He joked that the audience was probably expecting Tom Hanks — who played him in a movie — but there was no mistaking that astronaut Jim Lovell was the intended recipient of a standing ovation Saturday when he took the stage at the Gorton Community Center in his hometown of Lake Forest.

Lovell was interviewed by another legent, Bill Kurtis, for the sold-out launch of “Local Legends,” the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society’s new annual benefit series.

For a little over an hour, Lovell, a Lake Forest resident for more than two decades and owner of the local Lovells of Lake Forest restaurant, held the audience rapt as he recalled his then-unprecedented two missions to the moon.

Apollo 8, which launched on Dec. 21, 1968, was the first manned mission to the moon. Lovell amusingly recalled the Christmas Eve live television broadcast in which the crew members quoted the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis.

The crew, he said, could not think of anything appropriate for the historic occasion. They consulted with a newspaper reporter, whose wife, Lovell said, came up with the idea for the biblical reading.

“Leave it to NASA to spend all that money (on the mission) and then leave out the marketing guy,” Kurtis joked.

The Apollo 13 mission, which launched on April 11, 1970 and later became the basis for the Hanks film “Apollo 13,” was not initially front-page news. Space flight had become so routine that no commercial television network opted to carry a broadcast from the spacecraft. Lovell recalled that the New York Times article about the launch was buried on that newspaper’s weather page.

That all changed when, two days into the mission, an oxygen leak forced the crew—Lovell and co-pilots Fred Haise and John Swigert—to evacuate their command ship and use the intended lunar landing craft as a makeshift lifeboat to carry them back to earth.
Kurtis asked Lovell about the radio communication to Mission Control that has taken on a life of its own thanks to the film.

The line, “Houston, we have a problem” was ranked by the American Film Institute as the 50th most memorable movie quote of all time.

But the actual quote was , “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” which was initially spoken by Haise, and the repeated by Lovell.

Lovell joked that his first thought was, “Why didn’t this wait for Apollo 14? Why me? But it was me and we had to go from there.”

While the mission to the moon was a failure, Apollo 13 has been called “NASA’s finest hour,” as the crew and Mission Control heroically raced against time to return the astronauts safely to earth.

Kurtis presented Lovell with a roll of duct tape. “I never leave home without it,” Lovell said.

The opportunity to hear Lovell in person was “a special treat,” said Lake Forest resident Phil Shelley, who attended the event with his 12-year-old daughter India. Shelley, who grew up in England, said that he was about India’s age when the events of Apollo 13 unfolded.

“Every schoolboy was interested in the American space program,” he said. We thought it was the

biggest thing ever. My school had one TV and we all crowded around it.”

“I love science,” his daughter said, “but we don’t learn about this in history class. We learn about older history, but never modern-day history, and never any space stuff.”

Katrina Litke, 17, who attends Warren Township High School and wants to study astronomy in college, drove a half hour to attend the event.

“It was most definitely worth it,” she said.