William Anders, ‘Earthrise’ and the Sixties

The news Friday of the death of Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders at age 90 got me reminiscing about an event in my childhood – an odd conjunction of events so typical of the 1960s.

Anders died flying his classic WWII-era Beechcraft T-34 Mentor fighter training plane when it crashed into waters off the San Juan Islands. More than one commenter on the Web noted that it was a more proper death for an astronaut than dying in bed in a nursery home. It’s hard to disagree.

Anders’ obituaries all recognized that even more than orbiting the moon, his greatest claim to fame was having taken the image of the Earth from the moon — the stunning “Earthrise” — arguably one of the most famous photographs in history.

I think I know why that photo happened.

In junior high I was (reluctantly) part of a “gifted child” study group – a small number of really odd kids. The only good thing about it was we were taken to visit some equally odd, and even more brilliant, folks. Thus, I got to meet, for example, Buckminster Fuller – with whom I corresponded for years. I was also one of the first kids to actually use the Internet (actually its precursor Arpanet).

But the strangest of these visits was with a white guy dressed head-to-toe in deerskin Indian clothes: Stewart Brand. My father, a retired espionage agent and Air Force major, who was now working in security at NASA Ames Research Center, drove me to the meeting and stayed. I found out years later that he had been asked by NASA to file a report on Brand for his troublemaking, potentially subversive, ideas.

Brand turned out to be less a hippy than a canny entrepreneur and Stanford grad, brimming with interesting ideas and questions. One of his ideas was to create a New Age catalog of tools for the counterculture life. He was going to call it the Whole Earth Catalog. And he asked us a question: “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the whole Earth yet?”

We went home. I remember thinking, “Well, that was strange.” My father thought differently. In his report on Brand to the powers-that-be at NASA, he described the man as “harmless.” But he finished the report with a question:

“Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”

That was early 1968. The Whole Earth Catalog, with a hand-drawn cover, appeared a few months later. And, famously, on Christmas Eve of that year, as Apollo 8 orbited the moon, Frank Borman read from the Book of Genesis... and William Anders photographed “Earthrise.”

A coincidence?

[Years later, I actually did some writing for Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog – now with Anders’ photograph prominently on its cover – and told him the story. Now a very successful author, he laughed and said: “I always wonder how that happened.”]