Dave Bangert

dbangert@jconline.com

June 9, 1970

Dear Mr. Armstrong,

We want to thank you for being so brave and walking on the moon. We are proud that you are from Ohio. All year we have been trying to improve our writing so we would be chosen to write to you. I won!

With love from us all,

Traci-Lea Bernardo, first grade, Room 104, Royalview School, Willowick, Ohio

The letter fills a light-gray sheet of three-rule paper, the kind lined to help shape the humps, loops and bumps of grade-school printing. The blocky lettering, by first-grader standards even today, qualifies as top-of-class.

Traci-Lea Bernardo of Willowick, Ohio — who grew up to be Traci Bernardo Kuhn of Naperville, Illinois — remembers a lot about her first-grade classroom. ("We had teas at the teacher's house," she said, "and she produced a show on local TV. She was great.") But Kuhn doesn't have any recollection of writing to the commander of Apollo 11 a month ahead of the first anniversary of that one small step for a man.

Still, she's floored when she sees it 44 years later.

"It was in a folder? In a box? A box at Neil Armstrong's house?" Kuhn asks. "The Neil Armstrong? A letter I wrote? … That is so cool. To think he saved that — my little letter. He must have saved quite a bit if that's in there."

Quite a bit doesn't start to tell the story of Neil Armstrong's accumulated fan mail.

Two weeks ago at Karnes Research Center, Purdue University made the Neil A. Armstrong Papers — his personal collection of documents, photos and artifacts valued at $3.4 million — available for public viewing. Among it are stacks of fan mail that Purdue archivists measure by volume: 32.4 cubic feet.

That's 70,000 cards, letters and autograph requests in all manner of cursive, print and typewriter fonts, based on the nearest estimate Tracy Grimm, archivist for the Barron Hilton Flight and Space Exploration Archives, can give. Carbon copies of responses from Armstrong or his secretaries are attached to many of them.

"The sheer number might sound amazing," Grimm said. "Because, it is. … You have to understand, the volume of mail coming to Neil Armstrong was staggering. And here is so much of it — in our hands, straight from his garage. Who knows? Your letter could be in there, too. Probably is, if you wrote one."​

Nov. 12, 1970

Dear Neil Armstrong,

Hi! It's good to be writing to you again. I suppose you're getting a lot of mail from other people. You sure must be busy …

Sincerely,

Billy Brady, Kobe, Japan

"It's funny you should check in now," James Hansen said in an interview from his Auburn University office late last month.

Hansen, a history professor, was Armstrong's official biographer, the author of "First Man: The Life of Neil Armstrong." He said he's been pitching a book that will revolve around the personal correspondence that cascaded on Armstrong, knowing that the former astronaut and American icon saved so much of it. The goal is to have something ready for 2019, the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969.

He's making plans to spend a month or so for the next few summers to take in a collection that requires a three-ring binder nearly 6 inches thick to inventory.

The initial crush of fan mail — the pen pal requests, the notes of congratulations, the invitations to family dinners, the pre-Wikipedia inquiries for help on high school projects — came immediately after Apollo 11 splashed down.

It kept coming after Armstrong took a position as a professor at the University of Cincinnati in 1971. Secretaries were assigned to help sort and respond during his time on the faculty there.

"He told me that one of the things that bothered him was that, while he was at the University of Cincinnati, a lot of this sort of mail came to him and the University of Cincinnati had to handle it," Hansen said. "Neil was concerned that this was adding a burden to the mail room load and cost and all of that."

And it kept coming when he left the University of Cincinnati in 1980. At the time, Armstrong took out a classified ad —"He didn't sign his name to it, you know, 'This is Neil Armstrong,' " Hansen said — and hired Vivian White as an administrative assistant to triage his mail that came into a post office box in Lebanon, Ohio.

"As she described it to me, she had 11 different boxes that she would put things in," Hansen said. "She and he had worked together, elbow to elbow, for so long that she had a very good sense of what he wanted to see and what he didn't want to see."

The system must have been similar to ones Armstrong's previous six secretaries had used at NASA and at the University of Cincinnati. The files follow a similar pattern through the years, divided into categories: Autograph seekers, Eagle Scout congratulatory letters, solicitations for donations, invitations for events and speaking engagements, media requests and various student questions.

One set of folders in the collection donated to Purdue is marked: "Correspondence — Nonsensical and Unusual Requests, 1973-1984." Another, marked "RESTRICTED" in the collection, is sorted alphabetically: "L-Screwballs, 1971-1980."

"The 11th box was actually the trash can," Hansen said. "So there was probably more than 70,000 letters sent to them. Some just went to the trash. … It's kind of too bad. I wish she'd kept those, too."

