Launching Into a New Frontier
In its glory days, which reached its penultimate moment 20 years ago yesterday, Florida's Cape Canaveral contained all the elements of a western frontier town. It was young, vibrant, bawdy, daring, full of get-rich-quick prospectors. In only two decades, the population of Brevard County jumped from 20,000 to 250,000. Throughout the '60s, the unemployment rate never went as high as 2 percent.</br></br>Ironically, the bubble burst precisely when the world fixed its eyes on the Cape to witness the greatest achievement of the space age-that most spectacular of spectaculars, man's voyage to the moon.</br></br>Crowds, a million strong, were drawn to those dunes and palms, motels, nightclubs and go-go palaces that had sprung up along the Cape to accommodate the explosive growth of America's space endeavor.</br></br>I remember especially the stir of throngs along the beaches that night before the moon launch and the intense excitement that gripped them. They were there to share in a moment that they would talk about the rest of their lives and pass on to their children.</br></br>Along with them, of course, were the usual signs of rampant hucksterism and boosterism. The locals, ministers, bankers, shop owners, assiduously were drawing attention to themselves.