WHERE WERE YOU?

Blake at the Cellar Door reminds us that today is the 20th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger explosion and notes that he remembers seeing it on television when he was four years old.  Way to make a person feel old, Blake!  It got me thinking of where I was when I first heard about major events:

When I heard that Elvis died, I was six years old and watching television by myself.  I wasn't sure who this Elvis character was or what all the fuss was about. 

When I heard that John Lennon died, I was nine years old and watching television by myself.  (I think this was just a coincidence.  I don't think I actually spent my whole childhood unsupervised and watching television).  I loved Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hears Club Band and I thought John Lennon's shooting was the saddest thing I'd ever heard.

When I heard that President Reagan was shot, I was developing photographs with my Girl Scout troop.

When I heard that the Challenger exploded, I was heading out of my ninth grade algebra class and someone ran up and told me about it in the hallway.

When I heard that Princess Diana had been a major car accident, my husband and I had just walked in the door, arriving home from our honeymoon after midnight, and my husband had flipped on our television set.  When we woke up the next morning, we heard that Princess Diana had died.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in court.  As I was rushing out the door from my office to go to court, my secretary ran after me to say that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.  My secretary was always making a big deal out of minor occurrences, so I waved her off and proceeded to court. I assumed that it was some small private plane that would cause minimal damage.  No one mentioned it in my hearing at court, but when I emerged from the courtroom, everyone in the hallway was talking about it. Someone said that terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House.  I crowded into the bailiffs' room with everyone else and watched the events unfold on the bailiffs' blurry little black-and-white TV.  The TV was so fuzzy that, at first, I thought that it was just a bad picture when the building collapsed, until the announcer actually confirmed that that was indeed what had happened.       

The Iran hostage crisis?  I don't remember exactly where I was when I first heard that the hostages were taken or that they had been released, but the hostage crisis was a huge event in my childhood.  I watched the news every single night for news about the crisis.  My father, who did a lot of international traveling in those days, asked my mother to promise never to go on television to plead for his release if he were ever taken hostage. 

Comments

[norbizness]

I only know two:

Challenger: 8th grade English class, it was mentioned over the intercom. I had the added disadvantage of attending the same junior high (later high school) as many of the children of the astronauts (Smith, Onizuka) in suburban SE Houston, who of course were present at Cape Canaveral when in it happened. Chose not to attend projection screening of the launch in the school auditorium.

9/11/01: Had recently started new job. Farting around on the Internet when I noticed I couldn't pull up the CNN website. A guy from across the hall came in and said he had heard something about the WTC over the radio.

Another trivia piece: today is the 39th anniversary of the Apollo fire that took the lives of three astronauts.

[Ann]

Princess Diana died during my birthday party, although I forget what year it was so I don't know *which* birthday party. 17th maybe? 18th?

On 9/11, I was in Madagascar on a semester abroad program my junior year of college. We had been in the country for 5 days. It was in the evening there when it happened, and everyone in the program was eating dinner together when the guy who ran our hostel came running out, trying to explain in his rudimentary French that there was an "airplane crash in [our] country." We weren't too concerned, but he was sure this was really something we wanted to see and obviously frustrated that he couldn't communicate that to us, so he ran back into his room and brought out an ancient seven-inch black and white TV. The newscast was in French and the anchorman was very agitated and talking way too fast for us to understand much of anything but the horrible pictures that they kept replaying over and over and over. We all thought we would be stuck in Madagascar for years, that in a war that used commercial airliners as weapons we would never get to go home. Of course by the time we were actually supposed to go home, just before Christmas, everything had settled down and the only real change was the number of American flags in people's yards.

[chipmunk]

I recall many of these. Elvis and John Lennon didn't stand out as that important to me (Lennon fans, don't criticize too much please). When Reagan was shot I was talking to two of my profs in the political science dept. at college. We immediately found a t.v. to get the covereage. I still had to take a make up exam though. When I heard of the challenger explosion I was in DC at the Supreme Court (at the cafeteria). I had just come home from a wedding when I heard about Diana. I had walked in the door and turned on the t.v. and saw the reports from Paris. On 9-11 I was at the office when our administrator told us about the plane crash. We jumped to the tv for the live broadcasts (immediate thoughts went to friends in the NYFD and NYPD, one of them made the supreme sacrafice). I can't recall when I learned of the Iran hostage crisis. However, I was at scout camp in the Adirondacks when Nixon resigned. We listened to the broadcast from a radio in a camp next to ours (why should all historic points be sad news).

