ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601220068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ORLANDO, FLA.
SOURCE: MARCIA DUNN ASSOCIATED PRESS
THEY HAD NEVER been close. But just before the Challenger disaster, that seemed likely to change.
They were entertaining friends and relatives when the phone rang that January night. It was Greg calling to say hello - his father and stepmother hadn't heard from him in awhile - and to tell them tomorrow appeared to be The Day.
After months of being bumped from flight to flight and enduring multiple launch delays, Greg Jarvis was sure he finally would be heading into space aboard the shuttle Challenger.
The call lasted only a few minutes. The other astronauts were waiting to use the phone at the Kennedy Space Center, and Greg had to be brief. He waited until he was ready to hang up, and then he said, ``I love you, Dad.''
He'd never said it before.
Right then and there, in front of his wife and their out-of-town company, Bruce Jarvis, normally unemotional, broke down in tears. ``I love you, son,'' he replied - his first time too in Greg's 41 years.
That was their last conversation, their very last words to one another. An omen, Bruce Jarvis now believes.
On Jan. 28, 1986, at 11:39 a.m., Gregory Bruce Jarvis and his six Challenger crewmates died in a fireball in the sky.
Ten years later, his father is still heartsick and bitter about the decision by NASA and booster-maker Morton Thiokol Inc. to launch Challenger that fatally cold morning, despite engineers' warnings about the now-infamous O-rings. He no longer dwells on it, though, and is trying to make amends for his son's lost life, and their lost relationship.
At age 78, he figures it's now or never. |n n| It is a sunny Orlando morning and, as usual, Bruce Jarvis is prowling his neighborhood and nearby shopping-mall parking lots in search of Challenger license plates.
He used to go by foot, striding up and down the endless rows of cars and leaving blue thank-you notes on the driver's-side windows of vehicles with the commemorative plates. Nowadays, Jarvis has trouble walking, so he bikes. Even though he's slower and doesn't get out as much - ``I just don't have the health'' - he won't stop. He can't.
He's always on the lookout for the fund-raising plates, even when he goes down to the lake on the edge of his condominium complex at daybreak to feed the ducks.
``I got so that I could spot one of these things a half-mile away,'' he boasts.
Jarvis never leaves the house without a pocket full of the business-size cards, even though there seem to be fewer and fewer Challenger plates around these days.
The cards are signed by both Jarvis and his wife of 20 years, Ellen. They read: ``On behalf of Greg Jarvis and the crew, Bruce and Ellen Jarvis thank you for purchasing a Challenger plate. Your continued renewal is appreciated.''
Jarvis is cursed on occasion and left standing in engine exhaust; the drivers think he is peddling something. But for the most part, motorists are touched and grateful.
He figures he and his wife, also 78, have handed out some 5,000 cards since the first Challenger license plates were issued to Florida residents a year after the accident. (The couple got the first two; his bears Greg's birth date.) The commemorative plates have raised $16 million for the Astronauts Memorial Foundation at the Kennedy Space Center, paying for a huge granite monument bearing the names of the 16 Americans who have died so far in the line of space duty, and for a space education center.
It is Jarvis' passion and mission in what's left of his life. He and his wife see it as a way to keep the memory of the Challenger Seven, and especially the memory of Greg, burning bright.
Of the seven crew members, he is, perhaps, the one most overlooked, the one most easily forgotten.
There was Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher from Concord, N.H., who was going to use Challenger as an orbital classroom. Schoolchildren everywhere tuned in to watch her soar; their joy quickly became anguish.
There were commander Francis ``Dick'' Scobee and pilot Michael Smith; Judith Resnik, the second American woman in space; Ronald McNair, the second African-American in space; and Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian-American in space.
And there was Greg, a Hughes Aircraft Co. engineer who had been bumped from Discovery by a senator and from Columbia by a congressman, and was going to conduct fluid experiments in orbit. He designed and managed satellites, but was not a professional astronaut.
``This is my one chance,'' Greg had said. |n n| Neither Bruce nor Ellen Jarvis was concerned about his safety. After all, NASA's winged space planes had been flying since 1981. Shuttle flight had become almost routine, in fact, and was generating less public interest.
For Greg, though, this was ``the ultimate trip.''
It lasted 73 seconds.
