Cripes, I’m old - it was my thirtieth birthday. They were having a party for me at work when it was announced.
Kind of put a damper on things.
Regards,
Shodan
I think the OP confused Glenn with Congressman Jake Garn, who was a payload specialist on Discovery less than a year before the Challenger explosion .
It was my 18th birthday. I was living in Houston, home of the astronauts. For the first part of the day it was great, everyone welcoming me to adulthood and giving me treats. Then word spread around my high school about the explosion. My happy birthday turned in to a day of national mourning.
Then you and I have the same birthday! Happy birthday to you and me!
calmeacham, they are naming the old library after ron mcnair. his home town and surrounding areas have honoured him, but this is a particular triumph.
http://www.heraldonline.com/2011/01/28/2789660/lake-city-builds-on-ron-mcnairs.html
I remember this vividly, as if it were last week, as well.
I was a sophomore in high school and hadn’t heard anything about it directly until I got home from school that afternoon around 3:15. My BF called and told me to go turn on the TV. My parents had just arrived home and we gathered around the TV (we never watched TV at that hour of the day) to watch the coverage.
I was born on the same day that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, so the space program has always been near and dear to my heart.
Years later, after I grew up and moved to Florida, I took my mom to Cape Canaveral to watch John Glenn’s launch. COOLEST thing I have ever witnessed in my life. Very healing and cathartic to watch that launch, so I still get a little lift in my heart when I see footage of a shuttle NOT exploding.
I had just started a new semester at Wellesley after having had a break internship at WGBH-TV, the Boston PBS station. WGBH was not the main producer of them but it had tons of programs ready to go for schoolkids starting in the evening, with all sorts of messages and “classes” ready for McAuliffe to teach from space. It must have been crazy there after the disaster. A friend I called there later said that they masked their shock by getting into immediate damage-control mode.
In those pre-internet pre-cell days word spread by mouth in corridors and dining halls. I learned in the hallway of Stone Hall coming back from a class before lunch. Girls who didn’t have afternoon classes crowded into the TV lounge (one TV for the entire dorm, no cable) and watched on and off all day, and we all got together for evening news as best we could. But no slack was cut, classes went on and not one professor or administrator mentioned it that day or the next. I’d just read a book over break about the space program and frankly was surprised that this huge, sprawling, inherently dangerous enterprise hadn’t had more casualties over the years. It was a testament to the ingenuity of the flight crews and engineers, in a way, that people seemed so completely shocked by the accident.
There was a nice memorial to Dr. McNair put up in the Infinite Corridor at MIT, and there’s a little Ronald McNair park in downtown Brooklyn near the Museum.
I was in college.
I didn’t watch it live - by then I thought shuttle launches were pretty routine. In the dorm cafeteria during lunch, someone mentioned “the explosion” during some conversation. I said “what explosion?” They told me, and I stopped eating lunch, went upstairs to my room, turned on my little tiny dorm TV, and was just in time to catch a rerun of the launch tape.
I was pretty subdued for the rest of the day.
Could be! Note that it was two Ohioans who chimed in on the John Glenn date. 
It was my day off. I watched the launch. Then …
The live broadcast was the only time ever that one could distinctly hear the voice on the loudspeakers where families of the astronauts state, “The Shuttle has exploded…” followed by a screen shot of one set of parents look at each other in bewilderment upon hearing/seeing what just happened.
I’ve never seen the complete video with those words ever again, be in on TV retrospects nor searching for the footage elsewhere. The audio has always been edited out.
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[li]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4JOjcDFtBE[/li][/ul]
‘The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”’
Happy birthday! I hope your thirtieth was better than mine.
Regards,
Shodan
Junior year (high school) study hall. I remember very clearly, still, little details about that room- the color of the walls, where I was sitting, the clock on the wall. It was very disturbing, and I remember the explosion being shown over and over and over on the news. My first memory of a media feeding frenzy around a disaster.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
I was news director of a small radio station on the far north side of Indianapolis. When my UPI teletype machine suddenly went bonkers, I knew something big was up. Up until then, I never knew those things had THAT many alarms on them!
After reading the transcript, tears rolling down my face, I realized I had to pull myself together and get on the air as fast as I could. Hardest thing I’ve ever had to do professionally, and my voice was never quite where it should have been, but I got through it.
A little later in the day, after we knew for certain no one survived the disaster, I went home to get a certain book of poetry. I got permission from the PD, and for my last newscast of the day I quoted this at the close of my report:
‘Sea-Fever’
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
John Masefield 1878-1967
(English Poet Laureate, 1930-1967)
My dad watched it too… he was at home that day, and paraphrased he said he had watched the initial liftoff, and had gone into the other room to get something and when he got back, he got back just in time to see it come apart.
I was in 7th grade, in 4th period computer class, and Mr. Doggett came in and told us what had happened. We spent most of 5th and 6th periods watching the news and seeing what happened.
(also saw the aftermath of the Columbia disaster about 3 minutes after it happened- woke up to a bang, roommate beat on door like 30 seconds later to come out and see, and went downstairs and out into the yard, and looked up to see the pieces just starting to fan out across the southern sky)
I missed the actual event; I was in 2nd grade at the time, and was out of class for my biweekly GT enrichment session. My GT teacher sent us all back to our regular class so we could watch the launch. By the time I walked in the door, my classroom teacher had already turned it off and was talking to the class about what they’d just seen. The class looked astonished, a few weepy, Mrs. McKammet looked flustered, and I was left wondering what the hell just happened.
Star Trek inspired McNair:
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/28/133275198/astronauts-brother-recalls-a-man-who-dreamed-big
That’s a great article.
Garn was the name I was looking for. Thanks. NASA was trying hard to make shuttle missions routine. It was a “bus” into space. They started including civilians like Senator Jake Garn, Christa McAuliffe, and IIRC a few others.
I’m not sure NASA has ever fully recovered from the Challenger tragedy.
I was in sixth grade, in the middle of some section of history, when our seventh grade teacher comes bursting in shouting, “The Space Shuttle blew up!”
Then they rolled in a TV so we could all watch the coverage.
Even then I felt it was a huge blow, tragically and historically.
I know exactly where I was. I was lying in a hospital bed in North Adams, Massachusetts all alone and 3000 miles away from my family. I had broken my ankle and the previous afternoon had been told I needed semi-urgent surgery. The college infirmary had arranged my hospital transport at 6 am and surgery was planned as an add on for about 12:30. I was in pain and scared and I turned on the television to try to take my mind off things. Dan Rather was on and I remember thinking that he looked really upset just before they cut to the Challenger footage. I remember thinking that this day really sucked and that the TV wasn’t going to able to cheer me up. It still ranks as one of the suckiest days of my life.