Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings (7 page)

Chris Burke, born in 1958, experienced the excitement of easy money on Wall Street in the 1980s.

I
n 1979 I was two years out of high school and working in a local bar in Manhasset, Long Island, a bedroom community for people who work in Manhattan. And probably about 80 percent of those people worked on Wall Street. A lot of these Wall Street guys were regulars at the bar and they were always saying things like “What are you doing here? Come on down and work on Wall Street with us. You have what it takes.” They
made it all seem very glamorous, and I was lured in. In 1980 I went down to work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Wall Street was just heading into a big upswing, so things were pretty exciting down there. Suddenly there I was, a twenty-year-old kid with a high-school education, and I was starting out at $40,000 a year.

I was a clerk for a specialist house that traded in about eighty big stocks like TWA, Delta Air Lines, things like that. I stood behind a counter, and outside the counter was the broker I worked for. Surrounding him were ten to twenty guys just screaming and yelling, buying and selling. And I'd have to record all of these orders. Hectic isn't the word. It was overwhelming. We ripped our hair out of our head for the entire day every day.

When the bell rang in the afternoon, we cleaned up, and then it was cocktail time. I went out every night with the guys that I worked with and our immediate bosses. And we never spent a penny. Everything was on an expense account. We would go to this same restaurant a couple of blocks from the stock exchange. There'd be about fifteen guys. And we'd head right for the bar and just start pounding drinks. Then we'd sit down at the table. And we'd never even see a
menu; the food would just start to come out, and it seemed like it would never end. It was obscene. Platters and platters of food and bottles and bottles of wine. We never thought once about what anything cost. Not at all. Just like at the exchange, it was all funny money. Never your money. So you didn't think about it.

In 1982 I switched over to the government bond market. By the mid-1980s the government bond market was booming and I was making good money with a nice bonus every year. I bought a new house, new cars, new clothes, and I became so entrenched in the lifestyle that I was spending tons of money. When your whole life revolves around money, pretty soon your value judgments come into question. My buddies and I would literally be stepping over homeless people on our way to work, and we'd snicker about it. We certainly didn't want to get our shoes scuffed up by their burlap pants. “Get a job” was our attitude.

Wall Street in the 1980s was like nowhere else on this planet. It was a culture of greed and backstabbing and partying. Your best buddy is the one who's gonna stab you in the back tomorrow if it means some more greenbacks in his pocket. It wasn't a good way to live, but it was the only way I knew.

A powerful new form of cocaine, called “crack,” swept through American cities in the late 1980s. Darryl McDaniels, born in 1964, is the “DMC” of the rap group Run-DMC. He saw the damage crack did to his community.

I
grew up on the tree-lined streets of Hollis, Queens, in New York. Most of the parents in my neighborhood were hardworking people with nine-to-five jobs. You knew everybody's parents, every kid, every uncle, the name of every dog and cat on the block, and the TV repairman, the oil man, and the mailman. Hollis was really a close-knit middle-class community. Almost every Saturday in the summer, the whole neighborhood would come into the park, and a DJ would be there, and the rappers and the emcees from the neighborhood would come on the set and
we'd rap and we'd party and we'd DJ and we'd play music and have fun until the police came and said, “Somebody called the cops on y'all. Y'all gotta go home.”

In the early eighties I started noticing neighborhood businesses were closing down. Our favorite candy store and deli, where we'd go as kids to read comic books, closed. The supermarket kept closing and reopening under a new name. The crime level was going up a little bit. People, particularly older people and well-educated people, started moving out of Queens, too. Even when we'd DJ in the park, fewer and fewer people were coming.

So the neighborhood was already starting to go downhill when I left to do a tour from 1984 to 1986. My rap group, Run-DMC, had made it big with our first single. Everywhere we went on tour, and especially in the South, people were talking about this new drug called crack. And we'd see crack fiends on the road and we could see how it hooked people. But we didn't realize crack had penetrated so deep into our own neighborhood.

I came off the tour in 1986 and went home to Hollis. I remember walking around and noticing how desolate everything had
become. I looked at the playground, and the bleachers were gone. All the signs were ripped off, and there were holes in the fence and glass and rubbish and garbage all through it. The place looked like a war zone.

I was walking around one afternoon when I heard a woman say, “Darryl!” I turned around and I couldn't figure out who this person was. “It's me,” she said. She said her name, and I realized she was my good friend's sister. She may as well have pulled out a gun and shot me, I was so stunned. It was obvious she was using crack, but she was trying to hold a regular conversation as if nothing was wrong. How was I supposed to react when she looked like she weighed about ten pounds? She had lost all her teeth and her clothes were dirty. I had held her as a baby. But now to see her like that, it was really scary.