Challenger ruptured 8.9 miles above the Atlantic Ocean while traveling at 1,460 mph, or nearly twice the speed of sound. The pressure seals, or O-rings, in a critical joint of the right solid-fuel rocket booster gave way in the cold - it was 36 degrees at launch time - and failed to contain the combustible rocket gases.
It was like a blowtorch, fast and furious, creating a hole in the external fuel tank, which collapsed. At the same time, the tip of the leaking booster rotated and crashed into the upper part of the external tank, the final blow.
Bruce and Ellen Jarvis watched in disbelief from the launch site as chunks of shuttle rained onto Earth. ``Obviously a major malfunction,'' Mission Control reported amid all the confusion.
The couple were hustled away by NASA officials, along with the other astronauts' families. Jarvis, then 68, required medical attention; his wife feared he'd gone into shock.
Greg Jarvis' remains were the last ones found, three long months after the accident. His widow, Marcia, scattered his ashes over the Pacific Ocean, off the Southern California coast where the two had lived - they had no children - and cut off contact with her in-laws.
For Bruce Jarvis, peace, such as it was, lay in the Astronauts Memorial Foundation, established shortly after the accident, and in the thank-you cards.
``Greg would appreciate what we're doing, what they're doing, what we're helping them do, much more than anything else I can think of,'' he says.
It helps Bruce and Ellen feel closer to Greg and, maybe, just maybe, Jarvis says, makes up for all the time he should have, and could have, spent with his son over the years.
``I wish I'd had more time for all of them,'' he says of his three sons. ``But now that I've got the time...'' His voice trails off.
He explains it another day, this way:
The Jarvis family wasn't particularly close while Greg and his two younger brothers were growing up in Mohawk, N.Y. Like his father before him, Bruce Jarvis was too busy running the family pharmacy to dote on his children. So it was only natural that after Greg left for the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned home less and less, especially after he married Marcia and his parents divorced.
Bruce Jarvis' subsequent marriage to Ellen, who encouraged him to be a more expressive father, gradually improved the relationship between father and son. Greg kept his father abreast of his growing number of achievements in the satellite world, first with the Air Force and then with Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles, as well as all his outdoor adventures with Marcia - 100-mile bike rides, white-water rafting, cross-country skiing.
Greg's selection as a space shuttle payload specialist in 1984 was, for father and son, a professional pinnacle. His phone call to his father the night of Jan. 26 or 27, 1986 - Bruce and Ellen Jarvis disagree which night it was - surpassed that, at least in the eyes of the father.
``Oh God, I was ecstatic,'' Jarvis recalls.
But in one horrific instant, all his dreams were snuffed out.
A commission appointed by President Reagan blamed the accident on a frightening number of mistakes - a faulty rocket-joint design, unrelenting pressure to meet the demands of an accelerating flight schedule, a silent safety program, poor communications, slack management.
The findings rocked NASA and forced changes. Even unwitting members of the launch team were ashamed and felt guilty.
Some still do.
``There are some who today are not totally over the Challenger event,'' says shuttle operations director Bob Sieck, who was in the launch control center that fateful morning. ``Nobody who was a member of the team will ever forget it.''
Especially heart-rending for Jarvis was - is - not knowing precisely when his son died. He suspects Greg was alive when the crew cabin slammed into the Atlantic and possibly aware of what was happening.
``I'll never forgive them,'' Jarvis says.
Like other relatives of the Challenger crew, Jarvis sued. He received an undisclosed sum from Morton Thiokol, enough, he says, to live comfortably.
No matter how much it still hurts, Bruce and Ellen Jarvis go to every Challenger memorial to which they're invited. They feel obliged.
``It can be devastating, really,'' he says. ``You cry at every one.''
They have no idea how many ceremonies they have attended around the country in the past decade, or how many times they have made the hour-long drive to the Kennedy Space Center for Challenger tributes. The Astronauts Memorial Foundation plans a low-key ceremony next Sunday; Jarvis will be there.
But he will never go back for a launch. Ever.
LENGTH: Long : 174 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Pilot Mike Smith (front to rear), teacher Christaby CNBMcAuliffe, mission specialist Ellison Onizuka and payload specialist
Gregory Jarvis walking to the launchpad on Jan. 28, 1986.