This recieved very little coverage in the print media. It was really a TV event.
I was attending 3rd grade in Anchorage, AK at the time and it really dominated the local tv and print news. I got super bummed out when the little one died. 
I think the story may have stuck with me a little harder than my contemporaries, though, as I have occasionally mentioned the incident to them and been told they have no recollection. (Ask them if they remember when the polar bear bit the Australian tourist and they perk right up, go figure. :rolleyes:)
How is digging holes in the ice a miracle?
I not only remember it clearly, I remember that one of the cleverest costumes I saw at the New York Halloween Parade that year was a couple of people in whale costumes poking out of a cardboard or Styrofoam ice hole.
I could have sworn that some of the whales died. Could there have been another similar event?
I remember it quite well. What I don’t remember is Hollywood starlets running around up there whimpering about how we have to save these beautiful creatures, or some little kid scuba diving to keep the whales company such as the movie seems to portray. As I remember the Inuits cut a path of breathing holes for the whales until a Russian icebreaker ship came to clear a path to the sea. Period. No pretty airheads, no little kids. Sorry if I spoiled the bullshit movie for anyone with what actually happened.
No, one of the whales did die, the smallest one. The other two escaped to the ocean.
My dad actually commented on how that occurred for the Eskimo village he lived in back in the late 1920’s and how happy the village was that they could easily kill the whale for food then. Mind you, it fed an entire village for months.
I voted for “…vague recollection…” but now realize I’d never heard the source story for the movie. Apparently, I was vaguely recollecting HtW[sup]3[/sup]. My excuse is that I haven’t seen any promotional stuff for the film and was just going by twickster’s OP.
I was 34. I remember seeing it on TV, but didn’t remember the details.
In ‘88 I was fifteen, cared very much about current events, and lived in Alaska, so I’m guessing I followed the whales’ story closely.
But I have very vague recollection of the event, as with most other happenings in the 1980s.
Yeah, I remembered it, but not the details. But then, I only have a vague memory of last week…
My biggest memory of it was that someone at my university, for halloween, wore a styrofoam ring hat with little matchbox trucks and boats attached to the top. He then painted his head grey and stuck some sort of paper “spout of water” out of the top of his head. His re-creation of the event from his eyebrows up was one of the best topical costume I had ever seen.
I was 8, going on 9 and I have a fairly good memory of that year but I have no memory of this.