Memory and the Space Shuttle Challenger

This started out as just one little story but it has tripled into three very tangentially related essays.

Recently I’ve been reading some Proust auxiliary material and another essay sprouted called “Proust and the Fan Squeal” and a third summary to wrap up a project on my inability to become a super-fan of Philip Levine.

I’m at the stage in my life where I’m lamenting with friends over our faulty memories and so sometime last year this story started to coalesce. I decided if there was ever a Space Shuttle Challenger remembrance, I’d complete it. So, like clockwork,  I started seeing Twitter memorials this January for the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.  Calculating the anniversary (37 years), I’m even sure why we were memorializing this past January, but maybe the tragedy was on the collective mind. Yet another Twitter meme saw someone attempting to define big moments of American generations by national disasters, and for some reason they assigned my generation, Generation X, to Watergate. I’ve been polling my friends about this and none of us can even remember Watergate at all. Most say the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion…maybe, but more likely the assassination attempt on then-President Ronald Reagan.

Knowing my Generation X, I suspect our “moment” is probably more likely to be something irreverent and kitschy, like the first Brady Bunch reunion special.

But anyway, I thought it might be a good time to tell a story which is ostensibly about the day of the space shuttle explosion but also about my memory around that day, and what memory lets you have and not have.

I went to a nationally-recognized public high school. The year I graduated, my school was in, like, one of the top 25 public high schools in America or something like that. I don’t know how I happened to luck into that except when our family moved from Albuquerque to St. Louis, a real estate agent told my Dad he should aim for a house in a “good school district.” This wasn’t something one really thought about in Albuquerque; there weren’t that many great public schools to pick from in that very poor state. And in hindsight this was probably just some kind of institutionally racist suggestion on the agent’s part to encourage my Dad to pick a white neighborhood where the schools districts had more money and therefore could purchase premium teachers.

My Dad picked a neighborhood called Old Farm, (named for the old farm that once sat there), and its high school was in the Parkway School District, (which was big and had a lot of money). But our school, Parkway North, was most decidedly the least wealthiest of the schools in that district. The big houses were in the neighborhoods of Parkway Central and Parkway West.

But we happened to have an unusually good slate of teachers, like inspired teachers. One math teacher my brother and I had came in early every day to help us through Algebra. And our English teachers were superstars: Mr. Whaling had his Shakespeare students dress up once a year to re-enact a play; the grouchy composition teacher, Mr. Moceri, would do a mole impersonation on the last day for his honors students; and the iconic literature teacher, Ms. Eichorn, was the teacher who probably had the biggest influence on me.

Ours was also the kind of high school where over-achieving teachers probably in large percentage applied to NASA’s Teacher in Space Program in 1986, the teacher selected to go up in the Space Shuttle Challenger. You didn’t even have to be a science teacher to get selected. In fact, the winning teacher was a social studies teacher.

Of the 11,000 people who applied, I imagine many of them had to have been our teachers.

I remember the day of the shuttle disaster quite clearly. It was January 28, a Tuesday, and I was walking through the school’s open library which sprawled across the center of the second floor. I was actually headed to Ms. Eichorn’s honors American Literature class. Toward the side of the library was a large TV, (the deep square kind we had at the time), set up on a portable A/V stand. A circle of teachers and kids stood around the TV watching the shuttle launch that morning. I remember thinking, “Science…ugh…dull! Are those people really that interested in this?”

And the takeoff must have happened right then, (although my memory is foggy on that point so maybe it happened right before I came into the library). In any case, there was that unforgettable silly string of smoke on the TV set and it looked very unnatural for a shuttle launch and everyone was confused for a second and wondering what had just happened because nobody could even make sense of it until the TV announcers confirmed the catastrophe and the obvious demise of all the astronauts.

Everyone in the library was upset just immediately then.

It’s a good thing to remember here that seven people died instantly that moment, including the pretty high-school social studies teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who hailed from Concord New Hampshire. She was a teacher who symbolized, (at least for a lot of teachers), a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play astronaut for a minute. If memory serves, this was the first time it was even  conceivable to anyone that an average person could go up into space without having to become a professional astronaut, which equated to like professional genius back then.

This particular shuttle was heading up into space to study Haley’s Comet and to deploy a communications satellite, which seems a bit ironic now considering all the satellites that connect us to all our worldwide disasters and live TV events. But due to the cold weather that day, a faulty O-ring seal caused a live, televised explosion.

A stiff, rubber o-ring.

