A chance to shine on a dark day

By Kevin Pang
Spring 2003 Scholar

Posted: Feb. 6, 2003

February 1. I got a call at 9 this morning from my editor at The Arizona Republic. She told me to get to the office immediately. "The shuttle just exploded."

When I got to the office, I was told that the brother of the shuttle commander lived in Mesa, about 20 miles east of Phoenix. The editor told me to track him down. I thought that this was a bit insensitive, sticking a tape recorder in the face of someone who just had lost a loved one.

This is the seedy side of journalism. You react as a human, but realize that it’s a job someone’s got to do.

Before I left, a colleague at the newspaper pulled me aside. He told me not to just ask "How do you feel?" -- which seems to be the instinctive question to ask a grieving relative. He said be consoling, sensitive and to tuck in my shirt.

"Don’t be a kid," he said, just as I was sent on my way. That said it all for me.

It sounds horrible, but as a journalist (I use that term loosely based on the number of days I’ve been employed) I long for days like these. Big news happening. I only wished I could have covered Sept. 11, as morbid as that sounds. If you aren’t in this profession, you don’t understand the adrenaline you get and that certain newsroom ambiance.

A colleague who was on The Denver Post Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the Columbine shootings told me winning the prize was bittersweet. But such is the nature of the profession. We get to shine during the darkest days.

By the time I got to the home of the commander’s brother, TV trucks were lined up outside the gated complex. I tracked down the phone number of the household and reluctantly called it. The person on the other end hung up. This is the worst part of the job, being some intruding scumbag trying to get quotes for the morning paper.

Security eventually got us to leave the premises an hour later, and all I got were some neighbors asking why we were there. When we told them that the brother of the shuttle commander lived in the complex, they were in shock, too. Many didn’t even know him. Apparently, he was at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to watch his brother land.

I wrote what I could when I got back to the newsroom and started tracking other stories.

I found out idiots on eBay were selling "shuttle debris" as souvenirs for $10,000. Another person bought domain names relating to the Columbia shuttle, such as "Columbiablast.com" or "TheColumbiaSpaceShuttleTragedy.com" and tried to re-sell them for $50,000. Fortunately, eBay took down those listings.

On top of everything, I had to cover a house fire later that afternoon.

What can I say? I love days like these, but I just hate it, hate it, hate it.

Kevin Pang is a Spring 2003 Scholar at The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California. Reach him at KevinP1468@aol.com.

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