It is a long way from Lake Forest to the moon — 240,000 miles, give or take — and Jim Lovell made that trip twice, never setting foot on the moon but seeing things that few people have ever seen and living a life of estimable grace.

Lovell, who was 97 years old, died Thursday in that leafy northern suburb where he had lived for decades. It was where, for a time, he operated with his son Jay a terrific restaurant named Lovells and filled it with some of the memorabilia he had accumulated during his long, high-flying and honor-filled career.

Astronauts Jack Swigert, left, and James Lovell, right, wave to the crowds before heading to a parade in their honor in downtown Chicago on May 1, 1970. (William Yates/Chicago Tribune)

There were awards aplenty, models of aircraft and spacecraft, a moon rock and a framed “Apollo 13” movie poster signed by actor Tom Hanks, who portrayed Lovell in a 1995 film based on the mission.

Most obituaries contained the many facts of his long life: childhood dreams of being a rocket scientist; losing his father at 5 and growing up in poverty in a one-room Milwaukee apartment with his mom; college at the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Naval Academy; marrying his high school sweetheart, Marilyn, the day he graduated in 1952, and remaining together for 71 years, until her death in 2023; four children, many grandchildren; picked for the astronaut program and joining two Gemini missions; two Apollo missions that made him one of the first three astronauts to fly to and orbit the moon; ticker tape parades, the cover of Time magazine, becoming president of the National Eagle Scout Association, success in business…

Emphasis was understandably given to Hanks, who posted his thoughts on the internet, saying in part, “There are people who dare, who dream, and who lead others to places we would not go on our own. Jim Lovell, who for a long while had gone farther into space and for longer than any other person of our planet, was that kind of guy. His many voyages around Earth and on to so-very-close to the moon were not made for riches or celebrity, but because such challenges as those are what fuels the course of being alive.”

The word “hero” justifiably peppered the stories and television segments over the weekend. But this was a man who wore that tag lightly.

One night, shortly after his restaurant opened in 1999, I asked him what experience he had in the business and he told me proudly that when he was in college, money was so tight that he worked at an off-campus restaurant washing dishes and busing tables.

“That’ll teach you a great deal,” he said.

Self-effacing, gentlemanly and energetically friendly, Lovell was an astronaut, a member of a very exclusive club. There have been 600-some people who have flown into space. By comparison, there have been more than 900 Nobel Prize winners and more than 3,500 Congressional Medal of Honor recipients.

To know him was to like and admire him. Local best-selling author Robert Kurson was compelled to post on the internet, shortly after hearing of Lovell’s death:

“Jim’s most outstanding quality was his warmth and kindness, how welcoming he was to those who asked to shake his hand, to take his picture, to describe the first Earthrise ever witnessed by humans.”

Chicago Public Schools students from the Air Force Academy look on as Captain James A. Lovell, Jr., commander of Apollo 13, talks about the Apollo missions to the moon at the Adler Planetarium on March 31, 2010. (Heather Charles/Chicago Tribune)

He would know, because he wrote a book, 2018’s “Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon” (Random House), that vividly captured that 1968 flight and its crew.

That was, Kurson feels, “the greatest space story of them all,” the story of how Lovell and fellow astronauts Frank Borman and Bill Anders became the first humans ever to leave Earth for another destination and how this mission helped save the country’s space program.

The three of them are gone now, Borman dying in 2023, Anders last year and Lovell on Thursday. But they come to vivid life in the book.

Apollo 8 astronauts, from left, James Lovell, command module pilot; William Anders, lunar module pilot; and Frank Borman, commander, stand in front of mission simulator prior to training in exercise for their scheduled six-day lunar orbital mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 18, 1968. (AP)

Kurson’s internet post was touching, intimate: “Jim smiled a lot when we talked, but never more than when he spoke about his family… We were on a radio show together and the host asked what impressed me the most about Lovell. I responded by saying that, more than anything, Jim was a regular guy, one of the nicest guys I’d known, a good guy. The host recoiled and scolded me, asking how I could describe such a legend, a man with so many singular and astonishing accomplishments, as a regular guy. But, to me, after watching Jim talk to diners at his son’s restaurant even as his own meal got cold, after seeing him sketch trajectories and launch angles in my notebook so I could understand difficult concepts, after hearing him describe the moon to children, I felt like his standing as good guy was as important as going to the moon, and when Jim gave me a little smile after I took that guff from the host, it felt like he might have thought so, too.”

I met Lovell a number of times. I liked him plenty. After his restaurant closed in Lake Forest and relocated to Highwood as cozy/casual Jay Lovell’s, I would drop in whenever I was up north, hoping to run into the astronaut again.

There was no one quite like him. On Sunday, Kurson told me another thing. He said, “In all the time I knew Jim, he expressed just a single regret — that he’d been forced to give up flying at age 85.”

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/08/12/remembering-astronaut-jim-lovell/