Space and Heroes, Memories and Pride

It was a warm night in mid-July in Bethesda, Md. I sat with close friends Pat and Bob Buehler in their playroom, watching television and waiting. Finally, Neil Armstrong stepped out of the space vehicle in his suit that made him look like the Michelin Man. He half-waddled, half-floated down the steps and stepped on the moon.

Bob and Pat and I laughed and clapped and cried and yelled “hooray” for our country, for the space program and for Neil Armstrong, who planted an ensign where an ensign never flew.

During the night, I called my husband, Doug, two or three times in La Habra Heights, Calif., so we could oh and ah together. That was July, 1969.

Doug Thompson had three more years to live, much too young, and Bob Buehler died late this fall. There’s no connection between the explosion of Challenger and the deaths of the seven astronauts and the deaths of Doug and Bob, except to say that good people die all the time. Doug spent 4 1/2 years in the infantry in a rifle company in Europe, was wounded twice and brought home two Bronze Stars for gallantry in action. Bob Buehler had more friends than any man in Washington. He was a slow-talking man from Kansas and his friends all called him Coach, because of his unswerving loyalty to the University of Kansas and its athletic teams.

Since that awful Tuesday, we have mourned for the lost astronauts, by ourselves, in steepled white churches, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, in schools and in the Los Angeles Coliseum where the Olympic torch burned to keep a vigil.

We have heard the somber notes of Taps on television, on the radio, played by a lone skinny kid in a Boy Scout uniform standing against the sky on our hill.

The astronauts, we are told, all knew of the danger which might suck them in. And we have heard their aborted journey compared to the voyages of Columbus and to the pioneers who crossed the plains and came West.

I have had a long-time feeling of closeness to the space program. I had the towering good luck to go on a tour with the Apollo 10 crew, Tom Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan. We toured the West attending rallies, parades, speaking on campuses, the four of us traveling in a Lear Jet. It was some of the most fun I ever had. The lordly astronauts were very attractive men who had hangovers, played silly jokes, got bored at one parade too many, but they went through with the program.

That’s the secret. You stay with the program. John Young sent me Christmas cards for years afterward. That was May, 1969, and I felt like the den mother to three of the world’s most exciting men. They were.

This fall I saw Christa McAuliffe going through the countless drills aboard a mock-up of the Challenger at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. She was the dream girl of this mission, an exuberant, inspiring teacher.

Each one of those astronauts must have had just such a teacher. The crew was Protestant, Buddhist, Jewish and Catholic, black, white and yellow. Each one went to school and somewhere along the way was a teacher who said, “You can do it, kid. Try.”

What did the teacher in the tiny school in Kealakekua, on the Kona Coast of the island of Hawaii say to Ellison Onizuka, whose father had a small coffee plantation, that sent that little boy to the University of Colorado in Boulder and then to Edwards Air Force Base, NASA’s hall of heroes, where he became a test pilot?

Dick Scobee, flight commander, went to school in Cle Elum, in Washington. He was the son of a railroad engineer and went to night school. Was it a teacher in Cle Elum or night school that led him from his first job as an enlisted Air Force mechanic to flight commander?

Judy Resnik went to school in Akron, Ohio, played classical piano, was a gourmet cook and an electrical engineer. Was it the piano teacher who lifted Judy’s eyes to the sky? Told her she could if she wanted to?

In a segregated school in Lake City, S.C., Ronald E. McNair heard something that led him to a life full of honors. He was a Presidential Scholar and a Ford Foundation Fellow. His degree in physics was from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A teacher, probably in his segregated school, must have told him the only limits he had were those he chose. And he believed that man or that woman who told that small boy there was a gold ring out there if he just had the courage to reach out and grasp it.

Michael Smith grew up on a 14-acre farm outside Beaufort, N.C., and won an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Who was the teacher who helped the young farm boy study for the entrance exams for the academy? It was a teacher with belief and enthusiasm and hope for her kids.

Gregory Jarvis went to school in Mohawk, N.Y. Anybody ever hear of Mohawk? Some teacher did and saw that Gregory went on to the State University of New York in Buffalo, and became an engineer.

Each member of the crew walked into history the day his name was chosen for this flight. And each teacher who led those scruffy kids by the hand into the world of wonder that knowledge brings, deserves a laurel wreath all of his or her own.

As we’ve lived through these forlorn weeks, I thought often of something said by a man named Andrew Oliver, a contemporary of George Washington. He said, “Danger is the inescapable companion of honor.”

And so it was on that Tuesday.

But each of the astronauts, including Christa, had a teacher who pointed the way.

As we acknowledge what we owe to the men and women who taught the Challenger crew, may I be pardoned if I slip in a small salute to a nun named Sister Marie De Lourdes, who blessed my life with her eagerness to charge into the unknown, flags flying, guns blazing. I can never do it like she did, but I have been known to give it a try. Here’s to teachers.