[Chalicechick]

If it makes you feel better, while seeing that the guy from Cellar Door was four when it blew up might have made you feel old, knowing that you were like 14 or so when it blew up and are thus only about seven years older than I am depresses me as you seem really accomplished by comparision.

CC

[The Happy Feminist]

7 years is a looooong time!

[Emily]

I wanna play! I wanna play!

Elvis -- Not born yet.
Lennon -- Not born yet.
Reagan -- Inside my mother's uterus, waiting to be born a few months later.
Challenger -- Kindergarten. Quite traumatic, because I was going through the "I want to be an astronaut" phase.
Diana -- High school. Lots of girls were talking about it. Lots of guys were wondering what was going on.
Sept 11 -- In my Computational Physics class in college. We were coding some projectile motion (flight of a baseball while considering air friction), when one of the guys in the class said "Hey, on CNN.com it says that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York". Everyone stopped coding and we all went to CNN.com. Later, when the website became impossible to access due to the enormous traffic, we left the room (class time was over also, btw), and ran into our Intro Physics prof from the year before. He told us he had a TV in his lab, and he was watching the news, so if we wanted, we could join him. We went with him and as I walked into the lab, the first tower collapsed.
Iran - Not born yet.

[Ron O.]

I have a horrible memory for things that happen and timelines. Sometimes I don't even remember how old I am. I do have good recall on things I read, so I I really want to remember somehting, I have to write it down & read it.

Anyway, I never cared that much for the Beatles or Elvis, so their deaths didn't personally affect me. When Jerry Garcia died, a man far more important to me, I was saddened. A friend called me with the news. We went to Cricket Hill near Montrose Beach to mourn with the other hippies in Chicago.

I remember the Challenger explosion. I was in my freshman year of college, sitting the kitchen of the sorority where I worked for my meals. I really wanted to be an astronaut & was trying to figure out a way for that to happen w/o joining the military.

On 9/11 I was at work. I read about the first crash in a news alert. A bunch of us crowded into my bosses office to watch the news. Less than a minute after we turned on the TV the second plane crashed. That image will be in my memory unitl death or old age wipes the slate.

[TGR]

Wow, what a question. I love how this dates all of us!

Challenger: I was in third grade, and while I don’t actually remember the moment I saw it, I’m pretty sure we were watching the launch at school. But I was strongly affected: what I remember most clearly is that we had nominated our teacher for the trip, so were paying close attention to it (as were many schoolchildren of the time, I’m sure).

Gulf War: The first war I was old enough to really be aware of. I was in eighth grade at my school’s science fair, that first evening that the shelling was all over the news, and several of us snuck into an empty classroom with a tv cart and watched for hours, instead of participating in the science far as we were supposed to. One of the kids with us was worried that his military mom was going to be sent over.

Diana: I was in a hotel room somewhere between Ohio and California, driving my car back to start another semester of college, and it was on the news in the morning when I turned the tv on. I remember the layout of the room and the pattern of the bedspread quite clearly, but have no memory of what town, or even state, I was in.

September 11: At home in California. I woke up early having dreamed that my dad and I were on a plane that crashed. Twice. Went back to sleep and woke up a couple of hours later to a strange sound: talking instead of music coming from my radio alarm clock. I couldn’t understand what was going on, (I think that I momentarily thought it was some sort of “War of the Worlds” type program – I couldn’t make any other sense of it) so I turned on the tv and it was on every channel. The first tower had already fallen. The second one fell as I watched. I called my dad, irrationally afraid that he actually had been on a place (he traveled frequently for business, so it was possible) and he was fine, but hadn’t heard the news yet because he was in the car driving and didn’t have the radio on. My memory of what I said to him in that conversation is crystal clear.

[Chalicechick]

My answers are up on my blog

CC

[L.]

