Local woman recalls childhood friendship with Neil Armstrong

By DAN SOKIL
Staff Writer

Lorene Ahrens (maiden name Kellermeyer) moved to Lansdale from Ohio in 1950, but she still remembers the nights she and her sister Janice spent growing up in Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

They’d go to church and Sunday school every week, and play outside with the kids from down the street at night, including one who took one very famous small step 40 years ago today.

That man was Neil Armstrong.

“Neil’s father, Mr. Stephen Armstrong, was an auditor for the state of Ohio, and he and their family were stationed in various county seats in northwestern Ohio, so the Armstrong family lived in Upper Sandusky in the early- to mid-1940s,” said Ahrens.

“My dad (Rev. Hugo C. Kellermeyer) was a pastor, he had started with the church in North Carolina which was where I was born, but we moved to Ohio in January 1942 and so we knew the Armstrong family through Trinity Evangelical and Reformed Church,” she said.



Janice and Neil were the same age, but Lorene, despite being two years younger, still remembers weekly croquet games on her family’s front lawn with the neighborhood kids, including one who later became the first man to walk on the moon.

“We never wanted to stop playing, and in fact we used to wrap the croquet wicks with white cloth around the end so we could still see them after it got dark,” Ahrens said.

According to Armstrong’s authorized biography, “The First Man” (Simon & Schuster, 2005), Neil lived in Upper Sandusky from 1941 to 1944 before moving on to Wapakoneta, Ohio.

Lorene still remembers car rides to church events with him.

“I remember how when my dad took us to the church camp in the summer, Neil was a very quiet person. He was very, very shy and didn’t talk a whole lot back then, and I haven’t seen him since way back then but from what I read and hear, he’s still very much the same way now,” said Ahrens.

Janice, now living in Nebraska, kept a photo from the church school’s confirmation class of 1943, in which Rev. Kellermeyer can be seen standing to the left of his students; a very young but clearly recognizable Armstrong is in the top row of students.

On a recent trip to her family’s former church in Ohio, Lorene said, she saw a plaque now mounted outside the church that recognizes Armstrong’s confirmation held within.

“The really funny thing was that when my sister wrote the class prophecy for the Class of ’47 from Upper Sandusky High School, she wrote that a member of our class would be the first man on the moon,” she said.

“I don’t know what she was thinking when she wrote that, because who wanted to go to the moon in 1947? But she was right, and even though he didn’t actually graduate with her because Neil’s father had been moved to another county by 1947, she’s still had some contact with him because he still goes to their class reunions,” Ahrens said.

The family’s story was first told to The Reporter for the 20th anniversary of the moon landing in 1989, when Lorene’s mother, Josephine Kellermeyer, recalled their years in Ohio.

By the time Armstrong and fellow astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, Lorene and her family were camping their way across the country. She watched the lunar landing from a hotel in Phoenix, but Janice dropped his name a few times that night.

“She was up in Nova Scotia and couldn’t find a TV to watch the landing, so she started telling people about how Neil was in her high school class, and ended up being interviewed on one of the local radio stations up there,” Ahrens said.

The Ahrens family had one final encounter with the lunar landing as they continued their camping trip: a friend of the family brought them into Johnson Space Center in Houston the day the first moon rocks were brought in from Apollo 11.

“Of course, we were just peons so we didn’t get anywhere near them, but there was a definite buzz in the air,” she said.

“My kids and I all remember Alan Shepard cruising by as we stood outside one of the offices and giving us a once-over, thinking ‘Who are these people?’ That was the closest I’d ever been to an astronaut, except for Neil Armstrong many years ago.”