Christa as NASA’s Media Darling

With a push from NASA, the media stumbled upon a new concept; the teacher as hero. Forget Rambo, the rock ‘n’ roll idols and the recalcitrant million-dollar athletes. Here was a role model who spoke plainly and showed no pretensions.

The publicity could have exposed her as a fraud, but it didn’t. It could have drained her enthusiasm or emptied her words of meaning, but it didn’t. Christa was going where none of us had been, and all of us, it seemed, wanted to know her better.

NASA suddenly needed all the favorable attention it could get. Private companies were complaining louder than ever about scheduling delays. Congress was pushing for cuts in the agency’s budget. The President’s “Star Wars” strategic defense program was under fire. And NASA’s chief administrator, James Beggs, was on an unexpected leave of absence to fight charges that he defrauded the Department of Defense several years earlier when he served as an executive vice president of General Dynamics Corp.

Christa was the best thing NASA had to offer, but from September to December, 1985, her time with the press was trimmed to two hours a week.

There were interviews with newspapers and magazines and for nightly news shows across the country. But there was no time for telephone interviews--hundreds had requested them--or more time-consuming projects like live call-in shows and scripted television specials. As hard as they tried, journalists from Japan, Italy, Fiji and India never got hold of her either.

It wasn’t the first time a teacher had been the focus of a flying publicity campaign. In 1927, the Dole Pineapple Co. invited thousands of teachers to apply for a seat on one of the first planes to fly from California to Hawaii (only an Army plane had accomplished the feat).

Planes Lined Up

Dole lined up 15 planes to race from San Francisco to Honolulu and selected Mildred Doran, a 22-year-old elementary school teacher from Flint, Mich., to ride in one of them. Her flight piqued the interest of newspapers across the country. As it turned out, seven of the planes either crashed or developed mechanical problems on the way to San Francisco, and only four of the eight reached Hawaii. Seven people died, including the teacher.

No one who opposed NASA’s teacher-in-space project mentioned Mildred Doran, but a couple of critics talked about protecting civilians from similar dangers. John Glenn said the shuttle should be used for basic research, not for providing “cosmic carnival rides” to “the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker.” Wally Schirra, another of the original astronauts, bristled at NASA’s “scarf-and-goggle syndrome.”

“The shuttle is not a passenger plane yet,” he said. “In fact, we’re still learning how to fly the thing.”

Otherwise, dissenters were few, among them the magazine Human Events, a conservative weekly that complained about Christa instead of the teacher-in-space program. It noted that she called herself a liberal, a feminist who supported the ERA, and that she had married an “outspokenly Democratic” husband.

Letters and More Letters

But most of the opposition had come around, and so had such opponents as Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president, who had condemned the teacher-in-space project when it was announced several weeks before the 1984 election. As her celebrity swelled, Christa received letters by the thousand, so many that NASA printed standard letters of reply and ordered an automated pen to keep up with the requests for her autographed picture. Christa insisted on signing each of them, however, and reading every letter that had been written by a child. She added a personal message to each form letter, and above her signature she wrote “Reach for the Stars.”

Meanwhile, her publicist, Linda Long, planned for the madness that awaited Christa after the mission. Johnny Carson’s people had already begun fighting with David Letterman’s people over who would talk to her first.

The network morning news shows had already booked Christa for the first day she left her postflight quarantine.

There would be a triumphant return to Concord for a parade and a press conference on her husband Steve’s birthday, March 3. Then would come a six-month speaking tour starting in San Francisco and stops in 27 states before Christa returned to her classroom in September.

Along the way, she would speak to the graduating classes at Concord High School, Marian High School, Framingham State College and Bowie State College.

“We had enough requests to stay on the road for at least another year,” Long said. “I urged her to do it, but she seemed intent on going home.”

Christa missed home more than she had imagined. And home missed her.

Her husband Steve said, “When (the magazine) Working Mother is looking for a husband of the year, they know where to find me.”

But with little prodding, Steve admitted he had spent his 15 years of marriage as a fugitive from domestic life. Sure, Christa had gone away for a week or two here or there, but Steve had always relied on his mother or her mother to help out. And even when Christa was there, he had neither the time nor the inclination for housework, a shortcoming she had recently pointed out to him.

Husband of the year, indeed. The day after Christa left for Houston, Steve dropped Home Box Office from his cable television service and replaced it with Sports Channel. He was ready to sit back, relax and root for the Boston Celtics. But within days, he realized that only a housekeeper who came two mornings a week stood between him and domestic disaster. His time to watch sports dwindled, and he began counting the days until Christa came home and he could “bounce back to my old score.”

“When I first realized I was going to do this, my attitude was, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ” he said one night when the kids were in bed and Christa was in Houston. “But now, wow, it’s a different story: There’s a lot more to do than I ever dreamed. I’m starting to appreciate why she was never able to keep up with it unless she worked till 10 o’clock.”

Keeping House

All of it was painfully new to him.

Steve discovered as the weeks passed that he was better at getting 8-year-old Scott and 5-year-old Caroline in bed than out of bed, better at washing laundry and folding it and better at cooking for the kids than cooking for himself. He ate cornflakes three or four nights a week while Scott and Caroline usually ate something he had pulled from the microwave.

Steve’s struggle appealed to television people, especially those who had seen his lighter side. Many of them asked, but few were chosen to see him ply his culinary skills. One was Martha Cusick of WNHT in Concord, who found him in the kitchen, clutching a bottle with an unfamiliar shape.

“What’s that?” she wanted to know.

“Paul Newman salad dressing,” Steve said as the camera zoomed in. “It’s good. Have you tried it?”

“No. Is it expensive?”

He checked the price.

“I don’t know,” he said. “A dollar nineteen. Is that expensive?”

Caroline and Scott

Caroline stood nearby on a chair by the sink and made the salad. Her two Cabbage Patch Kids sat on the counter, but Scott, who was sick of the press, had retreated into seclusion.

The salad, as it turned out, was the most challenging course of the evening. The entree was spaghetti with a meat sauce that had been cooked by Margaret Lind, the wife of Christa’s lawyer and one of the many friends and neighbors who stopped by through the months with home-cooked meals. Steve’s job was to cook the spaghetti, and as he snapped a fistful in half and dropped it into a steaming pot, Caroline interrupted him.

“Can I do some, too?” she asked.

He carried some toward her, but it slipped from his hand and splintered on the floor.

When dinner was finally ready, they climbed a flight of stairs to the family room, where a video library of Christa’s public appearances stood next to stacks of magazines and newspaper clippings that grew larger by the day. They ate at the coffee table and watched a Disney movie about Davy Crockett. Steve twirled the spaghetti onto his fork and looked at the kids. It was hard for him to keep them happy, run the house and sleep alone every night in the loft bedroom with the big windows that he and Christa had spent months refurbishing. But he never fussed about the sacrifices. His wife, as hard as it was to believe, was closing in on the ultimate flying experience.

“You know, you’re talking about a human being breaking free of the bounds of gravity, orbiting the Earth,” he told an interviewer. “There aren’t very many human beings who have done that. So I think most of us feel that whatever the price of readjustment, of my taking on things that I probably should have been doing before and hadn’t done, whatever those prices are, they pale in comparison to the opportunity.”

And Christa wanted dearly to do it right. She knew she represented not only her family, her hometown, her state and the nation’s two million teachers, but also every other ordinary soul who had dreamed of space flight.

Excerpted from “I Touch the Future . . . The Story of Christa McAuliffe” by Robert T. Hohler. Copyright 1986, Robert T. Hohler. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Random House. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate .