Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, December 18, 1993                   TAG: 9312210022
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: C12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KEN GUGGENHEIM ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BOOK ON MACULIFFE CLOSES CHAPTER IN MOTHER'S LIFE

\ The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger that ended the life of teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe transformed her mother. But Grace George Corrigan is finally moving on after publishing a book about her daughter.

After the tragedy, Corrigan suddenly became a national figure and used her new fame to advance the causes dearest to her daughter: teaching and education. But after 7 1/2 years, Corrigan is ready to return to her old life and with the publication of "A Journal for Christa," she said she's closing that chapter for herself.

"It's tying up the ends for me," she said recently at her home.

Corrigan, a native of Waterbury, Conn., is a handsome, silver-haired woman. She won't disclose her age and her dignified bearing discourages a reporter from pressing the issue. Her walls are filled with photographs of her five children, seven grandchildren and her husband, Ed, who died in 1990.

Ask her about the schools built in McAuliffe's memory, the Christa McAuliffe Center at Framingham State College, about 20 miles west of Boston, or her grandchildren, and her eyes brighten.

Ask her about NASA's role in the Challenger explosion and she tenses slightly. She can't ignore the subject, but she doesn't feel comfortable discussing it.

"I'm not dwelling on it, and I'm not going to make any statements about it," she said. "But . . . I think we all feel that it could have been avoided."

The book is effectively a family scrapbook, a mother's collection of verbal snapshots of McAuliffe's life and the tributes she received posthumously.

There's Christa as a Girl Scout. Here she is lovingly tending her four younger siblings. There are some letters she wrote from camp. Here she is marrying her childhood sweetheart. The book could make "Ozzie and Harriet" seem like "Dynasty."

Corrigan said she wrote it because McAuliffe always wished her mother had kept a journal. Some of the book's proceeds would be used for improving education, she said.

"I see it as my doing for Christa what I think she would like me to do and that would be the end of it," Corrigan said. "I kind of feel I've done the job that she would have wanted me to have completed for her."