This is the story we published about my experience speaking to Byng, Oklahoma School students about the day I covered the bombing in Oklahoma City.

Journey of Hope visits Byng School

The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum’s “Journey of Hope,” an effort to share the experience of the 1995 Alfred P. Murrah Building Federal Building bombing, came to Byng School Thursday.

Byng Junior High and High School students gathered in the school’s auditorium for the event.

“Our guest speaker today is one of your own,” Martha Beliveau, Museum Outreach Programs Manager, said to the student body, “Richard Barron from The Ada News.”

The program included videos explaining what happened on April 19, 1995, tributes to victims of the tragedy, a short talk from Barron about what it was like to cover the bombing for The Ada News and a question-and-answer session.

“The mechanics of newspaper production was very different in 1995,” Barron said, “but the actual journalism was the same.”

Barron described learning of the bombing on the morning of April 19, and immediately deciding to drive to Oklahoma City, of the look and feel of the site of the tragedy, and how he and reporter Roy Deering covered the aftermath of the bombing.

Each student was given an “Oklahoma Standard” poster which let students pledge to commit to an act of hope.

After the program, Byng’s FFA students placed mulch under the American elm tree, an offspring of the Murrah bombing’s famous “Survivor Tree,” which the FFA at Byng Junior High planted in 2018.

Journey of Hope is a program designed to travel to all 77 counties in Oklahoma to teach the story of April 19, 1995, and commemorate the 30th anniversary of the bombing.

This was my column for that day.

Picture This: What Was I Feeling?

I recently spoke to the Byng School student body as part of Journey of Hope, a program from the Oklahoma City National Memorial, about my experience as a journalist covering the terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

At the end of the session, organizers opened the floor to questions from the students, and they all asked good questions. I thought the most interesting question was, “What were you feeling as you covered this event?”

I thought it was an interesting question because I had no hesitation in answering: I was thinking about how I was going to do my job.

I think this is probably true for everyone who strives to do their work in situations fueled by stress and adrenalin. That can be everyone from school teachers to air traffic controllers to firefighters to nurses.

What we were feeling that day was the urgency of the moment. There was very real work to do, and we were all simply going to do it.

There were certainly moments of shock, especially when we in the media got our first in-person look at the scene and the enormity of the damage, but I, and all my other peers in the media, simply set that aside and started making decisions: what film, what lens, what angle, should I move, should I stay put, who can we talk to, who has more information.

Our feelings about the events of that day would wait.