Texas town forever twinned with Columbia

Nacogdoches seems to cradle the events of that day, and the days that followed, with a special reverence.

On a back wall inside the Commercial Bank, the Columbia disaster is memorialized in a collage of photographs, newspaper clippings and handwritten notes. "We rember you Columbia," reads one note in a misspelled childish scrawl.

On the other side of the town square, inside a spacious but musty storefront, hundreds of people have visited the "Memories of Columbia" exhibit, which features NASA artifacts, front page reprints, topographic maps of the search grids and a small model of the shuttle carrying bouquets of dried flowers, tiny stuffed teddy bears and notes bidding farewell to Columbia's crew.

"Like any disaster, great things came out of it and then there are memories I don't really want to go to," said Dr. James C. Kroll, director of the Columbia Geospatial Service Center, which put on the exhibit.

At the Nacogdoches County Expo Center, an 18-hectare complex that served as the staging area for the recovery efforts, wooden bleachers and cavernous dirt-floored barns normally used to stage rodeos and horse shows were transformed into waiting areas and tent housing for hundreds of searchers and volunteers.

On the grounds where livestock are penned and football teams practice, NASA set up a portable trailer where engineers inspected the shuttle remains recovered by search teams or turned in by county residents.

Every day, hundreds of volunteers — undaunted by the sleet and freezing temperatures of early February — appeared at the gates and offered to assist in the search, recalled Bill Plunkett, a retired Houston police officer who manages the Expo Center.

"In this part of East Texas, that's just common. It's so gratifying to know that people will come out in force, knowing there's no compensation, that their names are not going to be written on billboards, and that when they leave from here no one will know what they did except for themselves," said Plunkett. "They do it because there's a purpose for it, and the purpose is to help someone else."

And at 5 a.m. each morning in the aftermath, just before the search crews set off to scour through dense pine forests and brush booby-trapped with thorns thick enough to slice through clothing, the workers offered up a soft prayer and named the seven astronauts lost in the explosion:

Commander Rick Husband. Michael Anderson. David Brown. Kalpana Chawla. Laurel Clark. William McCool. Ilan Ramon.

"I'll never forget about it, and the people who volunteered never will. It was part of something you gave of yourself to help someone else you never knew," Plunkett said. "Being 50 years old, I grew up with NASA as it grew, seeing the first man go into space, seeing the first man walk on the moon. You feel connected to that, and when something like that happens, you can't think of anything but how can I help."

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