Am I the oldest person playing? Damn!

Elvis -- did not make an impression on me.
John Lennon -- was killed on my 15th birthday. I remember listening to the radio before I went to sleep. It had been a particularly shitty birthday, and this really topped it off. At the time, Lennon was probably top on my list of celebrities I would like to have met. He always seemed to smart, and so funny.
Hostages in Iran -- I was a sophomore in high school when they were released. I remember thinking that CBS news must regret having started their close of every broadcast with, "....the xxxth day of captivity for the hostages in Iran," or whatever exactly they said. I guess they never thought it would get into the triple digits. (This really dates me: I remember when I was little, the CBS evening news ended with them scrolling the names of the soldiers who had died in Vietnam.)
Reagan -- in his own words, "I do not recall." I think I spent most of the Reagan adminstration drunk and/or stoned.
Challenger -- I only remember I was studying in Kyoto, and I talked about how sad it was with my then-boyfriend (later husband).
Princess Di -- don`t remember when that was. I remember being sad, though.
9-11 -- It was nighttime in Tokyo. A friend called and said, "Turn on your TV." I watched with my kids. I sent them to bed when the second plane hit -- they were too small to understand. I remember my son said, "Cool!" and I said, "No, not cool. Lots of mommies and daddies and probably kids just died, because it`s not a movie, it`s real." I stayed up until the wee hours watching it, and then barely slept, and then went in to work early. I was a financial reporter. No one had called anyone to tell us to come in early, but most of us had, because we were all news hounds and wanted to find out more right away, and be ready to cover Asia`s reaction as the day started. It was an awful day -- there was just about no US Treasurys market because Cantor had been decimated.

[wdegraw]

I may be the oldest. I don't want to do the math ...

Elvis: sitting on a neighbor's stoop wondering why she was crying. At that time all I knew about Elvis was that he was a fat guy who played Vegas and took lots of pills.

Lennon: Came down for breakfast, it was still dark out, seeing the NY Post headline on the table. Caught subway for the long commute to High School. Went to the Dakota after school.

Reagan: Rounding NW corner of 6th Avenue and 14th Street, NYNY, saw the Post midday edition at that newsstand on the corner. Went straight home to watch TV. [I learned that the Pope was shot the same way, different day!]

Hostages in Iran: aware, but that's all I can recall. Remember the news reports of the failed rescue ...

Princess Di: 4 to 12 shift in a DA office complaint room. Told incidently by a cop I was talking to over the phone.

Challenger: Sophomore in college in Carpy's dorm room, cutting class, listening to AC/DC's Jailbreak '(Seventysomething) bootleg album.

9/11- Sitting on my stoop with my daughter putting my shoes on, wondering what the loud explosions were, wondering why paper was raining down from the sky, wondering why the babysitter was late, being told by the sitter that a plane hit the towers, spending the rest of the day looking for (and eventually finding) my wife. I never got around to tying my shoes.

[Cheryl]

I think I win the award for being the oldest one here. I actually remember JFK's assassination! I was 6 years old and home sick from school. My mother had allowed me to lay on the chesterfield and watch TV. When the news hit, I didn't really know what it was all about but I do remember thinking that it must have been pretty important.

I heard about John Lennon's death when I came home from a late night college class. I couldn't figure out why anyone would want to kill John Lennon - a man whose music played a very big part of my life. Lennon's death was something I took hard - I think it killed a little bit of my childhood.

The rest of the events didn't really make any impact on me except Sept 11. Husband and I were making breakfast and we turned on the morning news. We stood in the living room, watching the TV, in stunned silence. It filled me with tremendous fear. As Canadians, we knew we could very likely be next in line, but what really scared us was the wait to see how the US would react. We thought there was a possibility we were watching the beginnings of a new world war. I don't think either of us slept that night.

One event not mentioned sticks out very clearly in my memory...the 1973 invasion of Israel by Egypt and Syria. For a while it had the entire world on edge when Russia threatened to intervene militarily. My father was in the Air Force at the time, my eldest brother was of draft age, and my other brother was only 6 months shy of being draft age. I wondered if half of my family was going to be sent to war.

