Childhood Dreams Touch the Moon: The Day Apollo 16 became mine

As children, we all dream of what we want to become one day.

Whether life unfolds as we imagined or not, many of those dreams are born from moments that quietly shape us along the way.

As a little girl,  I had the opportunity to live experiences that would stay with me for a lifetime.

One of them began with a family trip to Florida, for the opening of Walt Disney World—an invitation that came from Roy E. Disney, whom my father had met while working on the planning of the Disney hotels in Orlando.

After that unforgettable visit, my father took us to the Kennedy Space Center, where we saw spacecraft and rockets that had already traveled into space.

Inside the immense Vehicle Assembly Building, we stood before something extraordinary: the lunar module and the Saturn V rocket that would later become part of Apollo 16 Moon landing, still under construction. The air inside that building felt different—cool, vast, and smelling of metal and ambition.

It was there that my father told us a story that made everything feel even more real.

Years earlier, while studying at the Admiral Farragut Naval Academy in St. Petersburg, his roommate had been Charlie M. Duke.

We were amazed.
Our father—friends with an astronaut!

A few months later, he told us something we could hardly believe: Charlie M. Duke, along with John W. Young and Thomas Ken Mattingly, had been assigned to the Apollo 16 mission and invited us to attend the launch scheduled for the following year.

We were filled with excitement. The wait felt endless.

Dreams are powerful, but sometimes they manifest in ways that change history. As we approach the anniversary of this historic mission, I’ll be sharing the moment we saw the Saturn V roar to life.

The countdown to April 1972 had officially begun for our family. Little did I know that standing in the shadow of the Saturn V was just the beginning.

Coming next: Our journey to the heart of the Kennedy Space Center.