and potentially decontaminate the astronauts if they happened to bring back any lunar germs. I wonder if the 'Lunar Laboratory' had a fully stocked supply of Lysol? Talk about product placement.
Cars were perhaps more popular in 1969 than they are now with gas prices exceeding $4/gallon in many places thanks to our latest military foray. From an MG Sprite at $2,081 to a new Toyota Corolla for just $1,686 (girl in bikini optional) the dream of ‘two cars in every garage’ was becoming a reality. Even Ford was getting into imports with the Ford Cortina fresh from Great Britain for only $1,849. Not to be outdone, Volkswagen perhaps had the cutest ad without even showing their car. Their 1969 Volkswagen Beetle cost $1,799, slightly less than the cost of the Lunar Lander shown in their ad.
No discussion of the sixties would be complete without a mention of race relations - specifically that between blacks and whites. This ad acknowledges the difficulty in teaching about what was phrased then as a ‘racial crisis’ and advertises educational materials to help teachers address the issue. How did that ‘racial crisis’ unfold in the years since? In 1969 Martin Luther King was barely gone having being assassinated the prior year. Reading these summer issues of Life as a boy I had yet to learn the names Eric Garner, Michael Brown, or George Floyd. This ad would never fly in today’s world of alleged wokeness and DEI exclusion. Bookends.
There was even an ad for Bill Cosby bringing his comedy to life in a two-record set. Pre-Fat Albert, pre-The Cosby Show, pre-allegation and conviction of indecent assault. Back when he was still funny.
And if you were part of the ‘Action Crowd’ General Electric had you covered with their purse-sized Mini-Swinger transistor radio for only $12.98. Not to be outdone, Kodak (anybody remember them? Kodak at one time held roughly 90% of the film market and 85% of the camera market in the U.S. In 1969 Kodak had record sales of $2.74 billion} had the latest in camera gear with the Instamatic S-10 Camera. For less than $35 you could afford to capture all the not-quite-yet-invented selfies your heart desired. Even the mundane act of cooking was improved by technology - G.E., which just six years earlier had introduced the self-cleaning oven to the world, was showing off their latest model available in 4 decorator colors: Harvest, Coppertone, Avocado, and White. Who needed DoorDash, Uber Eats or Grubhub?
Marriage, which has undergone its own fair share of changes since 1969 was not forgotten on the pages of the moonshot editions of Life and the explicit chauvinism of the times was on full display in this ad from De Beers. The copy reads: “Look at you, happy girl. All dewy and smiley and sure of everything the promise on your left hand means.” In today’s context the woman in the ad doesn’t appear to be a ‘girl’. Nor does she appear to my 21st century eyes to be
particularly “happy”, “dewy” (whatever that means), “smiley”, or for that matter “sure of everything”. Perhaps she was prescient of all the turmoil surrounding marriage that was about to unfold and that continues to this day. The tagline of “A diamond is forever” would go on to be named as the ‘Best Advertising Slogan of the 20th Century’ by Advertising Age in 1999. The divorce rate in 1969 was 3.2 per 1,000 Americans. 1980 would see it peak at 22.6. In 2023, the rate per 1,000 was 14.4.
particularly “happy”, “dewy” (whatever that means), “smiley”, or for that matter “sure of everything”. Perhaps she was prescient of all the turmoil surrounding marriage that was about to unfold and that continues to this day. The tagline of “A diamond is forever” would go on to be named as the ‘Best Advertising Slogan of the 20th Century’ by Advertising Age in 1999. The divorce rate in 1969 was 3.2 per 1,000 Americans. 1980 would see it peak at 22.6. In 2023, the rate per 1,000 was 14.4.
Speaking of the fairer sex, Nationwide Insurance ran an ad that was as much a sign of the times as the aforementioned article on lofty royal affairs. Highlighting the accomplishments of 22 of its agents, only one is a woman. Kudos to Ms. Portnoy for being an early representative of what women would go on to accomplish if only given the chance.
I mentioned Artificial Intelligence earlier as I attempted to identify celebrities in some of the Life ads. Back in 1969 there was no AI but there was the 24 volume Encyclopedia Britannica available via an “Easy Book a Month Plan”. The ad highlights that the ‘largest, most complete reference work published in America’ contained a staggering 36,000,000 (36 million) words! In today’s world that would equate to about 200MB of data. The average cell phone today has storage measured not in megabytes (MB) but in gigabytes and terabytes. A terabyte would hold approximately 200 billion words - more than 5,000 complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannicas. A terabyte of storage can be had for as little as $50 today; a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1969 cost several hundred dollars, roughly equivalent to $3,000 in today’s currency. In 2026 you cannot buy printed versions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Instead, for just $8.99/month -"free 7-day trial"! - you can subscribe to their online edition. And of course now we have AI. Cheating on homework has never been so easy. Book ends. Literally.
Back in 1969 the cover price for a Life Magazine was 40 cents but if you subscribed you could get 25 weeks of Life Magazine for $2.95 or 12 cents an issue. Roughly 48 cents a month. Life certainly was not only advertising and there were some notable articles in the moonshot issues. One highlighted all the famous people who lived at the Watergate apartments in Washington, D.C. Just three years later a small matter of a break in at the nearby Watergate office complex would topple a presidency and change the political landscape forever. Presidential shenanigans it seems are nothing new.
Another article “Don’t ask me, I only live here" raised existential questions on the meaning of life, what it means to be an American, where is God? All subjects that are as elusive today in terms of answers as they were then. Today’s podcasts cover the same ground ad nauseam. The article even joked that the computers were taking over. Book ends.
Another ad hawked the advantages of computer dating, which admittedly was not quite the same as online dating today. But hey, it had to start somewhere. In 1965 two Harvard students had pioneered a computer-based dating service called 'Operation Match'. In 2004 another four Harvard students would roll out something called 'Facebook' which by the end of that year would boast more than a million users.Today Facebook has more than 3 billion monthly active users.
The final article I pondered over in the August 8th ‘On The Moon’ issue was about an American soldier in Vietnam, Sergeant John Cameron, nervously living out his last month of duty before going home. 11,780 U.S. troops would die in Vietnam in 1969 and Sergeant Cameron was determined not to be one of them. He would leave Vietnam the morning of June 23, 1969, alive, and he would live to see the first human being step onto the moon just a month later. I asked AI for information on what happened to Sergeant Cameron after he got home but sadly AI came up empty. Yet part of him lives on for those who go back and look through the now yellowing pages of a magazine documenting perhaps mankind’s greatest achievement. A whisper in time. That echoes still.
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