An Amazing Look Back

None of what is below has been doctored in any way and I made sure to leave the photos so you could see that. Someone found these items recently and they are amazing insight into what I would grow up to be. My maiden name is Laura Fleming. You'll notice it on the bylines.

Is it any wonder that I would grow up to work for Hard Rock and create work for the bands I mention back in 1985 in this article? The articles are all taken from the same year and the same issue - I was 16-years old when I wrote them.

In the same issue of the magazine where I write the editorial about the music industry and rock and roll legends like Led Zeppelin and Hendrix, is the article that I wrote three weeks before the space Shuttle Challenger exploded. My interest in science and technology was strong even back then.

I have always been insightful in my instincts but yet haunted by the article and the quotes I chose from Nikki Wenger, one of the ten teachers in space for NASA. Writing this article had a profound impact on my career and where I would go to college and how I would get there. Even today I think it is extraordinarily telling. I would watch the Space Shuttle Challenge explode three weeks later in a moment that no one could ever forget. Of all the things I've written in my life, this article was one of the most memorable.

It's hard to believe that my sense of who I was and who I would become was so well formed even at age 16. The following are articles that I wrote in 1985 and amazingly they appear in the same issue. The article about me missing a month of school due to knee surgery mentions that I took guitar in high school. I do not fancy myself as musician but just a collector who plays a little. In the same box of memorabilia were the schematics to my first guitar (also acquired at the same age). Funny, but true, the thing had an amplifier in the guitar as you'll see. Well, we all started somewhere.