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DURING MY LAST few weeks in the service, I had already begun thinking about life after the Air Force and toying with ideas of what to do. I had previously engaged in talks with the Bulova watch company, about a specially designed watch I had in mind. Bulova used some of my ideas, so I felt we might be able to do something together in the future. I dabbled with digital watches, convinced then that many of the communication devices of the future, including telephone, camera, calculator, and other functions, would operate off a person’s watch. This was in 1972, long before the Internet, cell phones, or text-messaging services existed, but I felt certain that such technology would be the wave of the future.

Another, more immediate opportunity rolled my way. I did a rather tacky commercial for Dynamark Lawn Tractor’s rotary lawn mower. The tag line went something like, “Dynamark Lawn Tractor. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin drives it around—it’s out of this world.” I had gone from walking on the moon to selling lawn mowers.

The Volkswagen automobile company hired me to do a sixty-second television commercial extolling the virtues of the VW’s new digital computerized vehicle diagnostic system. The system was pretty amazing, and the work was relatively easy, just learning a few lines and delivering them with authority and credibility. We negotiated the deal while I was still at Edwards, and did the actual taping after my official retirement date of March 1.

For that, VW agreed to pay me a whopping $300,000. I thought, Hey, retirement living might not be so bad, after all.

I also continued to think about the idea of writing a book about my experiences. When I mentioned this to the attorneys at Loeb & Loeb, who were helping me handle a number of my new business deals, they introduced me to Wayne Warga, a former Life magazine editor who was now living in Los Angeles and working as an entertainment writer for the Los Angeles Times. Wayne suggested that we might be wise to test the waters by writing an op-ed piece for the newspaper, and then see how the public responded. I didn’t want to write a book merely about going to the moon, but about the challenges I faced when I returned to Earth.

2 Author interview with Alan Bean, November 17, 2008.

8

HUMAN SIDE

of HERO

BEING HOSPITALIZED FOR FOUR WEEKS TO RECEIVE TREATment and therapy for depression was not the type of thing you publicly disclosed to the world on a whim. Seeking help had effectively ended my career in the Air Force. Would sharing it openly in the press jeopardize further opportunities as I sought a new direction in my life? But if I was going to do it, then I wanted to be honest about it. I wanted to have a chance of helping someone else. Such revelations would be in marked contrast to the picture-perfect layouts in the 1969 Life magazine where the three of us who reached the moon on the first landing were glamorized in our professional and family lives. If the public responded positively to the idea that an American astronaut “superhero” could be vulnerable to the pitfalls of depression, and brave enough to seek help, then maybe Wayne and I could use that leverage to approach a publisher about a book deal.

On February 27, just a couple of days before I said good-bye to my friends in the Air Force, Wayne’s article appeared in the Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times. The article was titled, “Troubled Odyssey—‘Buzz’ Aldrin’s Saga: Tough Role for Hero.”

Wayne began the article by quoting the psychologist Carl Jung: “Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.”

I could bear witness to that. Dealing with the pressure of several times the force of gravity pushing on my chest at liftoff, and keeping cool under the stress of landing on the moon with only a few gasps of fuel remaining in the tank was relatively easy compared to overcoming the enormous pressures and stresses that were unraveling