Читать книгу That Wasn’t the Plan - Reg Sherren - Страница 14

On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was in a small office in the Calgary police building, interviewing an officer who wasn’t much older than me. The day before, early in the morning out on the Deerfoot Trail, my cameraman and I had come upon a terrible scene. A fellow driving a yellow Chevy Malibu had lost control, jumped the guardrail and nose-dived down a steep embankment. Neither he nor and his female passenger had been wearing seatbelts and they were thrown from the vehicle. Both were killed. A truck driver had seen the wreckage and pulled over, and we pulled in behind him just as emergency responders arrived. I still dream sometimes about what we saw that morning. It was a horrible sight.

Now we were doing a follow-up interview, but just as we started, another officer burst through the door and said, “The space shuttle just blew up.” We all rushed down the hall to watch the coverage on a small black-and-white TV in the lunchroom. Nobody said a word. I think this must have been our generation’s biggest news event, before the tragedy of 9/11; our response was akin to the previous generation’s horror when John F. Kennedy was killed. Most of them could tell you exactly where they were when they heard the president was shot, and most of the people I grew up with can tell you where they were when the Challenger space shuttle was lost. (I have another space shuttle story to tell, but you’ll have to wait until later for that one.)

The tragic story of the car crash we had set out to tell that morning was unfortunately lost in the enormity of the coverage about the Challenger disaster.