Day 188 - The Day the Shuttle Blew Up

Image of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion
by MATEUS_27:24&25, via Flickr.com

I knew from my experiences living in Iran before I joined the Foreign Service that it was essential that I find an activity outside of work. In Iran, I joined the German School Orchestra. In Germany, I joined the Metropolitan Club, a social organization for those between 18 and 35. I was pushing that upper limit, had in fact already slipped over it, but I could see many members were similiarly over that line and I wanted to contribute by joining instead of just taking part in their programs.

The Metropolitan Club wasn't a place. It was a group of people who organized activites that took place every Tuesday, most Thursdays, and many weekends. Weekend events included trips to the Bavarian Alps for cross-country skiing in the winter and for hiking in the summer, for example. Weekday evening meetings included lectures, tours of museums, meals in local restaurants, whatever the member organizing the event wanted to do. Because the group met so often, I could take part regularly even if I had to work late one or two evenings a week. In fact, often on the days of Metropolitan Club meetings, I worked late anyway since the meetings either included or followed the evening meal. If the meetings weren't at a specific location such as a restaurant or museum, they were held in the American Cultural Center, a few blocks away from the consulate building.

Meetings were conducted in English, not German, although the majority of members were German.

On Tuesday, January 28, 1986, I decided to stay in the office after close of business because I planned to attend a Metropolitan Club meeting that evening. I was sitting at the one Wang terminal that the entire visa section shared, when the Marine on duty came into the office and told me that the space shuttle Challenger had blown up on take-off. We didn't have TVs in our offices, so all we could do to find out more was to turn on a radio and tune in Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS). I don't remember what the program at the Metropolitan Club was that evening. We mostly sat around and talked about what a tragedy the loss of the shuttle was.

That evening, I went home looking forward to a phone call from Thom, a friend in Minneapolis who called me every Wednesday morning, Tuesday evening his time, because I knew the Challenger disaster would be a bigger blow to him than to anyone else I knew. Thom was a space exploration junkie. While we worked together as software engineers in the Minneapolis area, Thom wore a NASA jumpsuit to work on the day of every previous shuttle mission launch. His ex-wife had baked a cake in the shape of the shuttle for him to share with the rest of the engineers on April 12, 1981, the day of the first shuttle launch. Thom was a real engineer, trained in physics and computer science. He had worked for Honeywell on defense projects before joining the company both he and I later worked for as software engineers. But I never thought of myself as an engineer. Whenever I heard someone say something like, "Oh, you engineers are all alike," I would turn around and look behind me to see who they were talking about. I was an engineer by chance. Thom was an engineer down into his bones. The loss of Challenger was going to mean he would need to talk.

And so it did. But he didn't call me on Wednesday morning, as he usually did. And he didn't call me on Thursday morning. I realized that there must be someone else with him, someone else for him to talk with about the loss of the Challenger.

I left Minneapolis to join the Foreign Service at least in part because Thom didn't ask me to stay.  I had sought the opportunity for so long, but my life had continued in the meantime, making me uncertain whether I still wanted it. But Thom's decision not to ask me to stay meant that if I turned down the opportunity, it was likely that our relationship would end anyway. It was frustrating to realize that it didn't matter what I decided, the result would probably be the same in at least that one regard. But after I made the decision to accept the offer with State, Thom and I stayed together and talked about how we could remain connected even with the separation of distance. Our Wednesday morning telephone calls were one way we kept connected.

I waited until Friday morning to call him. And when the phone rang, Beth answered. Beth was the girlfriend of Thom's best friend, Bob. They lived in Ohio, and they had visited Thom the summer before, so my first hopeful thought was that Bob and Beth were in town again. That would explain why Thom hadn't called me the morning after the shuttle blew up. And it would explain why Beth had answered the phone. So I hoped.

When I got home from work on Friday, Thom called and admitted that Beth had now been living with him for the past month. He had always placed his Tuesday evening-in-Minneapolis / Wednesday morning-in-Stuttgart calls to me from a room where Beth wasn't so she wouldn't overhear our conversations. So while Beth knew me, she didn't necessarily know that Thom hadn't ended the relationship - or at least that I didn't know Thom had moved on. That was the last phone call I received from Thom.

And that is the story of what the day the space shuttle Challenger blew up meant to me, the closing of the door through which I could have returned to Minneapolis and recognizing I had to face the open door of my State Department future head on, instead of in half-hearted bursts.