A somber milestone

Today is the 25th anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It's a big deal here in New Hampshire, the part of the world I call home, because the ship was carrying the nation's first "teacher in space," Christa McAuliffe, who was from Concord, N.H. She and the six other astronauts were all lost in the explosion.

It was one of those events where you remember where you were and what you were doing when it happened. In my case, I was 22 years old, in my senior year at Fordham University in New York City, and working as an intern at CBS in mid-town Manhattan, in the book publishing division. Our offices were at 383 Madison Ave., an older building just north of Grand Central station that's since been demolished. A television sat in our office, and someone that morning had turned it on so we could check out live coverage of the launch.

People drifted in and out as the countdown progressed. As lift-off approached, we all gathered to watch it. And it happened, and we all followed it for about a minute or so. Then, just at the point where people's attention started to fade and the topic was about what people were doing for lunch, it changed.

I remember watching the image and seeing the steady exhaust trail peter out in a way that didn't seem right, and wondering if something had gone wrong, even before anything was said by mission control or the anchor following it. And then the guy on the mission control feed said something like "obviously a major malfunction" and it began to sink in: the Challenger had blown up!

And yes, we were all in a state of disbelief. But what I remember specifically that day was finally going out at about 12:30 p.m. to get some air, and already copies of a special "Challenger" edition of the New York Post were being hawked on the street. It was long before the Internet, of course, and 24-hour news was in its infancy. And "extras" were nothing new for the newspaper business, especially in a competitive environment such as New York.

For some reason, it made quite an impression on me: that something could happen in Florida, and within an hour a newspaper in a city 1,000 miles away could be on the streets telling people all about it. I think it's one of the reasons, at least subconsciously, that I gravitated toward working in newspapers. It seemed so vital, so important.

Who knows what changes in communications the next 25 years will bring? But for me, the Challenger explosion provided an accidental but memorable lesson in the importance of information in a time of crisis, perhaps made all the more vivid because it was so rooted in a style of communication that even then was becoming obsolete. Anyway, with graduation looming only a few months away, I regard the Challenger explosion and what I saw that day as a significant step toward working in the news business.