Every Christopher Cross hit has a story, but only one of them began with a telephone call nobody should ever have to receive. In April 1982, Cross was at the very summit of the business: little more than a year earlier he had swept the Grammys, winning the Big Four in a single night, and just weeks before, at the end of March 1982, he had collected an Academy Award for Arthur’s Theme. He was also dating Paige McNinch, a student at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Through Paige he had come to know her roommate and sorority sister, an 18-year-old freshman named Laura Coffin Carter. Then, on 17 April 1982 — Parents’ Weekend at Denison — Laura was killed by a stray bullet in Columbus, Ohio, a girl who had committed no crime except being in the wrong back seat at the wrong moment.
Cross did not write Think of Laura for the charts. He wrote it for Paige, and for everyone who had loved Laura, as the thing he could actually give them: a song that insisted the right way to remember her was not with tears but with laughter. “Think of Laura, but laugh, don’t cry,” he sang. “I know she’d want it that way.”
The Night in Columbus
Laura Carter had come to Ohio from Wayne, Pennsylvania, and she had packed a great deal into her first year at Denison. She was a member of the women’s lacrosse team, and on that April weekend her parents had travelled to watch her play. Afterwards the family drove towards Columbus. Laura was riding in the back seat of her father’s car when, roughly a block away, a gunfight erupted between rival groups. A stray round crossed the distance and struck her. She was eighteen years old.
The shooter, Gordon Newlin, was eventually convicted and imprisoned; he was paroled in 2012 and died in 2020. None of that machinery of justice could do much for the people at the centre of the loss — least of all a young roommate who had to return to a dormitory room suddenly half empty. That roommate was Paige McNinch, and her boyfriend, a Grammy-sweeping pop star three thousand miles into a career that had made him famous for singing about sailing and moonlight, found that the only useful thing he owned was a melody.
Writing for Paige
Cross wrote the song as an act of consolation, and he built the consolation into its very grammar. The lyric never asks the listener to grieve Laura; it asks them to think of her, and then corrects them mid-thought — laugh, don’t cry, she would want it that way. It is a eulogy that refuses sorrow, written by a man trying to give his girlfriend a way to remember her best friend without being swallowed by the remembering.
The verses are precise about who Laura had been to him: “A friend of a friend, a friend ’til the end — that’s the kind of girl she was. Taken away so young, taken away without a warning.” Cross had not known her long or claimed her as his own intimate; he had known her exactly as the song says, one degree removed, through Paige. That honesty is what makes the record ache. It is not a lover’s lament or a parent’s. It is the grief of the person standing next to the grief — the boyfriend in the doorway of the dorm room, watching someone he loves lose someone she loved, and reaching for the only tool he had.
When Cross’s second album, Another Page, was released in January 1983, Paige McNinch appeared in its inner sleeve, pictured sitting on a stool — a quiet acknowledgment of the person for whom the record’s most personal song had really been written. The album, produced by Michael Omartian, was the follow-up to one of the most decorated debuts in pop history, and it carried an impossible burden: the first album had won five Grammys and sold in the millions, and anything less than a repeat would be reported as a decline. Another Page was a hit by ordinary standards, but it lived in that shadow, and Warner Bros. had clear ideas about its singles. The upbeat All Right came first and reached No. 12. No Time for Talk followed. Think of Laura was, by every commercial calculation, an album track: too gentle, too sad, too specific. It might have stayed one, if daytime television had not reached in and taken it.
General Hospital Takes It
ABC’s General Hospital was then the biggest show in daytime, and its beloved supercouple, Luke and Laura Spencer, were pop culture royalty — their 1981 wedding episode had drawn some thirty million viewers, a figure daytime television had never seen before and has never seen since. When the character of Laura Spencer vanished from the storyline, the show’s music department began threading fragments of Cross’s song through the episodes — a few seconds here, a ghost of the melody there, a practice Cross later described as a “ghosting effect.” The name was irresistible to the producers: a song called Think of Laura, for their missing Laura.
There was one problem. ABC had never licensed it. The network took the position that snippets so brief qualified as fair use, and carried on. Cross and Laura Carter’s family both found the use inappropriate — a private memorial, written for a real dead teenager, repurposed as a soap opera motif — even as Cross conceded that the exposure was selling records. When Laura Spencer finally returned to the show on 24 November 1983, the song’s borrowed second life had done its work: the public now wanted the record the television kept teasing them with.
Number Nine, and a Double-Edged Legacy
Warner Bros. released Think of Laura as a single in the wake of the soap exposure, and it climbed through the winter: it entered the Hot 100 in December 1983, reached No. 9 on 4 February 1984, spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart, and lasted seventeen weeks on the Hot 100 in all. It was Christopher Cross’s last Top 10 hit — a strange fate for a song he had never offered to the hit-making machine in the first place.
That doubleness has never left the record. To millions of listeners it is a soft-rock staple, a gentle voice on the radio. To a much smaller number of people — a family in Pennsylvania, a roommate who sat for a photograph in an album sleeve — it is something else entirely: the sound of a spring weekend in Ohio that ended in a Columbus street, and of a singer who tried to answer the worst news imaginable with the only instruction that mattered. Think of Laura. Laugh, don’t cry. She would want it that way.
And once, heartbreakingly, the song was borrowed back for its original purpose. After the singer Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash in 2001, Boyz II Men reworked Cross’s melody into Think of Aaliyah, a tribute built directly on his framework — proof that the consolation Cross had constructed for one grieving circle in 1982 had become a vessel other mourners instinctively reached for. Few album tracks ever earn a second life. Think of Laura has now had three: as a private letter of comfort, as a television phenomenon its writer never agreed to, and as a template for grief itself. When Another Page was remastered in 2019, the song finally received the full official-video treatment, its description on Cross’s own channel telling Laura Carter’s story plainly and by name — the way it should have been credited all along. Four decades on, the girl from Wayne, Pennsylvania is still being introduced to strangers by the song that carries her name, and still, per its instructions, being thought of with laughter rather than tears.
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