The summer of 1969 was the summer of my swimdresses.  

That I can even find an online photo of them now is amazing.  In our remote corner of the planet in southwest Wyoming where I spent my youth we had only mail order catalogs--Sears, Penneys, Aldens, and what was to us the very upscale Spiegels.  In order to buy clothing locally we pored through every one as they arrived in our mail, dog-eared the pages of the things we loved, and hopefully persuaded our parents to let us get a few new things before school started, a new outfit or two, a new pair of shoes.  Much more was a luxury.

If we ordered from Montgomery Wards, there was a pick-up location about an hour south in Kemmerer, just across from the J. C. Penney Mother Store, the first store that J. C. Penney started anywhere.  To us, it was a significant landmark, a point on a corner in that town which is distinguished only by being known as the fossil fish capital of the world and having the world's largest open pit coal mine.

That was Kemmerer. 

I was in a car parked exactly at this location, across the street from the J.C. Penney Mother Store in Kemmerer, Wyoming, one of seven people in a hot station wagon, when Apollo 11 launched on its historic journey to the moon.  

I was excited to be getting these swimdresses, one blue, and one green, one ruffled, one not, both polka dot.  They were, to a budding thirteen-year-old anticipating her first year of high school, divine and exciting.  Maybe they'd transport me through adolescence to that world where Davy Jones and David Cassidy would think I was worth a return swoon.

It was the highlight of my summer, that summer of 1969, waiting for those sundresses to arrive at Montgomery Wards.  Growing up in a religion where we couldn't wear two-piece bathing suits or bikinis, couldn't have a bare midriff, we welcomed the swimdresses, which came long before tankinis.  These particular swimdresses had a detachable skirt for those who preferred the two-piece.   

I happily initiated them in the clear cool waters of nearby Bear Lake a few days later on our annual beach vacation at a waterfront cottage, and felt very grown up indeed. 

This was considered a fairly abbreviated swimsuit for 1969.  If our navels were showing, it might as well be a bikini. 

And so it was, on July 16, 1969, in a long station wagon parked in front of the Montgomery Wards store in downtown Kemmerer, with my father driving, my mother seven months pregnant, and four younger siblings squabbling in the back, after In the Year 2525 played on the radio, we listened attentively as Apollo 11 launched for the moon.  

None of us breathed.

Four nights later, on July 20, 1969, we sat in front of a small first generation color television and watched Neil Armstrong take that first historic step in the Sea of Tranquility.

There are events we never forget, our memories seared with where we were, on the playground when JFK was assassinated, in a bathtub when Martin Luther King was, in a sunroom in Wisconsin watching the Challenger disaster as it happened live, on a cruise ship in Ephesus when the terrorists flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11.

I remember it as well as it was yesterday, the day we collectively left for the moon, exactly where I was, what I saw, what I heared, the view out the window, the heat of the day, the sound of the radio.  I studied it, memorized it, will always remember it.  

The day I got my swimdresses. 

Photos of 1960's swimwear courtesy The Fifties Web, accompanied by the following description: