Airplanes were an early fascination for Francis Richard “Dick” Scobee.
When he was three or four, his aunt gifted him a toy plane with wheels so he could sit inside and scoot around. He used it so much that the wheels wore out, so his father hung it from a cherry tree in their yard in Washington state, and his parents pushed him in the plane as a swing.
His childhood bedroom boasted aviation art, books about flight and model airplanes dangling from the ceiling.
“More than anything, he wanted to fly airplanes,” said his wife, June Scobee Rodgers in an interview with the Monitor. The pair got married as teenagers and raised two children together.
Scobee, who was born in 1939 in Cle Elum, Washington, enlisted in the Air Force in 1957, determined to make his dreams of flight come true. He spent his nights attending school and amassed two years of college credits and was eventually selected for the Airman’s Education and Commissioning Program. He graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Arizona.
While in the Air Force, he participated in a combat tour in Vietnam and became a test pilot after graduating from the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base.
“I teased him every now and then about flying in space when we were young,” Scobee Rodgers said. “And he says, ‘Those are for hotshot pilots. I just want to fly airplanes.”
And he did, eventually logging over 6,500 hours of flight time in 45 types of vehicles and rising to the ranks of lieutenant colonel.
When he saw NASA advertising spots in the Space Shuttle Class of 1978, he eagerly applied. And in 1984, the little boy who grew up loving planes took his flight aspirations to a new level, piloting a seven-day satellite repair mission on the space shuttle Challenger.
Despite his many accomplishments, Scobee Rodgers remembers her husband as quick to spotlight others.
“He was very special, very kind, very modest. Didn’t really want his picture taken. Wanted to put other people out in front, wanted to give them the attention. It was hard for him once he was an astronaut, because we’d go out and everybody would want to run over and meet the astronauts,” she said, recalling how he was always introducing her to people and praising her career as an educator.
He was a family man, too, and relished spending time with his children, Kathie and Richard.
“He really enjoyed the children growing up,” Scobee Rodgers said. “In fact, we were raising children while we were still children, and so it was all four of us growing up along the way.”
Playing touch football as a family — minus the tackling, she recalled with a laugh — was just one of the ways her husband enjoyed staying active.
“He was an athlete. He ran, jogged all the time. In fact, we jogged together. I couldn’t keep up with him, but he would go around the circle twice for my once. But we certainly enjoyed that,” she said.
He also played handball and spent time oil painting. His most frequent subject: Airplanes.
His wife remembers him as a handyman, someone who could “fix just about anything,” whether for the house or the car. When the couple first married, they didn’t have a coffee table, so he made “the most beautiful little curved coffee table” to adorn their home, she said. Later on, he crafted a cabinet to house their music sound system.
And, of course, flying was a hobby, too. The family owned a small Starduster, an open-cockpit Boeing aircraft. Scobee Rodgers remembers the thrill of soaring through the air with her husband, goggles on their faces, “kind of like Snoopy and the Red Baron.”
When Scobee was assigned to command the Challenger STS-51L mission, he came home full of anticipation.
“‘They’re down to the 10 finalists, and they want to know if I will have the teacher on my flight, and they think that, because I’m married to a teacher, I’ll really be good to the teacher,’” Scobee Rodgers recalls her husband saying. “He would have been good anyway. He was just that kind of person. Good family man. Loved his parents, his mother and his dad.”
On a walk on the beach in Florida ahead of the fatal launch, he pointed to the space shuttle towering in the distance and told his wife, “That’s home away from home for a while.”
She thinks of him every single day. Every time she opens her computer, his face lights up the screen. She charts time in terms of how old he would have been or how many years they would have been married.
Scobee was 46 when he died aboard Challenger on that frigid January day. He and June had been married 26 years.
His legacy lives on in many ways. 2004 marked Scobee’s induction into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. Numerous schools have been named after him, as well as an education center and planetarium at San Antonio College. A Cygnus cargo vehicle carrying Scobee’s name traveled to the International Space Station in 2024 as part of a commercial resupply mission.
Scobee believed in the power of persistence. His wife said a quote from him hangs at his college: “If I can do it anybody can.”
He didn’t set out to be an astronaut — but his achievements were the culmination of hard work and overcoming obstacles.
“He never had a big, bold idea. He said, ‘I just take one step at a time, and if I make it to that place, then I’ll dream about the next place and work hard for that,’” Scobee Rodgers recalled. “He always believed that working toward your goals is what you did. Perseverance.”
His modesty lingers. When Scobee Rodgers thinks about how her husband would have wanted to be remembered, the answer is quite simple:
“He would say, ‘Oh, June, whatever. I just wanted to be a pilot, and I worked hard. And if anything’s remembered about me is that I flew airplanes,’” she said.