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In what might be the least surprising book recommendation in the history of the blog, I thoroughly enjoyed reading a history of the Challenger disaster. This is known; I’m an astronomy nerd, and I’m 50, so I was in fourth grade when the Challenger exploded, and I dressed up as Ellison Onizuka for some sort of history performance thing later that year that I can’t really remember the details of. I do remember several other people in my class were other Challenger astronauts; I don’t think we had all seven, but there were a good three or four of us, and the thing involved everyone standing around in the gym dressed as their chosen person and giving speeches about our lives and our contributions to society to whoever happened to walk past. A history fair of some kind? Maybe. We finagled matching fake space suits from somewhere, I remember that.

I also set part of the prologue of my book Skylights on January 28, 1986, and the Challenger disaster is what gets the main character interested in space. The book is dedicated to the fourteen astronauts we lost in the Challenger and Columbia explosions, but I had to look up the names of the Columbia astronauts. I have been able to rattle off the seven Challenger astronauts by name since 1986.

The book begins with the Apollo 1 disaster, where the pure-oxygen environment in the cabin caught fire and burned the three astronauts to death before the rocket even took off. Higginbotham then goes into the history of the development of the Space Shuttle, which, my God, was an incredible clusterfuck, and it’s amazing that any of them ever flew at all. There’s a fair amount of attention paid to the process used to select Christa McAuliffe as a payload specialist, some biographical information of each of the other six astronauts, and then once we get to about mid-January of 1986 the book shifts to practically an hour-by-hour description of the run-up to the explosion and the multiple investigations afterwards. Higginbotham is an impressive storyteller– I’m going to find his first book, which was about Chernobyl, as soon as I can– and the book is detailed and authoritative without ever getting dry, with an impressive amount of footnoting at the end for anyone who is interested in checking his sources.

This is– okay, I can’t say objectively, really, but I’m gonna do it anyway– objectively a good book, but it’s also a book that there was no way I was going to be able to put down once I picked it up unless it was an absolute travesty of a hack job, and it won a bunch of awards. I read it in a day, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. I learned some things, and I remembered some other things I’d forgotten, and I’m much angrier at 1980’s era NASA than I was before reading it. None of these people should have died. None of them.

I think a lot of you are like me and knew from the title whether you wanted to read this; I would recommend you follow that impulse if you do, and if your initial impulse wasn’t immediately “This book exists? I should read it!” you should read it anyway. I will talk about it again in December, there is no doubt of that.

Nevin Longenecker, my freshman Biology teacher, passed away last week. I was surprised to realize, when I checked, that Mr. Longenecker was not among the teachers who I dedicated Searching for Malumba to. I can sort of reconstruct my logic; every high school teacher I mention on that list was someone who I spent at least multiple years if not all four years of high school with, and I only had the one class with Mr. Longenecker. Among his many accomplishments as an educator was his senior Research Biology seminar, an opportunity that several of my friends participated in and which, over the years, generated literally millions of dollars in research grants. I was not planning on a career in the sciences, so I was not part of that seminar, and Mr. Longenecker’s direct role in my education ended after my freshman year. He was, regardless, one of the finest educators I ever had the pleasure of being in a classroom with.

He started teaching at my high school in 1968. And Adams wasn’t his first school. He taught for sixty-four years in total, and never actually retired, although my understanding is that health reasons prevented him from starting this school year. He started that research program in 1976, the year I was born.

Sixty. Four. Fucking. Years. I am a grown-ass man with white hair and I have sixteen years to go before I have lived as long as he was a teacher. Fifty-six years at the same school, and I’d bet money that he was still in the same classroom that he occupied when I was there. I’m trying to imagine the pressure of being the next person to move into that room and I can’t do it.

The phrase “rest in peace” has had all the edges rubbed off of it by years and years of use, but I cannot imagine someone who deserves more peace and rest than someone who taught high school for six and a half decades.

Meanwhile, and the reason this isn’t headlined as an RIP post, I logged into my pension website and was greeted with, I believe for the first time, an indication that I was hitting my “retirement goals.”:

I don’t know who generated that $3533 number, for the record, or how or if it’s slid around during my years as an Indiana teacher, but this is the first time that dollar bill has been entirely orange. I don’t want to hear shit from anybody about how bad the economy’s doing; apparently my retirement account is up sixteen percent this year, which is ludicrous. I can’t even move that “might return” slider far enough to the right to account for sixteen percent increases (and, okay, I know it’s not going to last forever, too, but still.)

Anyway, I was happy for a minute, until I saw that retirement age.

68? Sixty-eight? Sixty-eight???? Shit, I’m not even going to be alive at 68 much less wait that long to retire. It turns out that if I play with that slider I can earn an impressive $55 a month if I retire next year, and the magic number appears to be 62, where the orange bar makes a big jump over to the right. That’s still fourteen years out, which feels kinda crazy.

I learned all of this and had all of these thoughts before learning of Mr. Longenecker’s passing. There’s no obituary yet and I’m not sure when he was born, but if he started teaching straight out of college he’d have to have been at least 85. The craziest thing is he was the teacher with the second longest tenure in the district. As far as I know, Bev Beck is still in the classroom.

(For giggles, take a look at the article linked on that page about the “80-year-old teacher” suing the district for age discrimination, and then look at the date on the article.)

I will, nonetheless, not be aspiring to equal either of those people’s feats. That said, I probably ought to start buying lottery tickets.