@BeschlossDC It was my sophomore year of high school. I was taking a Drama class, it was taught in the auditorium and had 60 or so students in it, so we generally had 2 teachers present. The intercom system didn't function correctly in there, so when we heard an announcement one of the (1/)

teachers went out to see why something was coming over the intercom in the middle of the day. I was in the Orlando area, less than an hour from KSC, so launches were normal for us. We'd grown up watching them & many of us had been to KSC to see them in person. So we weren't (2/)

really thinking about the launch, it was business as usual. This is where it's important to note I was in a drama class. In the first week of class the teachers had staged an incident where one of them was telling the class a story about a student, and a football player (3/)

who was in the class jumped up, screaming "you promised not to tell!" and attacked one of the teachers. It was all staged, and given that this was 1986 so before people thought about school shootings or mass violence it was scary but not something that would be considered (4/)

"out of bounds" like it would be today. It did, however, make us HUGELY skeptical of anything the teachers in that class told us because we didn't know if it was another "exercise." So when the teacher who'd gone out to check the announcement came in looking upset and saying (5/)