Readers Remember

In the late 1960s, with the ink still wet on my degree from UCLA, I was crawling through mud, under barbed wire stretched 18 inches above the ground, in an Army night infiltration course, with streaking tracer rounds from machine gun fire overhead, helicopters hovering overhead, and explosions going off on all sides.

Tyrone, my Army buddy from Philadelphia, was crawling alongside. At one point, he looked over at me and exclaimed, “Damn!” That’s when it hit me: “I’m not in Westwood any more.”

TOM STINDT

Northridge

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I sat at my grandmother’s kitchen table in January 1986 watching TV and nervously pondering how to tell her that I was going to be a father. Young, unwed, and without the resources required for fatherhood, my situation seemed cataclysmic.

As I opened my mouth to speak, my words were eclipsed by the image on the TV screen of the plume of smoke resulting from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. With the explosion repeating itself over and over in the background, I swallowed hard and made my announcement. “Things will be fine,” my grandmother said.

Five years later, while playing at a neighborhood school, my daughter and I stumbled across a plaque dedicated to Sharon “Christa” McAuliffe, the first teacher to fly in space and one of the seven crew members who perished in the shuttle that day.

Today I continue to be the proud father of a wonderful young woman. My grandmother was right.

KEVIN CASEY

Los Angeles