100 years ago: 1919
George H. Curtis left Friday night for the west. He will return next week, bringing a carload of horses.
50 years ago: 1969
The men of Apollo II — their lunar orbit only hours away — inspected Friday the fragile spacecraft called Eagle and found it ready for man’s first landing on the moon. Neil A. Armstrong and Air Force Col. Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. crawled through a tunnel into the moon-lander and found the small spacecraft undamaged by the buffeting of launch and its long space journey. The inspection — seen on earth during the longest telecast ever beamed from space — came as Apollo 11 neared the point where the moon’s gravity takes control of the spacecraft and starts arcing around the lunar backside. Apollo 11 goes into an orbit of the moon at 1:26 p.m. (EDT) Saturday. Armstrong and his space mates had to delay the start of their nine-hour rest period for more than an hour past the 9:32 pm (EDT) scheduled starting time. An attempt to put the spacecraft into a stable spin-called passive thermal control-failed and a second attempt had to be made. It was successful. Controllers couldn’t determine immediately why the first attempt failed. The spacecraft must be 3 RPM, three resolutions an hour to equalize in all sides, the intense heat radiating from the sun. The crew will awaken Saturday with the moon only 25,000 miles away and only seven hours before the moon orbit begins.
25 years ago: 1994
The Industrial Park at Kittyhawk will receive its first tenant in November when Spectrum Printing and Graphics Inc. moves into the park from its current location in Lewiston. The eight-year-old printing company, employing 13 currently, will build a 12,000 square-foot building in the park, which has been vacant since it was finished last summer. “It’s one of the nicest areas in the Twin Cities,” Alex McCulloch, one of the company’s three co-owners, said after the City Council approved the deal Monday night.
The material used in Looking Back is reproduced exactly as it originally appeared, although misspellings and errors may be corrected.
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