{"id":147,"date":"2014-07-18T21:21:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-19T02:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/?p=147"},"modified":"2014-11-15T14:03:23","modified_gmt":"2014-11-15T19:03:23","slug":"remembering-the-summer-of-moonraker-and-the-summer-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/2014\/07\/18\/remembering-the-summer-of-moonraker-and-the-summer-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the summer of ‘Moonraker’ and the summer of my independence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"image\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Moonraker<\/em> came out 35 years ago this summer. I was 13 at the time, and I saw it opening night. In the summer of 1979\u00a0Moonraker<\/em> was the greatest thing I had ever seen and Roger Moore the most important person on Earth (or in space).<\/p>\n

I no longer think so highly of the movie \u2014 when I rank the Bonds, it lands near the bottom \u2014 but I will always have a soft spot for Moonraker<\/em>. It was extremely important in my development as a Bond fan and also, in a weird way, my development as a person.<\/p>\n

Moonraker<\/em> was the first James Bond movie I saw in a theater. I was already hooked on Bond having seen The Spy Who Loved Me<\/em> roughly six months earlier on Home Box Office, but to see Bond on the big screen was a huge deal. The impact of that opening sequence, with Bond being shoved out of an airplane without a parachute, should not be forgotten. Watching Moonraker<\/em> spurred me to start reading the Ian Fleming novels. I checked out the few that the West Erie Plaza branch of the Erie County Public Library carried, but I needed to read more.<\/p>\n

Most of the books were out of print at the time, so to find the remaining volumes I had to visit a used book store. Don Hullenbaugh, my friend who lived next door, knew of one, called Trade-A-Book, on Erie\u2019s east side, but that required a bus trip downtown and a five-block walk to the store. We were suburban kids. It was unheard of for suburban kids to take a bus into the city to shop for books. We were supposed to ask our parents for a ride to the Millcreek Mall. But the only Bond book I could find at the mall was Doctor No<\/em>, so Don and I took the bus and walked to the bookstore. One of the books I bought that day was the Bantam paperback edition of Casino Royale<\/em> with the slick black cover and the Frank McCarthy artwork.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

Once I realized there was nothing scary about travelling downtown (in other words, black people weren\u2019t lining up to mug me; it was also at this point that I realized the stupidity of racism and prejudice), I made many more visits to Trade-A-Book on my own.\u00a0Saturday trips to the main library branch on Perry Square also became a ritual. That\u2019s where I found John Pearson\u2019s biography of Ian Fleming. Heady reading for a 13-year-old, but I had to know everything.<\/p>\n

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If I remember correctly, Moonraker<\/em>\u00a0played exclusively at the Strand Theater that summer, and the Strand was in the heart of downtown Erie, 10th and State. I saw Moonraker<\/em> 10 more times during its first run, which meant 10 more bus trips downtown by myself. My parents were unaware of most of these excursions.<\/p>\n

The summer of 1979, the summer before I started high school, was the summer I discovered my independence (not to mention an appreciation of public transportation). And it was all thanks to Moonraker<\/em> and James Bond.<\/p>\n

I transferred this spirit of spy-inspired independence to Brian Parker, the hero of my spy novel, The Boy Who Knew Too Much<\/em>. Also a suburbanite, Brian takes the bus into downtown Milwaukee to buy Foster Blake paperbacks at used book stores.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moonraker came out 35 years ago this summer. I was 13 at the time, and I saw it opening night. In the summer of 1979\u00a0Moonraker was the greatest thing I had ever seen and Roger Moore the most important person on Earth (or in space). I no longer think so highly of the movie \u2014…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[335,334,349],"tags":[154,147,158,146,156,77,157,15,16,17,70,159,12,155,471],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bond-films","category-films","category-personal-ramblings","tag-154","tag-brian-parker","tag-erie","tag-foster-blake","tag-growing-up-bond","tag-ian-fleming","tag-independence","tag-james-bond","tag-james-bond-007","tag-james-bond-films","tag-moonraker","tag-public-transportation","tag-roger-moore","tag-summer-of-1979","tag-the-boy-who-knew-too-much"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5foza-2n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":365,"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.westhoffpws.com\/jeffreywesthoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}