This historical photo from the Ruislip area comes from April 16, 1970, and depicts a young boy named Mark Bernstein, listening out for the news on his radio.
Mark was a pupil at the American elementary school that could be found on the RAF West Ruislip base, which had a sizeable portion of US air personnel and their families. The school was created to provide an education for these children.
Radio at a school lunch sounds unusual, but it was a far from usual time for Mark. One of his relatives was astronaut Jim Lovell, who at the time of this photograph was the commander of the almost-disastrous Apollo 13 mission.
What had started as a planned expedition to the surface of the Moon ended up becoming a life-or-death situation for Mr Lovell and his two colleagues in the spacecraft, but through ingenuity and improvisation, all three individuals made it back to Earth safely.
RAF West Ruislip closed in 2006, with the elementary school being turned into a special school, named Pentland Field, in 2015.
Do you have any historical photos or memories of RAF West Ruislip? If so, send them to our address at newsdesk@mynewsmag.co.uk, and they could feature!
0 Comments