NAPLES, Fla. -- It’s been 50 years since the Apollo 11 space launch and one Southwest Florida man’s mission was to deliver it to your television.
Joel Banow was the director of The Cronkite Show on CBS in New York five decades ago.
“When the president made that speech we are going to go to the moon in 10 years, they (NASA) said how we are going to do this, and we said how are we going to cover space, many of the things we did were so simplistic,” said Joel Banow, former director, CBS News.
Banow orchestrating a team to help bring the space mission to life through studio simulation, animation, and diagrams.
“I was always very focused on this, because I had to fly the mission, in the way the astronauts were flying it,” said Banow
Using the flight plan as his script and scanning the monitors to capture moments of Walter Cronkite and Astronaut Wally Schirra on air.
“And sure enough it was Wally getting a tear in his eye, he didn’t know where to look, but he rubbed it anyway, and I looked at Walter’s monitor and I grabbed that and he’s rubbing his hands and putting his hand over his nose and he turns to Wally and goes, I'm speechless. Those few seconds of them not saying anything, being able to catch those, that was the greatest two shots I had on the air,” said Banow.
Banow worked with Cronkite through all the space missions from 1963 to 1972.
“I’m very proud of putting that together, and wanting to do something totally different than what I had done before,” said Banow.
