Sometimes Even Newspapers Need Poetry

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series reflecting on the Apollo 11 mission, 50 years later.

It is difficult to imagine a more daunting task for a newspaper editor than planning the next day’s front page when the world has just witnessed humanity’s crowning achievement: the successful landing of two of its kind on an alien world. The headlines you write, the photos you place, the prose you edit—you are not simply working to sum up the immensity of the moment for morning commuters. The page you make will be hung on walls, folded into scrapbooks, passed onto grandchildren, and eventually stand in for even the most potent of human memories.

In July 1969, much of that job at fell to , then the paper’s associate managing editor. (, he’d be named managing editor, at the time the, the paper’s art director, who was called upon for layout duty “when a story of historic dimensions came along.”