Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

Yet another historic milestone in my life has passed. In late 1973, I was working in Los Angeles for Rockwell International. Being mid-westerners, we didn't take that well to the California lifestyle and I absolutely hated the LA comute (from the San Fernando Valley). About that time a headhunter in San Deigo called me and said they were looking for some kind of business development guy at a little company called WD-40 and was I interested? Even though I didn't know who WD-40 was or what they did, I decided to check it out. I went down for an interview and it turned out that that interview was with John Barry. I've never had a more interesting interview, he was a facinating guy. I'll never know whether or not I would have gotten the job at WD-40 (I think I might have), because before I had heard anything back from Barry I'd already gotten another offer from a friend back in Wisconsin, and we jumped at the chance to get back to the mid-west. One of those forks in the...

The date was July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon at 20:17:40 UTC according to NASA. (For those who like precision, Neil stepped onto the Sea of Tranquility 0°40′26.69″N 23°28′22.69″E / 0.6740806°N 23.4729694°E / 0.6740806; 23.4729694 based on the IAU Mean Earth Polar Axis coordinate system .) I will never forget that date and time because I witnessed this historic event at 3:17 pm in the induction center at Fort Leonard Wood Missouri. It was a very odd moment in my life. I had left my wife early that morning in a very frightened and emotional state by herself in Milwaukee; travelled all day by busses without airconditioning in 100+ degree heat; met up along the way in various little towns with what seemed to me at the time to be a very ragtag and slightly dangerous bunch of fellow draftees; and then arrived at Leonard Wood to the welcome of a bunch of screaming Drill Sargents just 30 minutes before Neil's famous landing. Mostly because the Drill Sargents want...