July 30, 1971

I am 10 years and 203 days old. … I would like to have you as a guest at my house for a weekend. If you can come, please notify me of the time you can. If you do come, please bring notes, records, exhibits and other papers about science. …

Your admirer,

Brad Brassfield, Rockford, Illinois

As it was, the accumulation was overwhelming in the Armstrong household.

"Neil had boxes in his office. He had boxes in the garage. He had boxes in the attic. He had boxes in the warehouse," Carol Armstrong, his wife, said during a private event Nov. 21 at Purdue. "And he didn't differentiate between what had a value and what didn't have a value. As I've said before, once I found his congressional gold medal, but it was stuffed in a drawer with Arby's coupons."

Armstrong started funneling some of those boxes to Purdue in 2008, after negotiating with the Archives and Special Collections Division about how his collection would be used at his alma mater.

Armstrong, for sure, belonged to Purdue, one of 23 alumni chosen as astronauts. He started in West Lafayette in 1947, was called away to the Navy in 1949, and returned to campus in 1952, before graduating with a bachelor's degree in engineering in 1955.

But Grimm said Purdue understood this would be a collection of worldwide interest.

"We make things accessible," Grimm said. "It's the reason why Mr. Armstrong gave it to Purdue — to be used and seen."

Shortly after Armstrong's death on Aug. 25, 2012, the rest of the 207.1 cubic feet of materials from his home started arriving on the fourth floor of the Humanities, Social Sciences and Education Library in Stewart Center. Stored behind locked doors, in an aisle marked Range 11 of Purdue's Special Collections, the boxes cover shelves that stretch 63 feet long by 6 feet tall.

A Purdue Special Collections team, including Grimm, Donovan Irven and Mary Sego, didn't actually catalog Armstrong's boxes. With this collection, the idea was to keep things exactly as they were filed and stored by Armstrong.

"That gives researchers clues into how his mind worked, what he might have been thinking when a set of letters is kept with another set of letters, or with one of his speeches or some other project," Grimm said. "It just took us more than two years to process it, to know what we had and how to find it all."

May 4, 1971

Dear Mr. Armstrong,

My class sent you letters that they had written, and you sent an answer. I just wish you could have seen their faces when I read the letter to them. … Because of a thing called "teacher's privileges," I kept the original letter. However, I did make Xerox copies for the students and most of them framed their copies! You will never know how happy you made my students.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Sandra Witt, Ross Elementary School, League City, Texas

The Nov. 21 ceremony meant the Armstrong Papers were ready for public viewing.

Among the collected items: His class notes from Purdue.

"We've made that part of the collection available to students in the past two years. They're just in awe, especially when they see Neil's coursework," Grimm said. "He was doing the same things, more or less. And there it is — in his notebooks, in his handwriting."

But by sheer volume, the part of the collection marked "personal correspondence" — enough to fill 32 boxes of office paper — is second only to those marked "NASA career" (42.4 cubic feet).

"What did he keep? Everything," Grimm said. "And with letters, they all seem to have been answered in some way. Or, at least, it's our sense, going through it all, that he really makes a point to respond.

"If you start with the early ones, it gives an insight to 1969 and those years right after when people just seemed to need to reach him," Grimm said. "They wrote poems. They wrote songs. They sent these just precious school pictures of these goofy grade school faces."

Jan. 9, 1971

Dear Mr. Armstrong,

I am a boy, 11 years old. My name is Raphael and I live in a little village. I try to do well in school since I want to be an astronaut like you some day. It would be great to live such an adventure. Papa read Jules Verne, but that was only a dream; I have seen the real thing (on TV)! Best wishes to you, and I hope you will send me an autographed photo.

Raphael Berg, Champigneulles, France

Why did Neil Armstrong, a man who had no shortage of daily awed looks as reminders of his place in history, save so much mail from strangers?

"I don't think there was any mandate, like the Ohio Historical Society or NASA or anyone," Hansen said. "There might have been people or family members who said, 'Oh, you ought to save that stuff.' I don't think Neil needed to hear that. …

"He was just a really good record keeper. I mean, how many people still have their calculus notes?" Hansen asked. "He was not unaware about what it meant to be the first man on the moon. He wasn't going about it in any egotistical way, but these were just things he thought he should keep."

Feb. 13, 1971

Dear Mr. Armstrong,

Our school newspaper, the LOG, is sponsoring its annual senior-junior beauty contest. Each year we ask a leading celebrity to judge the contest from formal portraits and candid snapshots. This year we would like for you to be our judge. … We would appreciate an early reply as the contest will soon be under way.

Respectfully yours,

Leon Briggs, Jr., co-editor in chief, LOG, Collins High School, Oak Hill, W.V.

