Pioneer woman, wife, mother, teacher: A profile of Christa McAuliffe

Christa McAuliffe stood on stage in a gold blazer with a red rose pinned to her lapel. Hands clasped in front of her, fingers interlaced, she listened patiently as Vice President George Bush made the announcement: She, as a teacher, would be the first private citizen to venture to space.

The cameras, broadcasting to viewers across the country, panned to Christa as Bush read out her name. A grin broke across her face, a laugh of pure delight ringing out. She and Bush gripped each other’s hands for a moment, his laughter mirroring hers, as the crowd of ten finalists in which she stood erupted in applause.

She stepped away from the group and walked up to the microphone, beaming and blinking back tears at the overwhelming emotion of the moment.

“It’s not often that a teacher is at a loss for words. I know my students wouldn’t think so.” Here, she paused for a moment to collect herself. “I’ve made nine wonderful friends over the last two weeks,” she said of her fellow finalists. 

“And when that shuttle goes, there might be one body —” her voice broke, and she paused for a moment, pressing a finger to her lips before continuing, “but there’s going to be ten souls that I’m taking with me.”

Christa wasn’t interested in fame. She wanted to go into space to share the experience with the world, especially students and educators. For her, the opportunity meant the chance to inspire others to pursue their dreams as much as she was pursuing hers.

Her space adventures gave the public insight into the life of an everyday person, which was a value the Concord High School history teacher carried with her long before her name ever entered the national consciousness.

“When I was teaching American history, I was always concerned that the military, political and economic history was in the textbook, but we never found out what happened to the ordinary person, because social history is not there,” she said in an interview in 1985.

‘An ever-increasing list of opportunities’: Sharon Christa Corrigan, the early years

Christa’s mother, Grace Corrigan, described her daughter as being ahead of her years.

“She was a very self-confident child, and always did things very well. She even walked at an early age. Christa was the first of five children, so we figured all children acted that way. What we found out, of course, was that they didn’t,” Corrigan told the Monitor in 1985.

Christa, born in Boston in 1948, was the eldest of the five Corrigan kids. The family moved to the small city of Framingham, Mass. when she was around five. The Corrigans attended church at St. Jeremiah Parish, and Christa played softball and basketball as a kid. She also took to the stage during multiple school theater productions and participated in her high school debate team.

Christa joined the Girl Scouts at a young age and remained an active member for two-and-a-half decades, eventually rising to become a troop leader. She even took a Girl Scout pin into the space shuttle Challenger with her.

Her full name was Sharon Christa Corrigan, but she only discovered she had been going by her middle name around the time of her confirmation in eighth grade. Years later, when she was selected to go into space, some of her former classmates didn’t initially recognize her name because few in her life knew her as Sharon. To most, she was simply Christa.

She grew up watching an era of space exploration unfold on black-and-white television. 

“When Alan Shepard made that first suborbital flight, my parents were so excited, and I can remember sitting there and watching it and then watching it again at school, and it was so exciting,” she told Channel 12 in 1985. “I mean, this was such an impact on history that space flight was actually going to continue, and we would be herded into the cafeteria when these things were on or herded into the gymnasium, and I got caught up in that excitement.”

While attending Marian High School, a now-closed parochial school in her hometown, she met her future husband, Steven McAuliffe. They fell in love and quickly became inseparable.

Christa always remained thoughtful of her younger brothers and sisters. 

“When I would wake up in the morning, she would always have a little something next to Betsy’s and my dresser, like a book or maybe a piece of candy, and I thought that was an unusual thing for a teenager to go out on a date and think about her siblings. And that’s just who she was,” her sister Lisa Bristol said in a Netflix interview.

According to lore at the Framingham History Center, Christa was the first student at Marian to ever wear a strapless dress to prom. She was a pioneer, even then.

That thrill of experiencing history in the making never dissipated for her.

During college at Framingham State, Christa studied American history and secondary education, in addition to leading the debate team, teaching CCD, working a part-time job and commuting to campus. 

“I was always impressed by her, because she seemed to have a clear idea of where she was going in the things that she was doing back then,” said Mary Liscombe, a college friend.

A physical science class Christa took early on brought her to a conference in New York, where she got to meet several NASA astronauts.

Never envisioning she’d one day join their ranks, Christa held onto that interaction.

“As a woman, I have been envious of those men who could participate in the space program and who were encouraged to excel in the areas of math and science,” she wrote in her Teacher in Space application. “I felt that women had indeed been left outside of one of the most exciting careers available. When Sally Ride and other women began to train as astronauts, I could look among my students and see ahead of them an ever-increasing list of opportunities.”

‘To be a participant’: Christa McAuliffe in Concord

Marrying Steven, in 1970, Christa began her career in education as a substitute teacher and quickly moved into a full-time role at a high school in Lanham, Maryland, where she taught American history, civics and English. 