But alas, all this was actually the last thing on my mind that moment. My first thought was, and I remember this quite clearly, “Oh God, I hope this doesn’t preempt John Waite’s guest VJ spot tonight on MTV.”

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

“I mean MTV’s whole station identification is a rocket shooting up into space and a bouncing astronaut so…”

Now…if I can get ahead of this thing for a minute…in my defense I just want to that say, first of all national disasters were constantly preempting previously scheduled television happenings. I remember thinking, “Today Challenger? You do this today?”

But secondly I would like to remind us all that most teenage girls are highly self-absorbed and probably borderline sociopaths, just like all college boys are highly self-absorbed and probably borderline sociopaths because girls are ahead of boys in most things. You know, ends justify the means in attention-getting schemes?

I also knew, instinctively, that this was not an appropriate response to the space shuttle explosion and as such I have kept it completely on-the-quiet until this moment. I just clammed up and marched myself right over to Ms. Eichorn’s class.

At least that’s how I remember it.

When I arrived to the class, I saw Ms. Eichorn was visibly upset with what I would imagine, in retrospect, was most likely  survivor’s guilt. If she had applied to be the selected teacher astronaut, like tens of thousands of other teachers across the country, she might have felt slightly to bitterly disappointed at first that this Christa McAuliffe person was the one chosen and not her. After the explosion, feelings of lucky guilt might have arisen quite understandably.

Ms.Eichorn’s reaction was to immediately tell the class we must write an emergency essay, (and this was a literature survey class, not a composition class), about what we were thinking about when the explosion happened and what it meant for us all as a country.

“No fucking way,” I thought. “Not a chance.”

In hindsight I do get her response, but at the time I remember thinking this was a complete over-reaction.

I’m sure I dashed off something quickly late that night after watching John Waite guest VJ on MTV, recording the show on my VCR and then rewatching it six to ten times. Yes, the show did proceed to air but with the station identifier discretely removed. “Appropriate response MTV,” I thought. “Nothing more required.”

Second disaster quietly averted.

But another disaster was afoot because Ms. Eichorn read our lousy, quickly-drafted, sociopathic teen memorials and Lost. Her. Mind.

We were  subjected to a 50-minute lecture on our heartlessness and bad writings. I thought she should have given us a break. I mean, we were teenagers after all. I was just happy I wasn’t the only malformed one.

In fact, the only kid who did do a good job on the assignment was a kid named Maurice. This wasn’t surprising looking back. He was probably by far the most mature one of all of us. I didn’t know him very well at the time but later that fall we would go to the Homecoming dance together and it would be one of the most fun nights of my life up to that point.

To quickly digress with a recap, Maurice first took me to University City (a city suburb of St. Louis) where there was a Jamaican Restaurant.  My parents would never go farther than a two-mile radius from our house to eat so this was a real treat, destination dining. Then we went to the dance, (which was kind of boring except for the fact that we both looked so good…I mean in a ridiculous, 80s kind of way), and then we changed out of our glamour duds and he took me back to University City to the Varsity Theater to see the midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show which I had never been to and was so thrilled to be witnessing. And then we went to a grocery store back in our neighborhood and tried Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream for the first time which I had never even heard of!

A few weeks ago I was looking for something in my garage and I actually came across Maurice’s Challenger essay in a crazy moment of serendipity. It was in a stack of favorite writings of friends from high school and college. It looks like it was published in one of our year-end memory books, the kind where you could leave messages to all your friends. I contacted Maurice through Facebook and asked him if I could excerpt passages from his essay here in my essay. He said okay, why not? His much-more-mature thoughts about the disaster were as follows:

Maurice said he was writing through fear of judgement but he decided he was going to be honest anyway. He listed emotions as he felt them in a particularly sharp self-assessment for a 16 year-old: surprise, interested shock, laughter (his first reaction was laughter at the absurdity of the technical mishap) . He admitted this first response of laughter was “not super socially acceptable.” Then he felt wonder, a horrible curiosity, horror at seeing death made real, a desire to keep watching the televised replays, fascination “at the instantaneous moment of death,” a chill at watching people die, the feeling you were watching your own self die, amazement over “the fact they were doing something that seemed so fun,” a realization that the astronauts might not have ever realized they died, and tears at the end, then a lingering sadness.

Maurice also expressed sympathy for the spectators who had no idea while they would be witnessing  sudden death that instant of takeoff. And in his final paragraph, Maurice zeroed in on the #2 teacher, the runner-up teacher, the one who didn’t get to go up into space and that teacher’s face as it was captured by TV cameras while watching the #1 teacher’s demise.