In "First Man," Vivian White told Hansen that 99 percent of the responses went out with signed form letters. In the earlier material in the Armstrong Papers, there's evidence that Armstrong had a hand in some responses. But then, too, most came with some variation on a disclaimer from secretaries S.B. Weber, Geneva Barnes or Fern Lee Pickens, replying: "I'm sure you understand that it is impossible for him to respond personally because of the demands on him."

Hansen waves off notions that Armstrong was the recluse that he's made out to be. But he said Armstrong remained a private person who was careful about how often he basked in a spotlight that always seemed to be waiting for him.

This is an astronaut, after all, who allowed Purdue to install a statue of him outside an engineering hall bearing his name as long as it portrayed him just as a student looking ahead to his future, not as a conquering hero.

Hansen said there will be plenty to mine from the correspondence collection as to how Armstrong handled letters from those who tried to persuade him into running for public office, endorse products or trade in proposed favors with other celebrities.

"But I think there's something more important in there," Hansen said. "It's holding up a mirror to ourselves.

"I think he did his absolute best of executing the privilege of being who he was. But he was constantly being pushed and pulled to be somebody else," Hansen said. "But it says as much about what we want, what we expect from our heroes. … I think what you'll learn from those letters is that we expect way too much from this guy.

"And he did give us a lot."

July 20, 1971

Dear sir,

To you, the Man of the Moon, my best congratulations, for this second anniversary. Would you please accept it from a simple Haitian girl who cannot forget this tremendous event. … You had walked for all the humanity. You did walk for me, too. I was proud, and so I am today. I consider that you are a Hero. Happy anniversary.

Very respectfully yours,

Gilberte Boursiquot, Montreal

Maybe it's adequate to know that Armstrong thought enough of the incoming mail to save letters from first-graders and their teachers. From the wife who watched her husband, just home from open-heart surgery, cry at a note and signature from an astronaut. From a rocket club president in the Bronx inviting him to a launch at his school.

Also from the kid who stapled a drawing of the American flag with peace signs instead of stars and used masking tape to attach seven tiny slips of paper for requested autographs. From a father in Paraguay who hoped one day the first man on the moon could meet the daughter who goes by Lunita because she set her feet on the Earth on the very same day.

And maybe it's enough to know Armstrong then left the letters in a place where we could find them.

Dear Mr. Armstrong ...

With love from us all,

Traci-Lea Bernardo

Traci Bernardo Kuhn spent part of Thanksgiving weekend retracing her childhood as Traci-Lea Bernardo, trying to pin down the bits and pieces contained in pencil on school-issued paper, carefully stored for four decades at the house of the first man on the moon.

Her family moved before she was in third grade. So, she said she actually had to Google Royalville School to make sure it was in Willowick, Ohio, a northeast suburb of Cleveland where she lived. The letter contained a few other clues, including the fact that Traci-Lea was hyphenated — something her dad insisted she did as a child.

"I was startled that he kept a letter I couldn't even remember writing. But it doesn't surprise me that I sent it because of a contest and that I won. Because that's what it took for me to do my best. I was very competitive," Kuhn said. "It was like, 'I know you walked on the moon and everything, but look at what I won.'

"It was about me."

Isn't that what Hansen's said: 70,000 mirrors with 70,000 people looking back through fan mail sent to Neil Armstrong.

Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.

About the collection

The Neil A. Armstrong Papers became available for research as of Nov. 21 at the Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center, on the fourth floor of the Humanities, Social Sciences and Education Library in Purdue University's Stewart Center.

The Armstrong Papers, valued at $3.4 million, includes collections from the first man on the moon's family papers, his speeches, his school work at Purdue, his test pilot years, the Apollo 11 mission and his life after NASA.

Viewing the material requires 48-hour notice. To schedule a time, contact Tracy Grimm, archivist for the Barron Hilton Flight and Space Exploration Archives, at grimm3@purdue.edu.

To see other collections in the Barron Hilton Flight and Space Exploration Archives, go to collections.lib.purdue.edu/flight-and-space.

On display now: Tied to the unveiling of the Armstrong Papers, an exhibit, "Steps to the Moon: Selections from the Neil A. Armstrong Papers and the Eugene A. Cernan Papers," is on display at the Karnes Archives, fourth floor of the HSSE Library in the Stewart Center. Armstrong and Cernan — the first and most recent men on the moon — are Purdue graduates.

If you go: There will be an exhibit open house geared for families from 1 to 3:30 p.m. Dec. 6 and Jan. 17 to see "Steps to the Moon" at the Karnes Archives, fourth floor of the HSSE Library in Stewart Center.