_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [106]
TWENTY-FOUR
Sudden Death
The recovery of Challenger’s debris and its seven astronauts’ remains ended sixteen months of high-stress and flat-out competition. It ended with me satisfied I had done my best. I had broken the cause of the Challenger accident, as well as filing some seventy Challenger recovery stories on Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News and the Today Show. My body felt like it had aged sixteen years instead of sixteen months and despite having to cover out-of-town stories while NASA redesigned the Space Shuttle’s boosters, I still needed to train for the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Journalist in Space Project. For eleven years, jogging had been my answer to keeping in shape, and the hard sands of Cocoa Beach offered the perfect place to run.
May 28, 1987, was a typical late spring day. The temperature was in the mid-80s, and I had wrapped myself in the comforts of being home. Since Challenger’s loss, I had spent my working hours at the press site and on other assignments. It was time for some serious jogging, time to reintroduce my lungs to the cleanliness of the salt air.
I hurried over our home’s sand-dune walkover to the beach, submerging myself in the ocean breeze. The brilliant white surf was just that, brilliant, and I squinted to stare across the ocean blue. A distant cruise ship hung like a slow-moving cloud on the horizon, and I stopped just short of the water. It was great to dig my jogging shoes into the wet sand where I began my series of warmup stretches. I was fifty-three years old, but I was trying to be thirty-three. Most of the semifinalists to be the first journalist in space were younger, one of the few exceptions being the man himself, Walter Cronkite. When it came down to it, I was confident I could do at least one more pushup than the trusted network anchor.
America was blessed to have such network news anchors as Cronkite and Tom Brokaw. They had been entrusted with their anchor chairs by such names as Murrow, Huntley, Brinkley, and Chancellor, and as my thoughts return to my jog, I knew they both fit nicely in those chairs. I turned into the wind. My fast-paced walk continued my bodily warmup. I felt the ocean breeze in my face. It smelled wonderfully clean, and I grinned widely, remembering Cronkite. He’s just a hell of a fellow. He and Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra were some team covering the Apollo landings. Even today, Wally loves telling the story about what Cronkite said on the air when Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the moon.
Walter Cronkite tells Jay Barbree, “I hope they get the Shuttles’ plumbing fixed so we can fly before our plumbing stops working.” (Barbree Collection).
Schirra, the worrier, kept bugging Cronkite. “Whatta we gonna say when they land on the moon? It’s gotta be historic, right?”
“Don’t worry about it, Wally,” Cronkite assured the astronaut. “I’ll have something to say. It’ll be fine.”
Yep, it was.
After fighting off computer problems, Eagle landed softly on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility. Millions were listening to what the New York Times called Walter-to-Walter coverage as Neil Armstrong reported: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
Capsule communicator Charlie Duke answered, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.”
The first humans were on the moon. It was Cronkite’s job to string profound words together—words for the history pages. Viewers listened intently. The master wordsmith sighed and said, “Oh, boy! Whew! Boy!”
I laughed aloud. Walter Cronkite was simply the greatest. We all did our best to emulate this genuine and loved man. The truth was, we did no better than he. You’ll not find our words in print recording the century’s most historic event.
Suddenly I was back to the present. I moved my jog into a perfect rhythm—running with the wind, matching my speed with the sea gulls flying and darting overhead. Stress had fled. The “runner’s high” would soon be flooding my body.