America's Race to the Moon Inspires a Freemason (and a Boy) to Dream

As I digitized this selection of documents from the Buzz Aldrin Masonic Ephemera Collection for inclusion into the new Van Gorden-Williams Library & Archives Digital Collections website, my work that day pleasantly conjured up one of my most precious childhood memories: the day I witnessed my very first moonshot during the early 1970s.

Press Photograph signed by Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, no date.		While too young to remember America’s first successful moonshot, as I handled Freemason Buzz Aldrin’s signed press photograph, I remembered the exhilaration I felt so long ago on a lazy Sunday morning in April of 1972 as I laid on my grandmother’s living room floor. I remembered being transfixed by the sights and sounds emanating from my grandmother’s television set: The deafening roar of the rocket, and the larger-than-life images of an Apollo rocket, which filled the television screen as it lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. For me, as for the donor of this collection, Ben Lipset, also a Freemason, seeing our first moonshot was a magical and unforgettable moments. It filled us and other viewers with excitement and inspired dreams of a bigger, brighter future.
Mission Accomplished: A Poem by Ben Lipset, 1969.

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Captions

Buzz Aldrin Masonic Ephemera Collection, 1969-1975. Gift of Ben B. Lipset. Collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, MM 001.012.