"It's an honor that I've held for far too long," admits Chicago native and one-time Bellwood resident Eugene Cernan who, as commander of Apollo 17 in December 1972, was the last person to leave his footprints on the lunar surface.

"What's incredible to me," says Cernan, who was in the area last week to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the event at the River Grove space center at Triton College that bears his name, "is that there is a whole generation of young men and women in college right now who weren't even born when I took those final steps on the moon. We are living in a time where people having gone to the moon is almost ancient history to most people."

"It was an emotional moment," Cernan recalls of those last lunar steps, "because we all knew that the moon program was ending, and I wanted to point out that only this phase of space exploration was over, not space exploration itself."