Good luck, Mr. Gorsky

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ →Go uptown Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

After Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind, there was the usual COM traffic between him, the other astronauts, and Mission Control before Armstrong paused, and said, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.”

Capcom assumed this to be a casual remark about a rival — perhaps a Soviet Cosmonaut. But there was no Gorsky in either the Russian or American space programs.

In the following months and years Armstrong was asked repeatedly what he meant by saying “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky” statement meant. He always declined to say.

Then in 1995, in Tampa Bay, FL, when a reporter brought up the 26-year-old question at long last Armstrong replied: the Gorskys had both died, so Armstrong felt he could answer. When he was a kid, Neil used to play baseball with his brother Dean in their back yard in Wapakoneta, Ohio. One day Dean hit one over the fence into the garden of his neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky.

Neil hopped the fence to retrieve the ball, which lay in a flower bed below the Gorskys’ bedroom window. As he bent down to pick it up, Mrs. Gorsky hollered, “Blow job? Blow job you want? I’ll give you a blowjob when that kid next door walks on the moon!”