Jo Lynne Roberts’ first telephone call from space left her at a loss for words.
The Camas teacher is part of a space-education program at Liberty Middle School. One of the program’s resources is Camas native Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut who recently returned from a 199-day assignment on the International Space Station.
Since riding a Russian Soyuz rocket into space last March, the 1977 Camas High graduate has participated in two events with Liberty students. In September, Barratt and a dozen sixth-graders were linked by an amateur radio network for a question-and-answer session live from the station, approximately 200 miles in space.
After returning to Earth, the astronaut had a chance to come back to Camas last month and spend a few days with his folks, Joe and Donna Barratt.
That’s when Liberty students had a chance to talk with Barratt face to face, during a school assembly. The Barratts were there, too, watching their son describe life in zero gravity.
They’d actually been in touch over the last few months, Joe said. Even though Mike was off the planet, he phoned home fairly frequently, and the shock of a call from orbit eventually wore off.
But Roberts still remembers the jolt when she got her first phone call from the space station. Barratt called her to set up the radio link for that classroom Q&A session in September.
“The first time he called, I almost had a heart attack,” Roberts said.
A few days later, Roberts realized there might be other interesting angles to that conversation.
“I wondered what had showed up on caller ID,” she said.
So Roberts went back into her phone’s call log and found the caller: U.S. Government.
You could say it came from an unidentified federal official — which would make Barratt a UFO.
Flush with cash
Wednesday’s “Neighbors” section described the effort by women of the Venersborg Community Club to add an indoor restroom to their old building, a historic one-room schoolhouse.
In 18 months of fundraising events, the group was able to collect $12,000 for what they called their “flush fund.”
There’s another name that could be applied to their bathroom budget: John Dough.
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