Pride Turns to Pain in Stunned Titusville

The space program built this city, and Tuesday a blast of fire in the sky broke its heart.

“With triumph goes tragedy, and today’s the day it caught up with us,” said Diane Estes, waitress at Paul’s Smokehouse.

Come lunchtime, the waitresses and the customers scooted outside to watch the shuttle take off. They squinted into the sun, and everything appeared normal. They cheered. They returned to their hamburgers and fries.

Estes said: “It wasn’t until I got back into the kitchen and heard the radio: It exploded, they said.

‘Others Just Cried’

“I went out and told the customers one by one. They were shocked. One nice old lady started praying. Others just cried.”

All of Titusville felt the shock. This was the day this city’s pride and joy--source of jobs, tourism and identity--turned into pain and sorrow.

Diane Estes’ husband works at the space center. So does her dad. So does her father-in-law. The space program pays the bills.

John Farrell owns a construction company that has profited from Titusville’s building boom.

On Tuesday, his crew was working on a new supermarket at Challenger launch time. Unlike some observers, he and his workers realized immediately that it was a disaster.

“We really saw a big explosion, all the fire,” he said. “Everybody was pretty devastated when it blew up right in front of their eyes.”

Thirty minutes went by before they started work again.

Tourists Along Roads

As usual, tourists had lined the roadsides early in the morning to watch the show.

John and Cathleen Ignas of Philadelphia stood at the sea wall of their motel, along with about 25 others. They had brought binoculars. Their 35-millimeter camera was loaded with film.

“We were all saying: This is so beautiful, look at the wonderful colors,” Cathleen recalled. “We thought it was all part of a launch.

“Then somebody started asking: Where’s the shuttle, where’s the shuttle? Finally, someone with a radio started saying it had crashed.”

Mary Reed, 52, of Goffstown, N.H., was observing from a tourist area inside the space center.

“I sobbed,” she said. “A lot of women were sobbing.”

She thought of teacher-astronaut Sharon Christa McAuliffe’s family, also from New Hampshire.

“All I could think of was her children and husband, sitting there watching what happened.”

Hometown Residents

The explosion was a particularly searing tragedy for people from Concord, N.H., the McAuliffes’ hometown, who had come to see their local heroine take her place in history.

Among them was Brian Ballard, the 16-year-old editor of the Concord High School newspaper, the Crimson Review.

“I was more startled than anything else,” he said. “I saw the explosion, and thought it was the normal separation between the booster rockets and the orbiter. And then I saw big pieces flying around, and little pieces falling around them. . . .

“At first, I felt sick to my stomach. Right now, I’m just kind of numb.”

Robert Hohler, a columnist for the Concord Monitor, phoned his 6-year-old daughter Lauren, who had watched the ill-fated liftoff at her school.

“I told her that pioneers had died throughout history, and she (McAuliffe) was leading ordinary people into space.

“And my daughter said: ‘Like Martin Luther King, Daddy?’ ”

Vice President Arrives

Inside the space center, some NASA workers stood in the doorway, watching the commotion surrounding the arrival of Vice President George Bush across the parking lot. Their mood was somber.

“I haven’t got my feelings sorted out yet, so I don’t even know what to say,” one of them said.

And at one of the gates leading into the center, a man in a dark blue jump suit stood on the trunk of his parked car. His hands were curled around a bugle. He faced the launch pad across the water.

He was blowing “Taps.”

Times staff writer William R. Long contributed to this story.