Christa McAuliffe Center recognizes 40th anniversary of Challenger disaster

Adrien Gobin / THE GATEPOST

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez

Arts & Features Editor

The Christa McAuliffe Center held a lecture in the McCarthy Center’s Alumni Room titled “Christa Corrigan McAuliffe, Symbol of Ordinary People Achieving Extraordinary Things,” on Dec. 4.

The event is the first in the “Challenger Series,” which is running around the time of the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, which is Jan. 28, 2026.

Irene Porro, director of the Christa McAuliffe Center, said this meeting will go into aspects of McAuliffe’s life before the accident.

“Because of the accident we learned a lot about her essentially in her last year of life. And that’s not really what we want to focus on. We want to focus on her transformation years,” Porro said.

Suzanne Wright, the assistant director of the Christa McAuliffe Center, introduced the speakers.

Anna Tucker is the executive director of the Framingham History Center, and Kathleen Young is the senior multimedia producer at New Hampshire PBS, Wright said.

Tucker said her portion of the discussion will focus on what Framingham was like during McAuliffe’s time here and how her familial roots might have influenced her philosophies.

She said people often let a story’s ending define the narrative.

Tucker said, “The end of Christa’s life and the six other astronauts was an uncompromising tragedy - we continue to feel the ramifications today. If not for the Challenger, we might have Christa here or on Zoom at age 77, and we do not, tragically.

“If we primarily see her extraordinary life though only through the lens of the tragedy, we miss the opportunity and the sight of the wisdom that Christa Corrigan McAuliffe provided throughout all of her 37 years,” Tucker said.

McAuliffe’s family moved to Framingham in 1954, when McAuliffe was very young, and lived here until about 1970, she said.

This time period was referred to as the “big change” by Stephen W. Herring in his book “Framingham: An American Town,” Tucker said.

New neighborhoods were being built in Framingham after World War II, followed by new schools, roads, and restaurants, she said.

Shoppers’ World opened in 1951, shortly before McAuliffe moved in, as “the first open air mall east of the Rockies,” Tucker said.

In 1950 the population was 28,000, which grew to over 63,000 by 1970, she said. 

The school that eventually became Framingham High was at the time the “most expensive secondary education school [to be built] in Massachusetts up to that point,” Tucker said.

Women faced several barriers in pursuit of civil rights, especially in that time period, she said.

“In 1955, the year after the Corrigan family moved to Framingham, a Framingham Chapter of the League of Women’s Voters was established here,” Tucker said.

This was also during the Cold War, she added. 

“The Massachusetts Turnpike, including going through Framingham, was partially established as an evacuation route from Boston in case of nuclear attack,” Tucker said.

“It also brought a unifying and federally funded and supported push for excellence, and a desire to take new risks,” she said.

This thought process led to the space program, she said.

McAuliffe grew up in an environment of growth and change, she added.

McAuliffe had a diverse family history, with ancestors from Lebanon, Ireland, and Germany, Tucker said.

McAuliffe had a great uncle named Philip Hitti, a Lebanese historian who is “largely attributed with popularizing Arabic studies in the United States,” Tucker said.

She said she would argue that Hitti’s love for history and education was passed on to McAuliffe in both professional and personal ways.

According to Tucker, Hitti once said, “I wanted to excel, not to get something for myself but to use this knowledge to the benefit of others.”

McAuliffe’s experience in Marian High School was described by her mother as “full, happy, and fairly normal,” Tucker said.

She was involved in several extracurriculars and was in the Girl Scouts for 21 years, Tucker said.

The only part of Girl Scouts that McAuliffe didn’t like was supposedly a girl who wouldn’t stop teasing someone, she said.

High school is where she met her future husband, Steve McAuliffe, Tucker said.

While there, she was part of a basketball team and wore the first strapless gown known in the school’s dance history, she said.

The high school closed for a day on Feb. 20, 1962 so students could watch the launch of John Glenn on Friendship 7, the first American to orbit Earth, she said.

The next day, McAuliffe reportedly said to a friend on the bus to school, “Do you realize that someday people will be going to the moon. Maybe even taking a bus, and I want to do that,” Tucker said.

McAuliffe graduated from Marian High School and started going to Framingham State College, now known as Framingham State University, in 1966, Tucker said.

McAuliffe took a history course at college that focused on the American frontier, and she was inspired by some journals of the early American explorers, Tucker said.

“It was actually a three-part journal that Christa proposed to be her project with the Teacher in Space Program. And actually in application she spoke of the importance of oral histories in understanding history and education,” Tucker said.

After McAuliffe graduated in 1970 with a degree in history, she left Framingham, Tucker said.

McAuliffe got a master’s in education from Bowie State University in Maryland before moving to Concord, New Hampshire, Tucker said.

Young said she made a documentary about McAuliffe last year titled “Christa: From Ordinary to Extraordinary.” 

When making the documentary she worked with the Concord Historical Society, she said.

Concord was a small town, she added. So small that the people there “really claim her as their own,” Young said.

Young shared both a photo and footage of a parade during her time there, before the Teacher In Space Program.

Young said she interviewed over 30 people for the documentary, including former students and teachers who knew her and Gov. Chris Sununu who helped get a statue of her made.

Many of the students she interviewed became educators themselves, she added.

When she was filling out her application for the Teacher In Space Program she involved her students, asking them what they thought would be a good response, Young said.

“She never took it incredibly serious. I don’t think she expected to win,” Young said.

According to Young, a few people told her McAuliffe waited until the last minute to submit the application and even ran down to the Post Office in her pajamas.

Even after she was chosen, McAuliffe would avoid the spotlight and “always found a way to bring it back to the teaching profession and the importance of education itself,” Young said.