Everyone's sister seemed to be getting addicted to crack. But when I started hearing about people's mothers, I just couldn't believe it. You'd look at the babies and wonder why they were like that. And it was because the parents were cracked out. I never knew that a drug could have such an impact on a community or a society. Every week something happened, whether it was somebody
getting killed or arrested or dying. It was as if the whole neighborhood started disappearing. It became like a ghost town.

At the time everything in the neighborhood was falling apart, a lot of billboards saying Say No to Drugs were going up. I remember thinking how much money it cost to put up those signs each week. To me, they were spending money on the wrong thing. I knew perfectly well that people weren't gonna look at a sign like that and say, “All right, I'm gonna just say no to drugs.” I found out that just telling people not to do drugs doesn't work. Besides, that saying came a little bit too late. Don't you think, Mr. Reagan?

Malcolm McConnell, born in 1939, was at Cape Canaveral to cover the
Challenger
launch for
Reader's Digest
.

B
efore I witnessed my first shuttle launch, NASA officials escorted several other reporters and me down to the launchpad to see the shuttle up close. I felt like an ant walking
around a stepladder. I felt awed and dwarfed by this huge machine. When you're three miles away in the press grandstand and that huge assembly lights itself on fire and takes off, the feeling is overpowering. There is a bright flash from the solid rocket boosters, and then you see an almost volcanic burst of steam from the main engines. Immediately after the flash this huge vehicle begins to rise away, and it's all silent. A second or two later you are literally assailed by the shock waves. The press grandstand has sort of a tin metal roof that begins to bounce up and down, and your chest is hit by this cacophonous pounding. The first time I saw it, I was virtually speechless. I felt proud that my country, my civilization, had put together this wonderful machine which was so powerful, so complex.

By the mid-1980s NASA had pretty well convinced most of the world not only that it could run the space shuttle economically, but that the shuttle could actually pay for itself on a commercial basis. NASA wanted to prove that the shuttle was so safe that even an ordinary person could ride into space. So Christa McAuliffe, a high-school social studies teacher from New Hampshire, was to encourage an interest in space for millions of schoolchildren.

The morning the
Challenger
was launched, very few of us who had covered the space shuttle program thought it was going to fly that day. It was bitterly cold. One reporter pointed up at one of the monitors and said, “Look at the ice.” The launch tower looked like a frozen waterfall. But we got our coffee and we sat around and waited. As it got light, the launch control people began saying, “Well, it's looking better and better.” NASA had somehow pulled this thing off. And then the countdown reached five, four, three, two, one, and that glare lit up from the solid rocket boosters. I had a sense of great pleasure and satisfaction.

As the shuttle cleared the tower and the first shock waves of sound began to pound the press grandstand, I had my first sense of foreboding. Because the air was so cold and dense, the pounding sound was much louder than I'd ever experienced. I thought, “That does not sound right.” But I quickly shrugged it off as the shuttle rose. All of us on the grandstand were screaming our heads off, yelling, “Go! Go!” Any sense of professional composure was lost; we were all caught up in the euphoria of the moment.

The pillar of smoke with the little tiny shuttle had turned to the degree so we could
no longer see the shuttle itself. We could just see the rippling cloud of white and orange smoke coming back toward us. From our vantage point, it still looked like a normal flight. Then there was silence. For a long time. I would say ten seconds, which is a long time during a launch. And we began looking around at each other. And then the voice came over the loudspeakers. In a very dry, almost emotionless voice, “Obviously a major malfunction. We have no downlink….” And then there was a pause. “The flight dynamics officer reports that the vehicle has exploded.” I felt this terrible cold drenching doom pouring over me. I could almost feel ice water pouring down over my head and chilling me deep into myself. Looking around me, I saw people who had been standing and cheering a moment before sink back down to their benches. Many people put their hands over their faces as if to blot out the sight. Other people put their hands to their throats, as if they themselves were being physically assaulted. One of my colleagues looked at me and asked, “What's happened? Where are they?” I said, “They're dead. We've lost them, God bless them.” And she got angry. She kind of pushed me and said, “Stop kidding. What happened? Where are they?” And I said, “They're dead.

They're dead.” And at that moment we looked up again, and the pieces of the
Challenger
began tumbling out of that pillar of smoke. That massive vehicle had been shredded into tiny little pieces that were falling like confetti out of the sky.