When you watch the new film APOLLO 11 you will notice things that others miss. That is the way we are with films.

Here are a few things that caught my attention. The film is the video record of the moon mission fifty years ago. From pre-liftoff to the astronauts return to earth and a bit beyond.

We repeatedly see hundreds of NASA engineers. Row upon row of them at their computer stations. We see hundreds of staff members.

We see thousands of Americans on beaches near Cape Canaveral to witness the liftoff. We see hundreds gathered before tv sets. And gathered to catch glimpses of the moon walkers on their return.

An hour after watching the film I realized something: There must have been some, but I cannot recall seeing any obese people.

I cannot recall seeing many, if any, black faces. Certainly none among the NASA engineers and staff. Nor do I recall seeing women among them.

There are good reasons for this. Today 75 percent of us are overweight. Maybe 30 percent are obese, 15 percent morbidly so. A fact of life in America today is that most of us are fat. Not so in the 60’s. A majority of Americans then were slim.

There were precious few black engineers in the 60’s. And not many women engineers, of course. But we saw few of them in the film. Because there were so few. And because they worked behind the scenes, so to speak.

(Some of the most critically important work was done by women mathematicians. One of the most brilliant was black. But neither she nor other women or blacks were front and center at NASA in those days.)

I was struck by the uniformity of people in the film. Hundreds of engineers. White skin. White shirts. No colors. Mostly short-sleeved. You could easily think the shirts came from the stores with plastic pen holders in pockets. All these engineers wore ties. All had short hair. Buzz cuts. Flat-tops. No pony tails or shoulder-length hair. Few beards or moustaches.

Meanwhile, the crowd scenes were of whites. Because whites and those of other colors rarely gathered together in those years.

I recently sat in a Cooperstown waiting room. Before me were wall-sized photos of crowds at big baseball games. One was from the 1940’s. One from recent years.

In the photo from the 40’s were probably 500 men. Not a single woman. Not one kid. Not one black face. Nearly every man wore shirt and tie. Long-sleeved and white. They wore suit jackets or had taken them off. They were clean-shaven to a man.

In the photo taken recently the crowd was multi-colored. Skin, shirts, hats, shorts – colors, colors, colors. There were lots of kids and women. No ties. No suits.

Like you, I often come upon photos of graduating classes of 50 or 60 years ago. And photos of lots of folks gathered at conferences or family get-togethers. Compared with people in similar photos today, they are so slim. There is only an occasional obese person. Whereas today, we often see gatherings in which there is only an occasional slender person.

Uniformity. Study photos of street crowds from the 30’s and 40’s. Maybe crowds at political speeches. All the men wear ties, hats and suits. All the women wear dresses. Most have the same hair style.

The “face of the nation” has changed over these many years. So has “the body”. And how we dress and groom it.

A good many of these changes reflect the growth of our freedoms. For instance, women and blacks, browns and goldens are more free to pursue education and jobs that once were denied them. We, most of us, feel more free to dress as we damned well want to. More free than our parents and grandparents felt. People whose skin is not white feel more free – and ARE more free – to go to a ball game. And to sit where they want.

I wonder what people 50 years from now will notice in photos and films we make today. By then perhaps there will be a “magic bullet” that makes most people slender again. People in 2069 may laugh at how huge so many of us are in the photos.

My learned brother reckons that years from now people will look upon us as a curiously different species. After a few generations of genetic manipulation they will be different creatures than we are. As different as we are from gorillas.  

He thinks people of that brave new world will look with wonder at photos and films of us. “You know, people then had different IQs. Some were smart, some dumb. They contracted diseases too. And they came in all sizes, especially fat. Some were born malformed. And they aged! And they had to go to schools to learn things. Instead of learning by Artificial Intelligence transferals that we got.”

They will say such things at occasions like their 250-year reunions.

From Tom…as in Morgan.

Find Tom on Facebook. You can write to Tom at tomasinmorgan@yahoo.com.