Apollo to mark 50th anniversary of moon landing with scaled-down celebration

Apollo has scrapped its traditional weeklong celebration of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but it is planning several public events and has invited NASA to town to commemorate the landing’s 50th anniversary on July 20.

“We didn’t want it to slip by unnoticed after all the years we’ve done it,” said Sue Ott, vice president of the Apollo Area Historical Society.

The summer moon landing celebration has been canceled the past several years because of declining attendance and ballooning costs.

For decades, it personified Apollo’s small-town character and drew thousands to the borough.

It was started by then-Mayor Duane S. Guthrie and tax collector Charles A. Leidy to parlay the same-name connection between the town and the historic NASA mission.

The first celebration featured a parade and special U.S. postmark in Apollo on July 21, 1969 — the day after astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.

In following years, Apollo’s celebration grew to a weeklong event with fireworks, a parade and a carnival that contributed essential dollars to the borough’s volunteer fire companies.

Eventually, the celebration began to fade out in phases, according to Bill Kerr, a former Apollo mayor and longtime member of Apollo Hose Company No. 2 who now serves as Norwin School District’s superintendent.

“These days, the parade and fireworks take tremendous fundraising to pull together,” Kerr said. “You don’t have a good number of marching groups and it comes down to dollars to transport and feed them. Fireworks are very expensive — we can’t compete with what happens in Pittsburgh.”

But for a while, Apollo was a destination for its annual summer moon landing celebration, when class reunions and other events were planned in tandem.

“For Friday night fireworks that drew so many people, every concession food stand made money. That was the big night,” Kerr remembered.

There was an economy of scale for attendance, event costs and fundraising worked well, at least for a while.

“Bill Swank, owner of Swank’s Amusements, sold his business about five years ago and the carnivals afterward weren’t quite the same,” Kerr said.

Now the event is evolving into something different.

This year’s scaled-back celebration — scheduled for July 20 at Owens Field — will feature a craft show, flea market, food vendors, a car cruise, a bounce house, ice-cream and pizza-eating contests, and other events that are still in the planning stages.

The Apollo-Ridge Education Foundation is waiting on word from NASA to see if the agency will send a speaker.

The Apollo Area Historical Society, Apollo Memorial Library, and Apollo-Ridge School District and Education Foundation continue to work together on the programming for this year’s event.