UNITED WAY SETS CAMPAIGN GOAL OF RECORD $550,000

Your mission, should you choose to accept: Raise $550,000, the highest goal ever for the Area Wide United Way.

Jackie Griffith, chairman of the 1997 fund-raising campaign, called Friday upon her team of special agents to help meet the goal during a light-hearted introduction following the Mission Possible theme during a luncheon at the Holiday Inn.

"We need a dynamic duo to infiltrate the corporate world," said Griffith. Bob Basler and John Thompson, wearing dark glasses, gave the thumbs-up sign.

Edythe Davis, Al Spradling Jr., Jim Rust and Gera LeGrand, all wearing their secret-agent sunglasses, said they were ready, willing and able to take on the mission.

Then Griffith said she needed a fall guy, someone to take the heat while the agents do their job raising money.

"We need a pretty face," she said. "Maybe the Tom Cruise-type -- Charlie Neese."

Neese, KFVS-TV 12 meteorologist and honorary chairman of the campaign, challenged people to educate and excite people in the community about United Way.

The United Way and NASA share a common trait, said astronaut Linda Godwin. "They are similar in making the impossible possible," Godwin said.

Godwin of Jackson has worked for NASA since 1980. She has flown three space shuttle missions.

For example, in the 1960s President John F. Kennedy set a goal to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade before Alan Shepherd ever took his first sub-orbital flight. NASA met that goal.

Part of the success was an innovative spirit, Godwin said. When NASA is planning to send a Mercury test into space, no one thought about how to get the equipment to the launch pad until it was time to launch the missile.

But the engineers gathered a flatbed trailer, a mattress and a couple pieces of plywood, lashed it all together and got the equipment to the launch pad.

Godwin said the challenge for NASA in the 1960s was competition. Today's challenge is cooperation.

She was on a space shuttle mission that docked with the Russian Space Station Mir. Cooperation was essential to successfully bring together two different space programs and astronauts speaking different languages.

Cooperation will be the key to NASA's future, Godwin predicted. "We are still working on the international space station," she said. The first elements are scheduled to launch next year.

And NASA astronauts hope one day to travel to Mars. "Talk about a goal we have no clue how to make happen," she said.

But Godwin is confident it will happen. And Griffith is confident the Area Wide United Way will also meet its goal.

The money raised by United Way helps support 24 service agencies.

At the kick-off Friday, the United Way received its first contribution for the campaign, $500 from the Rotary Club of Cape Girardeau.

Caution: Your pledge card will self-destruct if not used.