When the Eagle landed, one small exclamation said it all

Fifty years ago Saturday my stoic father, Polish-speaking grandma, normally chatty teenage sister, tearful mother and I sat speechless on our living room couch as we watched men land and then walk on the moon.

We were dumbstruck.

So was Walter Cronkite.

If you're old enough, you might remember what that dean of American journalists said to us viewers when the Eagle landed. Cronkite removed his ubiquitous black-rimmed eyeglasses, rubbed his (probably sweaty) hands together, suppressed a tear or two of his own, smiled like a kid in a candy store and said:

"Whew, boy!"

And do you remember what he said when Neil Armstrong later stepped onto the moon's surface?

"My golly!"

"Say something, Wally. I'm speechless."

Cronkite, a war correspondent who had flown on bombing raids over Germany, eyewitnessed the Battle of the Bulge, the Nuremberg Trials and the Tet Offensive, could only express his own amazement and joy this time with childlike exclamations. Yet, those four words expressed perfectly our own thoughts and feelings. Yours too, maybe.

My journalism teacher, Hattie Steinberg, preached that if you want people to care about what you write, "Check your ego at the door." She added: "Less is better."

To drive home her point, she slashed and gutted our pretentious, fancy-schmancy rhetoric mercilessly. Once she scrawled across (not in the margin of) my "editorial" about the military draft: "What in the world are you saying here? Stop showing off. Just say it!"

Then she handed me her copy of George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language."

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Later into that midsummer night in 1969 and right up through splashdown, the TV networks brought on sci-fi authors such as Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut and a bunch of scientists and journalists, all of whom opined about the moon and our arrival on it. Elected officials chimed in, too, of course.

Bradbury: "I'm willing to predict tonight that by the end of the century our churches will be full again. ... Because when we move out into the mystery, when we move out into the loneliness of space, when we begin to discover we really are three billion lonely people on a small world, I think it's going to draw us much closer together."

ABC's Harry Reasoner: "The moon has always had a sort of spooky or evil quality to it. Strange things were always happening by the light of the moon, and most of them were unpleasant."

President Richard Nixon: "This is the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation."

But from what I can remember, compared to Cronkite's "Whew boy!" and "My golly!" all those lofty pronouncements seemed like verbal froufrou.

To me, Cronkite had said it all with four words.

Miss Steinberg would have been pleased.