First Special Olympics / Apollo 11 landed on the moon - July 20

The First Special Olympics began on this day in 1868. / On this day in 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, making Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong the first people to walk on the moon.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, y'all were rerunning two episodes today, which means that
you'll hear two hosts me and Tracy V. Wilson enjoy
the show. Welcome to this day in History class. It's July.
The first International Special Olympics was held on this day
in At this point in history, it was very common

(00:21):
for people with disabilities to be housed and institutions, and
a lot of times these institutions had just appalling conditions.
Even if they were called a school, it wasn't really
about educating anyone. It was just about keeping people away
from the public eye. People who were kept at home
also tended to be kept out of sight from the

(00:42):
rest of the community and sometimes even secret. It was
really rare to see a person with any kind of
visible disability out in public, both because of all the
social stigma that surrounded the whole idea and because communities
just were not accessible. There were some people, though, that
really started working to change that. This included Unice Kennedy

(01:03):
Shriver and Anne macgon Burke. Shriver was the sister of
John F. Robert F and Ted Kennedy, and they also
had another sister named Rosemary, who had an intellectual disability.
That was treated with a lobotomy in one Today we
know that this was not an appropriate treatment for her
at all, but at the time the lobotomy was often

(01:25):
recommended as a treatment for arrange of mental and cognitive issues. Shriver, though,
was the director of the Joseph P. Kennedy Junior Foundation,
and that was a foundation that began focusing more and
more of its efforts on people who had cognitive and
intellectual disabilities. She did a lot of work, and she
did a lot of advocacy with her brothers, who as politicians,

(01:48):
had the ability to pass laws that would help this situation.
She also just wanted to combat all of this social
stigma and the segregation and isolation of children with intellectual disabilities.
One of the things that she did was to establish
a summer camp in nineteen sixty two, and one of
the goals of this camp was to get a better
sense of what these children could do instead of focusing

(02:08):
on what they could not. This led to year round
athletics programs for young people with intellectual disabilities. While Shriver
is the person that is most often associated with the
founding of Special Olympics, Burke was highly instrumental in expanding
its scope and its scale. In March of nineteen sixty eight,

(02:29):
Shriver and the Chicago Park District announced the first Olympic
Games for young people with intellectual disabilities. These first Games
were held at Soldier Field in Chicago on July thirty,
nineteen sixty eight. A thousand young athletes from the United
States and Canada competed, and they competed in more than
two hundred events. Special Olympics Incorporated was formed later on

(02:50):
in nineteen sixty eight, and today it's a global organization
that holds events all over the world and millions of
young athletes participate. Today. There's some debate about Special Olympics.
The field of education has moved toward trying to place
children into the least restrictive environment that still meets their
needs so as often as possible, placing them in classrooms

(03:11):
with their non disabled peers instead of in classrooms that
are segregated from everyone else. So there's a lot of
discussion about whether it's really helpful to segregate children with
intellectual disabilities into their own separate event. There are a
lot of other specific criticisms as well, including whether today
Special Olympics perpetuates more stereotypes than it helps to dispel. However,

(03:35):
though it's clear that the Special Olympics and Unice Kennedy
Shriver's work outside of the Olympics were monumentally important and
starting to combat some of the stigma surrounding disability. And
this included advocacy that led to some of the first
laws that protected people with disabilities and helped guarantee them
equal access to facilities and education. Thanks so much to

(03:56):
Eve's Jeff Cote for her research work on today's episode,
Antatari Harrison for her audio skills on all of his episodes.
You can subscribe to the Stay in History Class on
Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever else you get your
podcasts too. DN tomorrow for a show trial that's full
of monkey business. Hi, everyone, Welcome to this Day in

(04:23):
History class, where we uncover the remnants of history every day.
The day was July twentieth, nineteen sixty nine. U S
astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin buzz Aldrin became the first

(04:46):
people on the Moon when Apollo eleven landed on its
surface in the late nineteen fifties. In the nineteen sixties,
the space race between the US and the Soviet Union
was in full swing in nineteen sixty one. Not long
after the Soviet Union and US sent the first people
into space, US President John F. Kennedy declared before Congress

(05:07):
his commitment to landing someone on the Moon before the
end of the decade, so NASA dedicated the Apollo program
to Kennedy's mission. The first uncrewed Apollo space flight launched
in nineteen sixty six, and the first crude flight was
Apollo seven. In October of nineteen sixty eight. Apollo seven

(05:28):
tested the Apollo Command in Service module in low Earth orbit.
The Apollo program went on to send astronauts to orbit
the Moon and tested the lunar module while in Earth orbit.
In Apollo ten, the Apollo lunar module was flown into
a descent orbit in a dry run for the first
Moon landing, which would happened two months later. On the

(05:50):
morning of July sixteenth, nineteen sixty nine, Apollo eleven launched
from Cape Kennedy commander Neil Armstrong, Lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin,
and Command module pilot Michael Collins were aboard. On July seventeenth,
the first color TV transmission from Apollo was sent to
Earth On July nineteenth, the spacecraft went into lunar orbit,

(06:12):
and on July twenties, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the lunar module,
which separated from the command module, where Collins remained in
lunar orbit. One and two hours, forty five minutes and
forty seconds after launch, the lunar module Eagle landed on
the Moon. Hours after landing, Armstrong left the lunar module

(06:32):
and stepped onto the Moon, setting up the TV camera
for transmission back to Earth. About twenty minutes later, Aldrin
also exited the lunar module and took his first steps
on the Moon. About six hundred and fifty million people
watched the mission on television as the astronauts became the
first ever to walk on the Moon. They took photographs

(06:53):
of the Moon's surface and the lunar horizon, took samples
of lunar surface materials, and planted a U S flag.
They also left behind medallions with astronauts and cosmonauts who
died in accidents, as well as a silicon disc that
contained goodwill messages from seventy three countries. The astronauts spoke
with President Richard Nixon by telephone link. After the two

(07:17):
astronauts re entered the Lunar module and slept for about
seven hours, they began their ascent from the lunar surface.
Aldrin and Armstrong spent twenty one hours and thirty six
minutes on the surface of the Moon. The Lunar module
docked with Command Module Columbia, and Armstrong and Aldrin went
back to the Command Module with Collins. On July, the

(07:38):
Apollo eleven crew landed in the Pacific Ocean about nine
hundred miles or fourteen hundred kilometers southwest of Hawaii. The U. S. S.
Hornet was the primary recovery ship for Apollo eleven. The
astronauts were sent to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at NASA's
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center for quarantine. The astronauts moon

(08:00):
ending and returned to Earth was celebrated with parades, a
state dinner, and a world tour. Collins, Aldrin, and Armstrong
were each given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Five later
Apollo missions also landed astronauts on the Moon. The whole
Apollo program cost around twenty six billion dollars. Though a

(08:21):
lot of people celebrated the feat. Many Americans protested the
allocation of so much money and resources to accomplishing a
moon landing when they were pressing issues to attend to
on Earth. I'm Eves, Jeff Code, and hopefully you know
a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
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(08:43):
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