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January 20, 2006
An "ordinary citizen"
Next Saturday is the 20th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, which took the lives of Concord teacher Christa McAuliffe and six astronauts. This morning I watched a tape of the program CNN will air in observance of the anniversary. Nearly all the images from 1985 and 1986 were familiar to me. I was present for some of them, and I directed the Monitor’s coverage of all of them.
The center of the CNN program is Framingham, Mass., the city McAuliffe came from, not Concord, the city where she lived and where her space mission became one of the biggest news stories ever.
CNN addressed the reason for this directly: Steve McAuliffe, Christa’s widower, wanted to live his life and bring up his children in privacy. The community respected his wishes and even, to a large extent, followed his lead. Framingham, by contrast, openly celebrates its first daughter. The film prominently features Christa’s mother and siblings, but Steve is present only in old clips and photographs.
As editor of the Monitor, I dread when these anniversaries roll around. There is little new to say, and it is a challenge to say the right thing. But there is no choice but to report on the anniversaries. Christa and the Challenger are still a Concord story, and the Monitor is Concord’s newspaper.
I respect Concord’s attitude about the disaster. Those of us who were here in 1986 all have our private memories and thoughts. The events of that time touch emotions that are at once deep and near the surface. The loss of Christa still seems unbelievably sad and senseless. For me at least, one of the dreams that propelled her – space as the last frontier – died with her.
But we are proud that Christa was such a great teacher, parent, humanitarian, feminist and communicator. She was so Concord – everything we strive to be, all the qualities we want to see in ourselves.
And yet the telling of her story, whether by CNN or the Monitor or any other media outlet, cannot help but portray her as a saint, a hero, a symbol. By contrast, much was made at the time of the Challenger mission of Christa as an ordinary person. Steve had these words engraved on her gravestone: “America's first ordinary citizen to venture toward space.”
Christa was ordinary in the best sense of the word: one of us, sharing and embracing our interests, striving to make the future better, but also human, with human flaws.
In one scene, the CNN documentary captures her attempt to retain her ordinariness despite her celebrity. This comes during her farewell address to Concord High: If I can do this, you can achieve your dreams, too, she tells the students.
Ordinary is how Christa McAuliffe was known in our community even before she was chosen as teacher in space. Part of the loss Concord still feels is in the way the events of 1985 and ’86 erased that part of the story.
(The CNN program, Christa McAuliffe: Reach for the Stars, is scheduled for broadcast Sunday night at 8 and 11 and next Saturday and Sunday at 6 a.m. and 3, 8 and 11 p.m.)
Posted by Mike Pride at January 20, 2006 12:03 PM