Kavandi flight remembered

NASA's announcement Thursday that the space shuttle program would get underway again July 13 with the launching of Discovery reminded me of another time when Discovery was in the news, on June 2, 1998.

It was the first space mission for Carthage Senior High School graduate Dr. Janet Kavandi and there was no way The Carthage Press was going to get beat on the coverage of that event. It would have been easy to rely on Associated Press and NASA's website for coverage and we could have made it extensive and informative that way, but that wasn't the way we did things at The Press.

It wasn't an easy time for The Press. Sports Editor Brian Webster had left for a similar position at a newspaper in Jacksonville, Ill, and the replacement we had for him was there simply because we had to have someone. We didn't have a lifestyles editor since Amy Lamb had taken a job at Wal-Mart so the entire staff consisted of this sports editor, who shall remain unnamed, staff writer/photographer (now managing editor and general manager) Ron Graber, and three hard-working kids, Brooke Pyle, who had just graduated from Carthage High School, Jana Blankenship, who had just graduated from Webb City High School, and Marla Hinkle, an MSSC journalism student.

As shorthanded as we were, we still sent Ron to Cape Canaveral to cover the launch (we were able to get him with a group that was going to the event). But we weren't going to leave it at that. The launch was also going to be shown at the Carthage Senior High School Auditorium and that was where Brooke Pyle and I were stationed.

Ron took photos of the launch and interviewed the Carthage-area residents who were in Florida. We devoted the entire page one on July 3, 1998, to the event.

I sat near John Gremling, who was Carthage Junior High School counselor at that time and who had been Dr. Kavandi's counselor when she first told him she wanted to become an astronaut. That was how I started my feature:

"More than a quarter of a century ago, a Carthage Junior High School student confided to her counselor that she wanted to be an astronaut.

"Tuesday, that counselor, John Gremling, sat on the edge of his seat in the senior high school auditorium, anxiously waiting to see his former student realize her dream."

After that, I took the reader through the story of Janet Sellars' youth, including comments from Gremling and another of her former teachers, August Splitter. Gremling told about being one of the first locals to find out that Dr. Kavandi was going into space.

It was obvious to me and anyone else who was there that John Gremling was nervous as could be, worrying about what would happen if something went wrong. I wrote about his every reaction, and Brooke captured his anxiety for posterity with an excellent photo.

When the countdown concluded, the applause began in the auditorium. I will never forget that moment.

In addition to our full page-one coverage, we also used almost all of page three, with our scoop that Dr. Kavandi was going to participate in the Oct. 17 Carthage Maple Leaf Parade and would receive the key to the city.

That was a fun summer, working with Ron and those kids. It wasn't the best staff we ever had there by any means, that came when the summer ended and we hired Jo Ellis, John Hacker, and Rick Rogers, to join Ron, Jana, and me, but we worked hard and managed to get the paper out everyday.
And on that one day, we helped Carthage share Janet Kavandi's dream.