It was 25 years ago today that the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up seventy-something seconds (if memory serves) after liftoff. This was one of those “you’ll always remember where you were” moments for those of us who were around at the time, and we were treated to the replay ad nauseam for weeks, so that even if you weren’t watching the launch live (launches having become rather passe at that point), you felt as if you had been.

Like most people, I was running porn movies at the time. OK, maybe there aren’t actually a whole lot of people who can say that. Back 25 years ago, perverts had to pay $5 to go sit in a dark, musky-smelling movie theatre to watch porn back (though the porn home video market was on the rise, so to speak), and this is where a budding young projectionist such as myself got his or her (yes, we had a “her,” who I eventually took under my, um wing for a while, but the less I say about her the better, ‘cuz you never know when somebody you’re married to will read this stuff) start in show biz.

So, anyhow, I was up in the booth, doing my thing, which was typically reading, because – contrary to what most people think – you didn’t actually have to stand there watching the movie the whole time (good thing, as I used to work from 9:00AM – 10:30PM Mon-Fri and 10:00-4:30 on Sat, and I’d have gone insane in about a week). Though – as this was back in the days of film reels – you did tend to get know the changeover parts pretty well. But, whatever else I was doing, I had the radio on in the background, and thought I heard something to the effect of “…space shuttle exploded.”

Huh?

Clearly, I hadn’t heard that correctly. You have to understand, this was NASA and the space shuttle, and things just didn’t explode. Not since Apollo I – which, coincidentally, happened 44 years ago yesterday, which I doubt anybody bothered to even make note of, and which didn’t actually explode, but caught on fire, killing Ed White, Gus Grissom, and Roger Chaffee, and, anyhow, they fixed that. So when I heard that, I did something I tried never to do – I left the booth and went downstairs.

I tried never to go downstairs because it gave me the creeps down there and, while I’m sure it was purely psychosomatic, my flesh used to feel as though there were little tiny bugs crawling all over it. And that was just in the lobby – no way in hell I’d ever have sat in one of the seats.

Anyhow, I went down to talk to Jimmy (nice enough guy, but talk about creepy; he had one of these eyes that used to kind of drift over and look at some point behind you and over your shoulder, so that you always got the feeling that somebody was sneaking up on you) who had the honor of selling tickets, and who also had a teevee in his cage (I would occasionally come down and watch the ticket booth for him while he used the rest room; those of us who worked there would of course use the ladies room, because there’s no way you wanted to be in the mens room with one of our customers, and, well, we didn’t get a lot of ladies in our establishment – except for the working kind), and I found out that, yes, the shuttle had indeed exploded. Nobody knew the fate of the crew, but watching the launch video replay, it seemed pretty apparent that nobody could have lived through that (of course, much later, we learned that they actually were alive – if not conscious – until they hit the water at over 200 MPH).

Most people probably remember Challenger because it was the fist time a non-Astronaut – 37-yr old NH schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe – was supposed to go up into orbit. I remember it for Judy Resnick, who was kinda cute and had a shitload of thick dark hair that looked really cool floating around in zero gravity.

And of course we all became experts in ‘O’ rings in the weeks and months to come following the accident (much as we’d become foam tank insulation experts in 2003 after Columbia disintegrated upon reentry – the eight anniversary of that coming next Tuesday).

So, anyhow, not that anybody asked (or cares), but that’s where I was half my life ago when the shuttle blew up.