What started as a call to my long-time friend Carl McNair had an unexpected outcome. Given his background (more on that shortly), I wanted to know what he knew about the African American rocket scientist who was soon to fly with other women on the Blue Origin space flight. Near the end of our conversation, he casually mentioned that the next morning he was driving to his hometown, Lake City, South Carolina to work with a film crew from the United Kingdom in a documentary on astronauts to be released on British Broadcasting System and in the United States on PBS.
“Hey man, if you need someone to carry your bags, give me a holla,” I said moderately serious. Well, the next morning he called my bluff with a text of the itinerary for the trip including the time he wanted us to meet. But before I tell you about our ride from Atlanta to Lake City, here’s a memory jogger.
Forty years ago next February, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff snuffing out the lives of seven astronauts. For those of us who knew him personally, the shock of knowing that we lost one of those astronauts, Dr. Ronald E. McNair, reminds us again that grief has no expiration date.
In the weeks following the Challenger disaster, I clung stubbornly to the hope that the crew survived somehow and made their way to a 1986 version of Gilligan’s Island. But as the days and weeks transpired, acceptance of reality set in.
Now as we’ve done many times over the years, during the trip we traded stories about growing up in small towns in the south, when as used to say, “we were poor but didn’t know it,” and small-town values that were ingrained in but never left us. We shared memories of the times he and Ron picked tobacco in Lake City and my brother and I milked cows in Virginia.
On a more serious note, Carl did not hesitate to answer a few potentially intrusive questions I wanted to ask, among them “how does it feel to be introduced as “The famous astronaut’s brother” as I’ve sometimes done over the years?
“Well at one time it did bother both me and our brother Eric. But over the years we’ve accepted the fact that Ron’s fame does bring with it other issues.
Next, I marveled at his immediate, “yes I have,” to my next question “have you forgiven the NASA decision makers who authorized the launch despite possessing prior knowledge of the potentially catastrophic design flaw of one of its field joints?”
As we approached Lake City, I shared my recollections of the most unforgettable interactions I had with his brother among them that scary time when I, from my office window, saw smoke billowing up from the apartment a few blocks away that Ron shared with my late brother Mike. When I arrived at the building, I saw Ron sitting on the steps on the second floor with a baseball bat in his hands. He told me that he was there to protect low-income residents in the building from looters.
Next, I remember giving Ron a ride in my beat-up old Chevy to a party in Roxbury when, as we exited the car and climbed over a snowbank on the sidewalk, we were confronted by an angry stranger who yelled at and accused us of taking his parking space. When he charged us, Ron dropped into a karate stance. Our surprised attacker stopped dead in his tracks and retreated down the sidewalk while hurling profanities at us.
The third interaction was when I sat at Ron’s at kitchen table in his apartment overlooking the Charles River that separated the cities of Cambridge from Boston. He pushed a draft of his PhD thesis across the table for me with a sly grin on his face. Well, after thumbing through maybe two pages of complicated scientific formulas and equations, and not having the foggiest idea what they meant, I pushed it back to him. We broke out laughing and sipped on a beer.
The morning after we arrived in Lake City and checked into the exquisite hotel built and furnished by Lake City native and philanthropist Darla Moore, we met our two film producers who flew in from the United Kingdom.
For the next few hours, I sat quietly in the back seat of his SUV while Carl took us first to meet the mayor of Lake City, Yamekia Robinson whose dad played on the football team at Carver High with the McNair brothers. Robinson, I should add, is the first African American woman elected mayor in the state of South Carolina.
From there we drove down Ronald E. McNair Boulevard with the camera zeroed in on Carl as he drove us through town, stopping along the way to comment on structural reminders of his formative years, among them his now boarded up grandmother’s house where they lived at one time. We then visited the cemetery where Ron was buried near his mom and dad before being exhumed and put into its current mastaba downtown.
Next, when we pulled into the driveway leading up to the Ronald McNair Jr. High School the first thing you see – and students see – are paintings of the Challenger Space Shuttle with its implicit message from Ron, who once walked those hallways, that if you work hard and dream big, nothing is impossible.
After lunch at Saul’s Sunrise restaurant, our last stop was at the Dr. Ronald E. McNair Memorial Park, Library & Museum.
Intuitively sensing that I needed quiet time alone to process my thoughts, Carl led the film crew into the museum as I took a seat on a cement bench in front of his brother’s final resting place.
The sight of the mastaba with the name Ronald E. McNair etched into stone, the burning eternal flame in the water fountain, and Ron’s footprints set in stone in a small cement box behind me, taken together spoke volumes without words. I sat there in complete solitude as a soft breeze rustled the trees behind his monument. Suddenly the cognizance set in that Ron’s been deceased longer than he actually lived.
As I sat there, I experienced a chilling realization, a compression of 40 years into a mano-second of what happened on the cold January morning in 1986, a flashback of the face of Maureen, an assistant in my office in New Jersey at that time who, knowing about my relationship with the McNair brothers, knocked on my door and uttered words that I wish I’d never hear, “Terry, the Space Shuttle just exploded after takeoff.” Today the remainder of my behavior that day and the days afterwards remains a blur of shock, sadness and denial.
When I looked out the rearview mirror as we left town, I was struggling to come up with the right words to describe the past two days in Lake City and my personal experiences with and recollections of its native son, the Ron McNair I was blessed to have known.
And as you and I are reading this, I still am.
Terry Howard is an award-winning writer, a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, the Augusta County Historical Society Bulletin and recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the Georgia Press Award.
