Twenty-eight years ago I was given an assignment in my eighth grade history class. Write a report about an explorer. This was the time when I was starting to find my writer voice. I had written a time travel story for English class and had been published in the local newspaper. I wasn’t going to do the same old same old. Instead I chose to write about space pioneer Christa McAuliffe, who known as the first teacher in space. It was a program where a teacher would train with the astronauts and go into space on the spaceship Challenger. From space she would teach millions of children from video feed. It was revolutionary and exciting for everyone, especially her family and students in New Hampshire.
I
wrote my report and sparked the imagination of my teacher Ellen Quagliaroli who
decided that we would write a proclamation and send it to McAuliffe. We added a
small sheet of paper with all of our names signed on it and asked if she could
take it into space with her. We sent it off in the mail and waited.
It
was a clear day when the shuttle Challenger was ready to take off. There were
many people watching the live launch on television. I was not one of them. It
seems, I am never supposed to see tragedies on TV as they happen. A student ran
into our classroom and told us that the Challenger had exploded. We watched the
replay of the launch over and over again. It looked like fireworks, like it was
supposed to happen that way, until we realized exactly what had happened. That
tragic day will forever be marked in my life.
The
following day a newspaper reporter came to my school to interview students and
to see how we were coping with the tragic news. During lunch my teacher called
three of us students into the hallway outside the lunch room. The reporter was
there. The teacher was holding a large envelope. I opened it with shaky hands,
after all it was my report that got us following this event. Inside was a
signed picture of Christa McAuliffe and a letter explaining why she couldn’t
take our paper into space and how pleased she was that we were learning from
her.
“It’s
eerie how she got our letter, wrote back and now she’s not here,” I said. It
was to be the quote heard around the country. Eerie became a buzz word and once
the story hit the newsstands life became a crazy whirlwind of activity. The
following day the AP wire picked up the story and relatives of mine started
calling the house. Reporters called the house. I have copies of the story from
Tampa to Texas. There was no way to know how many letters McAuliffe sent out
like this.
At
school all of the major local news stations arrived with cameras wanting to
interview me and my classmates. Then CBS News landed a helicopter on the soccer
field at the school. After interview after interview (one with Gale King, BFF
to Oprah), things started to settle down. That night I was on the national news
with Dan Rather. I said something. My name wasn’t mentioned, but within a
minute of it airing family friends from Mars Hill, Maine called my parents to
say they had just seen me on the evening news.
Maybe
that’s where my love of journalism comes from. Connecting people near and far
through a story. The original documents were framed and put in what is now, the
New England Air Museum. It was a tragic time, but also an exciting time for an
eighth grader who only wanted to write a good report on an explorer.
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