It makes you think about what good fortune really is, something much more nebulous and ambivalent, like the old Zen story about the farmer with a son who had a broken leg.  Luck and fortune sometimes reveal themselves over time.

Deep thoughts, me.

So I re-read Maurice’s essay and wanted to think I’ve changed between then and now. (See me adulting?) I mean these were all the same thoughts and feelings I had on 9/11. We heard the news “America was being attacked” in New York City. I had just come back from NYC the day before. My friend Julie had set up both an interview for me at McKinsey & Co. and a John Cougar Mellencamp concert for us at Jones Beach. A group of my co-workers and I went a few floors up into another company’s offices, (they had a small tv), and surrounded by strangers we witnessed 9/11 unfold on live TV. I remember someone saying, “One of the towers is gone” and we all thought this must be a trick of a helicopter’s camera angle. It was the same TV confusion.

Anyway, while digging through some photos recently I also came across a photo of Ms. Eichorn’s classroom that semester. My friend Lillian was drawing Notre Dame on Ms. Eichorn’s classroom wall and we took our picture in front of it with me, Lillian, Diana and their friend Kathy.

Then last week I was going through some yearbooks. I had a hard time finding my own class in each one. And I couldn’t recognize most of the names in my own class.

When I was 17, I could identify all 400-plus fellow students of my senior class, save one person who I just never managed to have a class with. I remarked about this feat to my friend LeAnne at our senior overnight party in 1987, saying this would be the last time we would be in a room full of hundreds of people and know all their names.

So this is a significant loss of data here. And it made finding my own Junior picture in 1986 somewhat difficult. But I did find it. It looked like this:

(and that was as high as my hair ever got, by the way). Scanning down the page I was surprised to find snippets and pictures about the Challenger explosion on the very same page. That’s what a big deal it was.

But whew, right? Thankfully nobody could possible imagine what my initial reaction to the explosion had been….except for some godforsaken reason there’s a pull quote next to the explosion photos…

from me.

God. Dammit!

I have no memory of being asked about the challenger explosion, no memory of saying anything about it, least of all saying anything so remarkably dumb. No memory. This was a shock to see.

And this is just great because now any Junior from 1986 with a last name falling anywhere between Kirsch and McCullen can one day look up their picture in the Parkway North High School yearbook and see this pull quote about the Challenger explosion and think firstly “Who the hell is Mary Ladd?” and then secondly “Man, what a heartless boob she must have been.”

Sigh. Ok. Enough of that.

This is an unrelated-but-sort-of-related story about failing memory. When I was eleven or twelve I saw a man get murdered in a park.

My friend Christy’s dad worked at McDonnell Douglas where many of our dads worked. He brought Christy to his department’s summer company picnic every year and she was allowed to bring three of her little friends. LeAnne and I were always solid invites. And then there was always this revolving fourth girl who was the add-on girl every year, the girl who made LeAnne and I extremely jealous. In fact, my relationship with LeAnn probably solidified over this fourth-girl adversity. We were very possessive of Christy. And we made kind of a sisterhood-peace with each other.

On that year’s picnic, all four of us were standing by the curb waiting for Christy’s dad to get the car and pick us up. A blonde-haired man, maybe in his 20s, started running toward us.

(I’m convinced to this day he ran toward us believing nobody would shoot at him if kids were around him.)

We heard what sounded like firecrackers popping and the man fell literally twelve feet from us. All four of us realized at the same time what was happening and we booked it across the street and over a low grass hill.

Like a movie, Christy’s father drove up right at that moment and we pointed at the man who just got shot. To his credit, her Dad hustled us all into the car as fast as he could and got us out of there.

I was convinced that night a killer was at-large and hunting down four little girl witnesses. He wasn’t. He was arrested, if not at the scene then shortly afterwards. The next day the paper reported the murder was a domestic disturbance involving a family picnicking next to the big company event.

I was in St. Louis last November and I met up with my old friend LeAnne for dinner and we talked about this murder. She kept talking about Melissa being the fourth girl. Who was Melissa? I have no memory of a girl named Melissa or her slot as the fourth girl that year. I’m sorry, Melissa, if you ever read this and think who the hell is Mary Ladd? I can’t remember you either.

And it bothers me I can’t remember her. I mean dips and peaks, right? A murder. I should remember Murder-Day-Melissa quite clearly, shouldn’t I?

Well, I do not.

However, I can still remember every video John Waite played as guest VJ that night after the space shuttle exploded.