A Mission Accomplished

The image was quick, almost as sudden and startling as the event itself. But here in the Granite State, Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan’s use of even a flash of the exploding Challenger space shuttle in a television campaign ad seriously backfired. Sensitivity about the incident 10 years ago that claimed the life of Concord High School teacher Christa McAuliffe still runs deep and strong.

“It looks like we are being used,” said Michael Garrett, assistant principal at the school where the nation’s first teacher-astronaut was on the faculty, of the ad that attempted to capitalize on Buchanan’s closeness to President Reagan during times of crisis.

Seven astronauts were killed on the morning of Jan. 28, 1986, when the Challenger rocket blew up 73 seconds after takeoff. Not surprisingly, her hometown best remembers the name of McAuliffe, a popular educator who was making plans to conduct history’s first science lessons from outer space.

Around the corner from the state Capitol building, at Bookland on Main Street, manager Laurie Jakubowski said a 1987 biography of McAuliffe continues to sell. Often the purchasers are grown-up students who are eager to learn more about the social studies teacher who became a legend. “It’s as if Christa is still a presence here,” Jakubowski remarked.

That is how people here speak of her, by her first name only. It’s a friendly kind of ownership, a sense that her memory belongs to everyone in this city of 32,000. Ten years after her death at age 37, there is little question that in her hometown, Christa McAuliffe’s spirit remains very much alive.

“It’s a happy spirit,” said Garrett, who served on the Concord High faculty with McAuliffe, “very decidedly a happy spirit.”

Adhering to the policy he set at the time of the accident, Steve McAuliffe declines to speak of his late wife and zealously guards the privacy of children Scott, a college student in Maine, and Caroline, who attends Concord High. It was Steve McAuliffe who quashed a move not long after the disaster to rename the high school in his wife’s honor. McAuliffe thought the daily reminder would be hard for his children when they attended the school.

McAuliffe has remarried and recently was named a federal judge. Friends say he keeps the Challenger explosion in quiet perspective, rarely discussing his late wife. But others speak warmly of a woman who gave shelter to pregnant teenagers, fed small armies at parties for her husband’s law firm and sometimes neglected to wash dishes for weeks at a time. Christa McAuliffe had a huge heart, this city remembers, and an unwavering commitment to teaching.

Susan McLane, a retired state senator, also remembers a girlfriend with a sometimes wicked sense of humor. Once McLane addressed McAuliffe’s class, droning on earnestly about the importance of public service. McAuliffe smirked as her students glued their eyes to the clock on the wall, not the speaker, and bolted the minute the bell rang, without so much as a “Thanks a bunch, senator.”

“Keeps you humble, Susan,” McLane remembers McAuliffe saying. “That’s good for you.”

Since McAuliffe herself was so down-to-earth, Concord has been careful to keep her memory grounded in reality as well. “It’s so easy to turn a real person into an icon,” said John Radzilowicz, education director at the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium here.

“She was an ordinary person who did ordinary things, and she was allowed to have this very, very special opportunity,” he said. “Most of all she was a teacher. So that’s why we are here and what we try to do. We teach.”

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For years after he wrote “To Touch the Stars” (Random House, 1987), the biography that still sells at Bookland, Bob Hohler said he continued to hear from New Hampshire readers who said their lives had been changed by McAuliffe. Hohler, now a Boston Globe correspondent in Washington, said he was particularly struck by the number of letters he received from women who were inspired to become teachers because of McAuliffe’s example.

In Dumfries, Va., outside Washington, fourth-grade teacher Micaela Mejia said she “most definitely” chose her profession in honor of McAuliffe. Mejia grew up in Concord, baby-sat for the McAuliffes and was one of Christa’s students in Sunday school. Mejia had been selected to be one of the students who would participate in McAuliffe’s class from outer space, and as student council president was watching the takeoff in the school auditorium when the Challenger exploded.

Once the shock wore off, Mejia, now 27, vowed to adopt Christa McAuliffe’s motto as her personal creed. “ ‘I touch the future, I teach,’ that’s just such a powerful statement,” Mejia said.

“In my teaching now, I’m very much influenced by her,” she continued. “Here I had this person who always believed in me, who always believed that people could do whatever they put their minds to. So I tell my kids what she used to say, ‘All it takes is all you’ve got.’ ”

The same determination has spread south, to Framingham, Mass., where Christa Corrigan McAuliffe grew up and earned her teaching degree. A teaching fellowship was named for her at Framingham State College, her alma mater, as well as a national teachers’ honor roll, “Christa’s Teachers.”

“Any time I go out and speak at a school, there’s always at least one teacher who tells me she’s there because of Christa,” said her mother, Grace Corrigan. Christa was the eldest of five children of Grace and the late Edward Corrigan.

“And I’ve had so many other teachers come up to me and tell me they were burnt out, ready to walk away from teaching because they were so overtired and underpaid--and then they got all excited again when they saw and heard her,” Corrigan continued. “In that sense, I think she accomplished her mission.”

Hohler, McAuliffe’s biographer, agreed. And he said that on certain days when he looks up and sees a distinctive cloud formation, he can still feel McAuliffe’s presence. “Ten years later, you can still see her in the clouds,” Hohler said.

Campaigning in Iowa, meanwhile, an aide to Buchanan said the footage of the Challenger episode would be replaced with “another tragedy.”