In my political participation class today, we talked about tonight's State of the Union Address; its history and significances, and we talked about a bunch of other little tidbits of State of the Union trivia. While it was another example of me feeling really, really old ... it also made me realize that time marches on.
One thing that we didn't mention was the only time in history that the annual presidential speech was postponed. It happened 22 years ago today; Ronald Reagan, instead of speaking to Congress, spoke to the nation from the Oval Office to discuss the events of the day.
It was Jan. 28, 1986 ... the day that space shuttle Challenger exploded after liftoff, stunning a nation ... and rocking one 7-year-old boy to his very core.
I was in second grade -- Mrs. Radke's class -- at St. Anthony of Padua grade school on the city's near west side. We were in reading class when Sr. Janet, our principal, came on the loudspeaker and gave the news: the space shuttle, carrying teacher Christa McAuliffe and six other crew members, exploded.
We listened intently -- as intently as second graders could -- as a radio broadcast was played over our school's PA system. We were stunned. We were young, but we knew and understood what had happened.
I had a hard time with it. I loved space. I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I knew everything a second-grader could possibly know about the space program and had watched "The Right Stuff" time and time again. My parents bought me a memorial packet from NASA and signed me up for the Young Astronauts Club ... and like most kids, I was looking forward to the classroom in space broadcasts.
It took me years before I could actually watch video of the accident again. In fact, it was the summer of 2000 before I finally watched it again, and that was totally accidental. My roommate was watching the history channel when I walked into the room ... I was shaken again. I remembered the sadness that filled the room that day in 1986. I remembered my classmates and I being confused ... how could it have happened?
For me, I have Punky Brewster to thank for helping me deal with what I saw that day. In the episode "Accidents Happen," Punky -- like many kids my age at the time -- was trying to come to grips with what we saw on TV. Buzz Aldrin visited and told her -- and us -- to not be scared and to follow our dreams.
It was weird today asking people at school about it. A majority of people -- most of them well under the age of 25 -- had no idea that the accident even happened or thought I was taking about the more-recent Columbia disaster.
A common response has been "that was before I was born," but the same people were easy to identify Nov. 22, 1963 and Dec. 7, 1941. In the grand scheme of things, maybe the Challenger accident was only a big deal to those who remember it ... but while the kids in my class will remember Sept. 11, Challenger was, to me at least, as big as Kennedy's assassination was to my parents and Pearl Harbor was to their parents.
