55 years later, the mystery of The Plain Dealer’s moonwalk error is solved: Letter from the Editor (2024)

A key benefit to being a journalist is witnessing key moments that become part of our shared history, but there’s another highlight having to do with history:

Sometimes we get to solve an intriguing mystery from days gone by. Today is such a day.

You might remember a piece I wrote two years ago about the white whale of journalism mistakes. For decades, legend in The Plain Dealer newsroom was that the newspaper got the quote wrong in perhaps the biggest news story in history, the moon landing.

I had seen a grainy facsimile -- produced on a copy machine -- of a July 21, 1969, Plain Dealer front page that misquoted Neil Armstrong saying “One small step for me, one giant leap for man.” But no one had an original version, leaving many of us to question whether the legend was nonsense. That day’s edition in our microfilm archives has the correct quote - “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

In 2022, however, I found the white whale – a yellowed newspaper with the wrong quote. The legend was true. It was an early edition, so it was not captured for microfilm. You can read the story I wrote about the discovery here.

When I wrote that piece, we all had a good laugh about it, and we had plenty of speculation about how the newsroom made the error, but no one knew the answer. Two bylines were on the story – Fraser Kent and William D. McCann – but I did not find them with my cursory search before writing my piece. Given how much time had passed, I didn’t think odds were great that either of them was alive. The mystery of the big Plain Dealer’s oopsie was unsolved.

Until now.

McCann, it turns out, is alive and well and living in Texas. My piece from two years ago recently caught up with him, sparking him to get in touch.

I belatedly offer my perspective to you as someone who was in the room. I hope it is helpful. It was a long time ago and my 81-year-old brain has forgotten many things over the years. But I still remember that night clearly.

He said he had just completed active duty in the U.S. Navy as a photographer in Southeast Asia when The Plain Dealer hired him as a science writer five months before the moon landing. Previously he was a science writer based in Washington D.C. Among his first Plain Dealer assignments was covering the Apollo 10 and 11 moon missions, which meant writing a lot of advance stories – drawing on the experts and what is now NASA Glenn Research Center -- and then being at Cape Kennedy and Houston for live coverage.

The lead reporter was medical writer Fraser Kent, who McCann said was far more experienced, and their Apollo 10 coverage went off without a hitch. McCann said they knew Apollo 11 would be more challenging because the moonwalk would be so close to deadline as to preclude the use of the rewrite staff.

What’s a rewrite staff, you ask? Back in the days when newsrooms were orders of magnitude bigger than they are today – years before cell phones and laptop computers -- teams of people existed to take information or dictation from reporters over the phone – often pay phones. Those teams typed up or cleaned up the stories – rewriting them, ensuring that the stories appearing in print were clean.

Not having the rewrite team available presented a challenge for Kent and McCann. Editors solved it by renting a teletype machine, on which the reporters would write and transmit their story from the space center in Houston.

It would mean minimum editorial oversight back in Cleveland. It was a scary thought for relative rookie me. No typos, I kept telling myself. We had filed numerous earlier stories, using rewrite staff, and all was going well.

On the day of the moonwalk, McCann described hundreds of journalists sitting in an auditorium in Houston, watching the lunar scene on a big screen.

The black and white images were not sharp and the sound ranged from fair to awful, but we all had to work with it. The plan was to have both of us take notes. After 10 minutes, Kent took off for the teletype machine to write the lede and a few paragraphs. When he returned to the auditorium, it was my turn to take over. Even before he returned, I heard some reporters arguing about exactly what Armstrong had said. When I saw what Kent had written, I suggested we confirm. I don’t remember what he wrote, but it was not exactly what I and others thought we had heard.

Kent went and confirmed the correct quote with NASA, and when he returned, he told McCann he had reached The Plain Dealer editors in time to get it right in the paper. After that, the two took turns going to the teletype machine to update the story until their editors said they were done.

We breathed a deep sigh of relief. The next day NASA contractors, who had set up shop at the Houston center, showed off newspapers from all over the country, including the Plain Dealer. I nabbed one of them. I still have it yellowing away in a box in the closet. It had the words “one small step for man.....” in the lede.

Kent and I were in Houston for nearly another week and took vacation time afterwards. When we returned to the office, we were greeted with congratulations and thanks for a job well done. I still have letters of appreciation from Publisher Tom Vail and others. There was never any mention to me of a glitch, nor did I ever hear anything from staff, which, knowing some of those characters, would have had a fun field day with the story.

Yep, you read that right. Until he read my piece, McCann never knew about the Plain Dealer early edition publishing with the wrong quote. It might have been Plain Dealer legend by the time I arrived in Cleveland in 1996, but in 1969, the newsroom wasn’t talking about it.

Maybe Kent did hear something, but he never mentioned it to me. He was that kind of guy. Your finding a copy with the wrong words in it was a big surprise to me. I always had assumed the problem had been resolved in time… I was fortunate to have covered the biggest story of my lifetime at such a young age. So I won’t let anything mess with my good thoughts about those days. Or my fond recollections of a bunch of interesting characters who wrote and edited the PD every day. Or my fondness for my long-gone friend and hero Fraser Kent.

McCann, who graciously gave me permission to quote what he sent me, pointed out that no story in his career was more stressful than Apollo 11, because of its importance and the tough deadline. He also noted that there was no instant replay in 1969. And, he said, it’s likely that everybody got the quote wrong.

Armstrong later insisted that he actually said “one small step for a man” and the official transcript reflects that. The “a” apparently got dropped out during a slight glitch in the radio communication. So the truth is everybody got it wrong.

Mystery solved.

I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com

Thanks for reading.