I first sat down to work on this column at 9:30 on Sunday morning. It is now 12:25 p.m. and I’m finally putting words together.

There’s one reason for this delay. I made the mistake of turning on the television in my home office. What caught my eye was the men’s finals of the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament in London, England, undoubtedly the most prestigious tennis tournament of them all.

Playing in the finals were 37-year-old Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, 32. They played to an historic five-set match, including an unprecedented fifth set tiebreaker with Djokovic coming out victorious. The match lasted nearly five hours.

Commentator John McEnroe said this could be one of those historic moments where you remember where you were when it happened.

I don’t know if it was that big, but there will be a celebration of one such event this week. That is the 50th anniversary celebration of the successful trip to the moon by astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft.

I know where I was when Armstrong and Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the Moon.

I was in the living room of my second floor apartment located in Sunnyslope at the intersection of Hatcher and Cave Creek roads.

I had set up my newly purchased Super 8 movie camera on a tripod in front of the black and white television I had purchased at Montgomery Ward to watch in my dorm room my senior year at ASU.

What I filmed off that little TV came out very good. It looked just like the images of Armstrong and Aldrin I was seeing live on TV.

I used to watch that film periodically for something to do in the hot summer months.

It got lost somewhere during my divorce or the five moves since then.

I still have some places to look (like our storage area at The Times office). There’s a camera bag on a high shelf that Brent can maybe get down for me. His six-foot, five-inch frame comes in handy for that kind of task.

The film shows Armstrong descending down the ladder, setting foot on the moon and uttering the famous line, “That was one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.”

The time was 11:56 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time on July 20, 1969.

I had hoped for them to reach the Moon on July 18th, my birthday. They launched on my wife Diane’s birthday, July 16th. Another coincidence involving our family and the space race is that John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth on May 5, 1962. That was my late brother’s birthday. Glenn’s July 18th birthday was the same as mine.

I believe I told you in a column several years ago that Buzz Aldrin came to my high school physics class to talk about the new space program. That was in 1965.

In closing this week, I want to thank all of you who commented on the 45th anniversary section that was in the paper a few weeks ago. The staff worked hard on that special section. It’s a keeper for sure.