36 years ago this morning

Second grade. Being in Christa McAuliffe’s neck of the woods, we knew it was coming but we didn’t watch the launch. I don’t think we had TVs in the classroom, so our very old teacher took our her small radio. I had no clue what was going on.

The cutaway shot post-explosion to who I think were the McAuliffes still comes to mind.

 

The TV commentators were bad enough in terms of swinging wildly from completely uninformed speculation to reality-denying inability or unwillingness to state the plainly obvious, but at least they had video footage they could let the audience see. I can only imagine what radio commentary must have been like.

 

At WMEL, we were carrying the NASA feed directly from Launch Control/Mission Control -- with the famous Steve Nesbitt line, "obviously, a major malfunction." I was standing behind Christopher Glenn of CBS (the voice of Saturday morning's "In The News") as his voice went from elation to disbelief. Once he cut away back to New York, I ran out of the trailer to try and get interviews, but the scene was complete chaos.

At that point, I got on the phone with news director Don Germaise at the station and relayed everything I could see and hear. We mainly stayed with the NASA feed, interrupting when possible with recaps. Our audience had seen it first-hand so there was no reason to sugar-coat it.

I was unprepared for that to be the biggest story of my life, and yet, I remember being calm and collected that morning, probably thanks to some wonderful mentors. (Or at least I thought so, and the tape seemed to show it when I listened later.) We definitely didn't speculate, not with an audience comprised of people whose livelihoods were dependent on the space program.

Germaise was brilliant enough to have a reel-to-reel recorder going for the entire time -- probably with the idea of just getting actualities for later -- which taped our broadcast. That won the Florida RTNDA spot news coverage award over much bigger stations.

But dang, to have that happen one month after taking what I thought was going to be a dream job, was not what I expected.

 

The only audio commentary I remember was Nesbitt's, and certainly as the official NASA commentator he probably knew the details as well as anybody could have.
The "obviously a major malfunction" line has risen to the level of a joke among NASA haters, but in fact it was a totally appropriate thing to say -- it indicated something was dramatically wrong without leaping into panic or wild speculation.

 

The way his voice cracks while saying it tells you everything without saying anything. The folks in Houston immediately knew without a doubt. They just weren't able to confirm it at that moment.