Lunar landing: Bill Stevens

Bill Stevens,70, a former Massapequa resident now living in Beverly Hills, Fla., was an electronic technician with Grumman's lunar module program.

I was 27 years old when I started, just out of the service. When I found it was the moon landing I was very proud. It was part of history.

We were sent down on work orders to install electronic equipment on the vehicle. It took quite a while to do that. Then we went into testing mode. . . . I worked on the displays and controls, all the electronics and the guillotine to slice the wires so the ascent stage could blast up back to the command module.

I worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Everything had to be perfect. . . . The astronauts sat in on the vehicles for testing, they were testing right with us.

It was very tense. . . . We were doing the

same thing that they were doing out in space, but we were doing it in Plant 5.

In Plant 5, in the big hangar, we were listening to the whole landing and watching it on closed-circuit TV. It was suspenseful.

I talk to people down here. I say, you look at that moon up there. I've got my name on that moon. . . . There is a plaque up there with my name on it.