Day the moon man visited

It was 40 years ago that man set foot on the moon - a memorable and historic occasion.
One which, 15 years later, created a few more historic memories - this time for a "rookie" reporter and a bunch of delighted children at the tiny Porangahau School.
For they all got to meet the second man to ever walk on the moon, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and this year is the 25th anniversary of that visit.
It was a momentous event for such a small school, with Mr Aldrin leaving the awe-struck children smiling and dreaming of maybe one day becoming an astronaut just like him.
And it left Hilary Pedersen, who had started as a reporter with the CHB Mail eight months earlier, with a great "scoop" so early in her career.
But it wasn't her first brush with extraterrestrial history.
Back in 1969, on the day Neil Armstrong and Mr Aldrin left their footprints on the lunar surface, Hilary had been driving the schoolbus at Porangahau and was half-way out to Cook's Tooth Rd when she ran out of petrol. "Which is not really a good look for a school bus driver," she recalled with a laugh.
She was able to get a canfull in from the garage to get the bus going again and headed for Cooks Tooth Rd - where she was met by a clearly excited woman who emerged from a house declaring "they've landed ... they've landed!"
It was Gwitha McLean, well-known in the area.
"I had no idea what she was talking about and asked who?"
Which is when Mrs McLean said she had just heard on the radio that men called Armstrong and Aldrin had made history about 380,000km away.
It was big news at the time ... but in December of 1984 there was even bigger news emerging.
Hilary had simply been chatting with someone in the street and they happened to mention that Mr Aldrin, the astronaut, was staying with Gwitha and Courtenay McLean on their rural property off Cook's Tooth Rd.
So, keeping the news to herself, she made a call to the McLeans and was told that yes, Mr Aldrin was at the residence.
He was staying there as he was friends with their son Hamish and his American wife, whose family he had long known.
"I'm not sure what he was doing out here - he may have just been holidaying, I don't know."
She spoke to Aldrin but he made it clear he would not do an interview - but she was welcome to pop along to the school when he went there to meet the children.
"It was my first real scoop ... it was very exciting," she said.
She kept it quiet until just before Mr Aldrin went to the school when she told two colleagues at the CHB Mail. She had aimed for a front page spot on the Hastings paper at the time, the Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune, and subsequently got it.
The children, among them her son Matt who was 9 at the time, were spellbound by being in the presence of the man who walked on the moon.
Aldrin told them how the simple task of eating on a spaceship was tricky.
"Do you know what happens when you eat peas and gravy upside down?" he asked. "They end up on the ceiling."
And he told them of the sensation of walking in a weightless environment ... which wasn't completely weightless, he added.
"When I first landed on the moon and got down to the bottom of the ladder I checked my balance and then tried running around. But you try running with 25 stone to carry," he said.
The kids lapped it up.
"Every word that he spoke I turned into a picture ... a dream," Matt recalled. "I imagined the floating and the huge steps you could take up there on the moon.
"This man had been there. Wow ... it was just amazing."
His visit was relatively brief but it left a bigger impression on the children than his great space boots had left on the moon. It still gets talked about in the small Central Hawke's Bay township these days, for it was the day the man on the moon came to visit.