From 'magnificent desolation' to depression: Buzz Aldrin makes visit to Rochester
Heroic figures are not supposed to exhibit cracks.
But shortly after becoming the second man to walk on the moon, astronaut Buzz Aldrin realized a deep fissure had opened in his personality.
"I hadn't thought very much about what I was going to do after the flight," Aldrin said of the 1969 moon landing, "and I found myself with a very empty feeling. I couldn't seem to find anything satisfying anywhere I looked,"
For that reason, Aldrin was in Rochester on May 9, 1974, at the invitation of the Olmsted County Mental Health Association. Aldrin, a man idolized by millions of Americans, was here to recount his struggle with depression, at a time when the topic was still considered taboo in polite company.
He recalled that his life shortly after the moon landing had become dark and lonely.
"I gradually drifted into a very depressed state," Aldrin said. "I didn't want to meet people, and I didn't like and didn't feel confident in what I was doing."
It was an unfamiliar state of affairs for Aldrin, a chronic overachiever who all his life had set and met goals that would leave ordinary people in awe.
Aldrin was reared in New Jersey, the son of a military pilot who pushed young Buzz (his actual first name is Edwin) to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. Aldrin, however, opted for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he was a pole vaulter on the track team and finished third in his academic class. He graduated in 1951, went through flight training and flew 66 combat missions as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean war.
He then earned a doctorate in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and embarked on the path that would find him selected in October 1963 as a member of the second group of NASA astronauts.
Aldrin made it to outer space in 1966 as a crew member on the Gemini 12 mission, during which he made three space walks. For the Apollo 11 moon mission, Aldrin was the pilot of the lunar module "Eagle," which made a soft landing on the moon on July 20, 1969. Several hours later after the clock and calendar had flipped to July 21, 1969, fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first to step from the Eagle to the surface of the moon, followed 19 minutes later by Aldrin. But most familiar photographs of the men walking on the moon are of Aldrin, because, he said, Armstrong was operating the camera.
"All through my life leading up to the flight of Apollo 11, I was a very hard-driving, goal-oriented individual," Aldrin said in Rochester. The moon mission accomplished, he struggled to find a fulfilling purpose and in 1971 was admitted to an Air Force hospital for treatment of his depression.
"That realization, that step toward help was a giant leap toward recovery," Aldrin said. He quickly decided that "this was such a unique experience that I felt I should not push it under the rug, but rather I should uncover it and let other people benefit from my experience." His goal, he said, was to "dispel some of the myths and misconceptions about mental illness and the mentally ill."
So Aldrin wrote his first book about his mental health journey, and undertook the kind of speaking tours that had brought him to Rochester.
Today, at age 93, Aldrin reportedly splits his time between homes in California and Hawaii.
