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Armstrong first set eyes on an airplane at the age of two, and he made his first flight at six in an old Ford tri-motor. As a boy, he was forever assembling model airplanes, and while other youngsters were still scrambling for comic books, he went right for the aeronautical publications when the magazine shipments arrived on the stands. He worked part time in the drugstore (400 an hour) and as a grease monkey at the airfield to accumulate the money for flying lessons ($9 an hour), and earned his pilot's license on his 16th birthday, the first day he was eligible. For a while, he had to bicycle the three miles between Wapakoneta and the field; Neil Armstrong was flying planes before he had a driver's license.
At about the same time, the future astronaut was taking his first close look at the moon through a homemade 8-in. reflector telescope fashioned from a stovepipe and mounted on roller-skate wheels atop a garage. The wondrous device belonged to Jacob Zint, a neighbor of the Armstrongs and a draftsman in the Westinghouse plant. "I can't recall that Neil ever said he wanted to go to the moon," says Zint. But as early as 1946, Armstrong was regularly visiting the makeshift observatory and often, says Zint, "he looked right into the Sea of Tranquillity"—the prime site for next week's landing.
After graduating from Wapakoneta High School, Armstrong won a Navy scholarship to Purdue, the alma mater of three other astronauts (Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, both of whom died in the Apollo launch-pad fire of Jan. 27, 1967, and Eugene Ceroan, a member of the Apollo 10 crew). Called to service in Korea at the end of his sophomore year, Armstrong earned a reputation as a hot pilot and three Air Medals in 78 combat missions. Returning to Purdue, he collected his degree in aeronautical engineering, and a wife, the former Janet E. Shearon of Evanston, Ill., who was studying home economics at Purdue when they met. They have two sons: Eric, 12, and Mark, 6.
A Lot of Marbles
Armstrong went to work for NASA as a civilian test pilot for the X-15 rocket plane, which he flew at 3,989 m.p.h. and an altitude of 207,500 ft.—both records at the time. In the early days of the space program, Armstrong had no desire to become an astronaut. Says a close acquaintance: "He thought those guys were playing around with a lot of marbles." After the "marbles" began lifting other pilots into space, he changed his mind and in 1962 became one of the second group of astronauts to be chosen. As a civilian, he is paid more than any other astronaut ($30,054 a year, v. Aldrin's $22,650 as an Air Force colonel and Collins' $20,400 as an Air Force lieutenant colonel), a fact that has stirred resentment. There are men in the space program, in fact, who detect behind Armstrong's supercool all-American image a rigid character who has more faith in the perfectibility of machines than of people. "He's all scrubbed up on the outside," says a NASA official, "but inside he has nothing but contempt for the rest of mankind that isn't willing to work as hard as he does."