Reluctant hero who became a global celebrity

New York: Forty years after the lunar module Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquillity, the Moon landing continues to captivate. The Space Race may have been a child of the Cold War but its ultimate expression, the Apollo series of lunar expeditions, transcended politics, presenting man with the first full view of his delicate little world.

It was a mythic and insuperable moment, propelling him to global fame, and he has spent the rest of his life dealing with its consequences.

Armstrong spent just short of nine days in space - eight days and three hours during the Apollo 11 Moon-shot and 11 hours during the earlier and near-catastrophic Gemini 8 mission. His visit to the Moon lasted 22 hours and he walked on its surface for a mere two-and-a-half-hours, never venturing more than a couple of hundred yards from the module. Yet his life is defined by space. He has been a combat flier, a test pilot, a university lecturer in aeronautics, and a company director, but none of this matters to the rest of humanity.

For a man who shuns celebrity, and insists on assessing his life in broader terms, it is a source of frustration.

Few people truly know Neil Armstrong. He seems a man locked within himself, stubbornly refusing to "emote" about his voyage to the Moon.

He has looked death in the eye on a number of occasions and made little of those encounters. When his two-year-old daughter died from a brain tumour in 1962 he was back at his desk within days of the funeral, burying his grief in work.

Other astronauts, notably Buzz Aldrin, his fellow Moonwalker on Apollo 11, have waxed lyrical about their extraterrestrial adventures, but not Armstrong, the implacably down-to-earth spaceman.

In 1994, on the 25th anniversary of the Moon landing, Armstrong attended a board meeting of an energy company of which he was a director. "Then we all went to play golf," says Jim Rogers, his friend and CEO of the company. "All of us knew it was the 25th anniversary, but we were waiting for him to bring it up. He never mentioned it."

Reticence - he once said he had no wish to play the part of a "human memorial" - is accompanied by suspicion. An elusive, reluctant hero, he has long since given up signing his name in books and cards for fear of yet another autograph offer on eBay.

"Mr Armstrong," said one of his university colleagues, "can smell exploitation a mile off". Not always. Drive for 48 kilometres along Interstate 71 from Cincinnati and you come to the dormitory town of Lebanon. Following his departure from Nasa in 1971, Armstrong and his wife Jan bought a farm here, which he named Rivendell after the elf sanctuary in The Lord of the Rings. Its 300 acres provided a haven from prying eyes, and there was a small grass airstrip at the back which allowed Armstrong to indulge his love of flying.

Lebanon is typical rural Ohio: God-fearing, Republican, comfortable. The townspeople respected the Armstrongs' privacy and they returned the compliment by participating in the local community. Neil would visit Herald's, a small barber shop at the end of Main Street, once a month. Marx Sizemore joined Herald's in 2000 and started cutting Armstrong's hair soon after.

In 2004 Sizemore was approached by Todd Mueller, a dealer in celebrity memorabilia. Mueller wanted Sizemore to save some of Armstrong's hair and sell it to him for $3,000 (Dh11,019).

"He asked me what I did with discarded hair and I said I put it in the trash. When I thought about it like that, it wasn't that big a deal. When Neil came in I swept the floor real fast so it was clean, and when he left I swept it up and put it in a bag." According to Mueller, Sizemore did this more than once, receiving another $3,000 for two more bags of cuttings.

In 2005 Armstrong discovered what had happened and confronted Sizemore. A lawyer's letter followed, but Sizemore went to the media and Armstrong backed off. Now he and Mueller are planning to capitalise on the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing by selling strands pinned to cards.