[chipmunk]

the '73 invasion. I remember that well. I was standing outside of temple as the Yiskor service was taking place.

[The Happy Feminist]

The '73 invasion was before my time. My first political memory was trying to decide who should win the Ford-Carter election. My analysis was that Ford should win because Carter was really funny looking. When you're five, there is not much beyond that to go on (especially since my parents were voting opposite ways).

[Norsecats]

I think I'm about the same age as Happy Feminist (born in 1971).

Elvis & Lennon - vague memories of Lennon, none of Elvis. I listened to a lot of Beatles music growing up but never really connected the music with the man until later.

Reagan being shot - my fundamentalist aunt was living with us at the time (she found Jesus at the bottom of a bottle) and was very, very upset. I was in fourth grade.

Challenger - I remember a student running into our biology lab and saying "the space shuttle blew up". Then I remember endlessly watching footage of those two contrails trailing off, and all of us grimly laughing when Mission Control said, "Obviously a major malfunction here." Seemed to be the understatement of the year.

One event no one's mentioned - the Berlin Wall coming down. I was a sophomore in college, and we all sat around watching in astonishment at the people dancing on the wall. I had friends who had been to Russia in the late 1980s, but if you had told me in 1987 that the Wall would be gone in two years I would have said you were insane. I just remember that 1989-90 seemed like this glorious wave of freedom was spreading across the world as the Iron Curtain lifted and Mandela was released from 27 years of prison.

9/11 - I was taking care of my 6-month-old daughter when my wife called and said, "Turn on the TV." "Which station?" "It won't matter." I was taking a few weeks' paternity leave, and that kind of sucked because for a week all I did was watch TV and get depressed. I will never, ever forget the image of the South Tower collapsing into dust, and the dawning horror on the voices of the TV anchorpeople as they slowly comprehended what had just happened.

The other "where were you when" news that will be painfully familiar to any Minnesota Democrat was hearing the news of Senator Paul Wellstone's death. What a horrible election 2002 was.

[The Happy Feminist]

Thanks Norsecat!

Actually the fall of the Berlin wall was a biggie. I was living in a very isolated third world town when that happened. I actually missed the immediacy of a lot of big events because my family lived in such isolated areas for much of my upbringing.

[bmmg39]

President Reagan: Our third-grade teacher was called out into the hall, and then entered the room to tell the class the news. We were all sent home.

Challenger: I had volunteered to erase the board after eighth-grade English class. The principal gave the word over the public address system.

Diana: Some of us were walking around in Philadelphia when we had heard something about an accident in Paris. I learned she had died after speaking with my mother on the phone.

9/11: I was off from work and turned on the radio after waking. I think Imus was on and I heard something about a plane crash somewhere. I winced; then I heard something about the WTC, which prompted me to jerk upright and run into a room with a television set.

My personal 9/11 stories: I had interviewed the local 7-Eleven manager for a paper I had written in college. He's of Middle Eastern descent, and so I feared for his safety. I wanted to warn him to go home, or something. I drove to the store, where there were just a few other customers. The man's wife had just purchased a mini-TV from another store to keep an eye on the news coverage. I was wondering how I was going to phrase it when he said, "Do you want anything? We're about to close."

Also that day, there was an already scheduled blood drive at a nearby church. I was going to donate that day, anyway. When I arrived, the line was out the door. After I was there about three quarters of an hour, we were informed that the Red Cross didn't have enough supplies to handle the turnout. It's a problem they probably wish they had all the time, you know?

I read something years ago about Jim McKay of ABC Sports having to harbor the awful secret about the slaying of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich games all to himself until he went onto air, and how difficult that must have been for him. And I thought of that when seeing the pictures of President Bush being one of the few people in that classroom who knew the awful truth, having to keep it all in and keep face while wondering how to break the news...

Boy Genteel
Men's Rights = Women's Rights = Human Rights
www.safe4all.org

[The Happy Feminist]

I imagine President Bush's mind just racing as he read that story to those schoolchildren right after he heard the news . . .

You know, I have always been saddened that I've never in my life been able to give blood. First, I was disqualified because I had lived in Africa. Now I am disqualified because I spent 6 months in the U.K. at the height of mad cow disease.