Mason Dixon Remembers The Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion
If you were in Tampa in 1986, you may have been looking to the east to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger, as we’d done so many times before over the years. This time, something was different. Here’s Mason’s experience.
Mason: Normally, I would have been in my backyard watching the shuttle go up as I had done so many times before.
But, on this particular date, Bobby Rich and I were hosting almost 40 of our listeners on a ski trip to Kitzbühel, Austria. So, instead of watching the shuttle go up, we were running the ski slopes all day long.
When we arrived back at our hotel, the TV was on, and we were seeing video of something that didn’t quite make sense, and it was all in German. It looked like a shuttle, and it looked like and explosion, but we couldn’t tell for sure until we got our trip guide, Hans, to translate, and we were devastated.
In ’86, there was no internet and were no computers where we could log on and get details. After numerous calls back to the radio station to gather information, we broke the news to the rest of those on our trip.
We all felt the need to do something, so a trip to town got us seven Roman candles, to represent each of the shuttle astronauts we lost.
That night, we were out on a snowy hillside firing off the Roman candles in memory of the shuttle astronauts and singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the top of our lungs. The Austrians probably thought we were drunk Americans, but in this case, we were proud Americans paying tribute the best way we could, that far from home.
This was the tribute by Q105 to those we lost in the Challenger disaster in 1986.
