APOLLO 17

DATE: December 12, 1972

✵ Ride Of The Valkyries by Wagner (Classical: Romantic)

Comment:

• wake-up to Schmitt on Moon. Jack Schmitt and Gordon Fullerton were both undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology. At 7:00a.m. it was traditional for students with hi-fi systems to tie them together and wake up everybody in the undergraduate dorms by playing ‘The Ride’ at full volume… Bob Parker may have had the duty of choosing this piece. In a February 1992 telephone conversation, Bob said that, if it was he who picked the piece, it was simply because he likes Wagner and can think of few things more stirring than the Ride. He also says that, in the Apollo era, the wake-up music was usually picked the night before and that they sometimes had trouble finding a recording in time. From Apollo Lunar Surface Journal