Am I Right Side Up or Upside Down?

The next six weeks in Hot Springs were more interesting than I could have imagined. I worked one week helping a sixty-seven-year-old man put up one of Jeff’s pre-fab houses in the small settlement of Story, west of Hot Springs. The old guy worked me into the ground every day and shared a lot of his homespun wisdom and country skepticism with me.

Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague, Michael Collins, aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months President Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon before the decade was out.

The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it had happened. I said sure, I saw it on television. He disagreed; he said that he didn’t believe it for a minute, that “them television fellers” could make things look real that weren’t. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn’t ahead of his time.

Bill Clinton
My Life