By J.C. Bruce
It’s Sally Ride Day, celebrating the birth of the first American woman to fly into space.
Since her pioneering launch aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, she has been followed by nearly 60 other women joining the more than 300 men who have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth.”
Sally Ride would have turned 75 today had pancreatic cancer not claimed her a little more than a decade ago.
Americans have been launching into orbit or to the Moon for decades now, starting with Alan B. Shepard Jr.’s suborbital flight in 1961. So, it’s not surprising that after all these years, the list of astronauts who have left us has grown, including 17 who died in the line of duty during spaceflight missions or direct pre-flight testing, most of them aboard Space Shuttles.
Among those tragically killed were the seven astronauts aboard the Challenger three years after Ride’s historic launch, a crew that included two other women, Judith Resnik and Christa McAuliffe.
All of which is to state the obvious that every launch is a perilous business, and when Ride climbed aboard the Challenger, there was more than the usual anxiety because no other American woman had been given the chance to take that risk before her.
I was the managing editor of a newspaper in Texas on that day, and we all cheered when the Shuttle lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral on June 18, 1983.
I had this great idea for a headline:
RIDE, SALLY, RIDE
It was a line lifted from the popular song “Mustang Sally” by Wilson Pickett, which included the line:
“All you want to do is ride around, Sally (Ride, Sally, ride).”
I thought it was a terrific idea. My copy desk chief felt otherwise.
“Hey, wait a minute. Why are we just using her first name? Because she’s a woman? You wouldn’t have just called John Glenn, John, would you?”
She was referring to Glenn’s historic launch aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, when he became the first American to orbit the Earth.
What I didn’t know at the time my copy desk chief and I were debating is that 15 years later I would be at the Cape reporting on John Glenn’s return to space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. But to her point, history shows we did not just use Glenn’s first name in a headline then, either.
The problem was that when you put in the commas, as in RIDE, SALLY, RIDE we were just using her first name.
So, I suggested we drop the commas and make it RIDE SALLY RIDE. That way people could read it any way they wanted.
Nobody liked that either. Part of the problem was how the public and the media had been treating Ride prior to the launch. She’d been getting sexist questions such as “would she cry in space” or “would she wear makeup” or how the flight might hurt her ability to have children.
Still, to this day I think it would have been the best headline ever, and I want to believe Sally Ride would have loved it.
I honestly don’t recall what headline we ended up with, but, as I wrote in a recent Florida Weekly column, any chance of winning the Pulitzer Prize for headline writing (which does not exist) had just passed me by.
I did get my way, eventually, however. In a scene I set in my novel The Strange Files, my protagonist walks into a newspaper-themed bar, and there on the wall along with a collection of other front pages was my headline. Minus all commas.
Almost as good.
For the record, I wasn’t alone in thinking it was a cool idea.
A little history from the never-wrong internet:
In Wilson Pickett’s classic 1966 hit “Mustang Sally,” the line “Ride, Sally, ride” simply refers to a woman cruising around town in her car.
The lyric actually began as a nod to the traditional nursery rhyme “Little Sally Walker” (which features the lyric “Rise Sally Rise”). Singer Aretha Franklin suggested changing it to “Ride, Sally, ride” and helped rename the song from its original title, “Mustang Mama.”
The song later gained an iconic cultural connection in 1983 when astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. During her Space Shuttle Challenger mission, crowds and fans famously wore shirts printed with the phrase “Ride, Sally, Ride” as a play on the song’s lyric.
So, happy birthday, Sally Ride. Godspeed, wherever in the universe you are.
Related:
Sally Ride remembered as an inspiration to others
High Flight: Slipping the surly bonds of Earth
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J.C. Bruce
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I love science fiction, and I'm a Star Trek fan. I appreciated the stories they told and the characters that were created in the stories.
While I haven't attended a conference where the actors talk about their experiences and what being on the show meant to them, I watched some. Kate Mulgrew, the actor that played Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek Voyager, said that young women would come up to her and say that she was their inspiration to go into sciences or become a software engineer. Whatever makes you think outside of yourself and fans a desire to reach for a dream is wonderful, regardless of the path.
I wonder if these women are being taught about female heroes in school. There are so many throughout history. Must you wait until attending college to learn about inspirational women? Sally Ride was an inspiration, as were the many women who were in the background, keeping mission control going during a launch and flight. Sally Ride paved the way for more women astronauts to achieve their dream, just as other women in history paved the way for women to choose what they wanted to do with their lives.
Thank you for this exceptionally great article. Dr. Ride was also a PhD in physics from Stanford University. She sat with Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, PhD, General Charles (Chuck) Yeager, and other notable names, on the Rogers Commission. My sources indicate that Dr. Ride played a crucial role in divulging the internal NASA data on the history of burn-through of the O-rings, the flaw that doomed the Challenger. The final Rogers Commission report also identified the flawed, male-dominated decision structure prior to launch. Perhaps Dr. Ride’s experience as a member of the LGBTQ population gave her the strong independence to voice independent thinking.