In 1976, she gave birth to her first child, Scott. Two years later, she graduated from Bowie State College with a master’s in education for secondary administration and supervision. That same year, the family moved to Concord.

By the end of the decade, Christa welcomed her second child, Caroline, and began working first at Rundlett Middle School, teaching American history and English, and then at Bow High School, where she taught ninth-grade English, before joining Concord High School.

Her husband once tried to convince her to become a lawyer.

“She said, ‘nah.’ She loved teaching,” he told the Monitor in 1985. “I think she likes the idea that she has such a great impact on so many students, and that she is able to impart not only knowledge but life values.”

Her teaching philosophy was cutting-edge in the 1980s. She tried to get every student as involved as she could, to instill “strong democratic ideals and the tools to be useful citizens,” as she wrote in her Teacher in Space application. To that end, she devised hands-on lessons, simulations and field trips to breathe life into academic material.

While at Concord High School, she founded a course called “The American Woman,” which centered on the social history of everyday women throughout the decades and drew from first-person accounts, such as journal entries and oral histories. The course remains a staple of the curriculum today.

In an 1985 interview, one of her students described her teacher’s outlook as “What the heck, you’ve got to live life.”

“When she was first applying for this, she said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll make it or not, but I’ll try it and it’ll be fun.’ That’s the attitude she goes into everything with,” the student told the Monitor.

On a trip to Washington, D.C. with her students in the fall of 1984, Christa had walked past a stand displaying Teacher In Space applications and grabbed a few for herself and her colleagues. It wasn’t until the day before the deadline, in typical Christa fashion, that she finalized the bulk of her essays and postmarked the application. 

And then the waiting began.

‘This pioneering trip’: Christa McAuliffe, Teacher in Space

Christa found herself in a pool of over 11,000 applicants to be the Teacher in Space. As NASA narrowed down its search to two teachers from every state and then to ten overall, she remained in the running, keeping her students abreast of any developments regarding her application.

Her first thought when she learned she was in the top ten was, “This is a joke.”

She blended her excitement for space exploration with her passion for education throughout her Teacher in Space candidacy.

“Not only as a woman, but as a person, an ordinary person who feels that I live history every day, I really feel important that a teacher is able to look at things so much differently, be able to kind of demystify the space age and take all the acronyms that the astronauts that use, that the government uses, and put them into simple words so that they can really describe what happens, not look at it from a technological point of view but as a person who is taking this pioneering trip for the first time,” she told Channel 12 while still a finalist.

Captivating the nation with her zest for life and her acute level of relatability, Christa quickly worked her way into the hearts of millions, especially following her selection in July 1985.

“I think my philosophy of living is to get as much out of life as possible and to certainly involve other people in that enjoyment, but also, because of the country that we live in, to be a participant,” she said in a NASA interview during the selection process.

Everything she planned to do in space, she wanted to do for others. Her proposed project drew from her lifelong love of journaling. Christa envisioned writing a three-part journal of her adventures, to then be shared widely as a primary source of the space age. The trilogy would begin with her selection and take readers throughout the training process, then chronicle the flight itself and conclude with reflections upon returning to Earth.

She wanted to bring the world with her — to feel the cramped cabin, to float in the weightless silence, to see the majesty of the Earth from the window.

“Just as the pioneer travelers of the Conestoga wagon days kept personal journals, I, as a pioneer space traveler, would do the same,” she wrote in her application.

June Scobee Rodgers, wife of Challenger Commander Richard “Dick” Scobee, befriended Christa during the training process and described her as “delightful in every way” and “a real team member.”

“She didn’t have to have all the attention. In fact, every chance she got, she brought attention to the rest of the crew,” Scobee Rodgers said. “In fact, one of her lessons was going to be, ‘Yes, I’m the teacher, but let me tell you what the rest of these crew members do,’ and point out each of them with what they were doing, what they were contributing to that mission to make it successful.”

She was slated to undertake a tour of the country to speak with teachers and help them develop their own space-related lessons. 

Even as she became a national sensation, Christa held fast to her life as an “ordinary person” in the ways she could. She visited home during her training as she was able to and relished time with her family. 

Scobee Rodgers described Christa’s “delight in her marriage, how much she loved Steve, her children, how she would want to get home to make them a Halloween costume.”

Keeping up with her Concord High School ties, Christa also corresponded with her students throughout the year, writing college recommendations for those who asked and celebrating their accomplishments from afar.

The 37-year-old knew she was a symbol to teachers and students everywhere and hoped that her visibility would inspire current students to pursue teaching as a profession and consider their own teachers in a new light.

As Christa addressed the Concord High School Class of 1986 at the start of the school year, she left them with a piece of advice.

“Push yourself as far as you can,” she said. “Because if I can get this far, you can do it too.”

This story is part of our series, ‘Christa’s Legacy: Concord’s pioneer woman, the world’s teacher.’ To read more visit www.concordmonitor.com/christas-legacy.

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