I grew up listening to Scott Muni on WNEW, he started a memorial to John Lennon by playing Beatles songs (or Lennon, McCartney, Wings, Ringo Starr) every day at noon. Scott met the Beatles the first time they came to the US in the '60s.
I found out about John Lennon by picking up the Daily News from out front steps and reading the headline. It’s what I think of whenever I hear “I read the news today, oh boy…”
And I was listening to the radio when they said Eric Clapton’s son fell out of the window of a skyscraper in NYC and died. My son was the same age as his son, so I had to go find my son and give him a big hug. Tears in Heaven still makes me cry.
John Wayne - I was all of 7 at the time. My dad is a huge western fan & I grew up watching The Duke. Strangely we were watching one of his films on TV when his death was announced during a news break.
Oh, damn. I was at the library with a friend/co-worker, and picked up To Sail Beyond the Sunset. I pointed out the jacket photo to my friend and said “Man, I don’t believe Heinlein intends to ever die. It’s obviously on his mind, though. ‘To Sail Beyond the Sunset.’” Then I went home and heard the news. :smack:
I was at summer camp when a counselor mentioned Elvis Presley had died. I went home a day or so later to see the big headlines in all the newspapers.
I don’t remember exactly when I heard Princess Grace had died, but I remember going out the next morning and seeing the huge headline on the Philadelphia Inquirer. The death was big news in Philadelphia, as you can imagine.
John Lennon. Heard about it on the morning news.
In college I arrived at a lab where I was doing a research rotation and walked into a conversation about the future of the space program. I looked blank and the technician said, “The space shuttle blew up.” That was the Challenger. I saw the reentry of Columbia’s remains live.
Katharine Hepburn. I switched on CNN at 6 PM and it was wall-to-wall Hepburn recollections. Usually I’m annoyed when a celebrity dies and CNN acts like nothing else happened that day, but Hepburn was one Hollywood big shot I actually thought it might be interesting to meet, if only to tell her her film “Summertime” was the focal point of my parents’ first date, therefore it is possible she contributed indirectly to my existence.
Princess Diana. I heard on the 10 PM news she’d been injured in a car crash and just thought “Too bad” or some such. Turned on the radio at 11 for a pre-bedtime update and heard “After this, the latest on the condition of Princess Diana…”, a commercial, and then an odd silence and three slow beeps, like an attention signal, something I’ve never heard on that news station before or since. Then the announcer: “ABC, CNN and the Associated Press are all reporting that Princess Diana has died…” My mouth fell open, literally. I went to the TV to get confirmation and after a few minutes noticed the CNN reporter in London had an odd strained look on her face and seemed to be blinking an awful lot. My God, I thought, she’s a journalist, and she’s struggling not to cry. This is going to be huge.
John Lennon was the first really big one I remember, mostly because of my mom’s reaction (I was 10 at the time) - she was just in shock when it broke onto the TV, and then she cried a couple hours later. I’d grown up listening to the Beatles through my parents, but I’d always thought of them as mythical beings (for whatever reason), and I found it strange that he could die like any mere mortal.
The only celebrity death that affected me personally was Joe Strummer. I was at work and my girlfriend called and asked me if I’d heard the news. That one just hit me right in the stomach, and I was actually dazed for a few hours. It’s the only celebrity death that made me cry, and probably the only one that ever will.
Whoa, John Lennon’s death. I was managing a mountaineering store and a crazed drug addict came in right before I closed the store. He put a gun to my ribs and theatened to kill me. Didn’t beat or rape me or anything like that, but terrorized me for close to an hour. He tied me up with wire, face down on the floor and I was completely convinced that he was going to shoot me in the back of the head. So I just started talking, wishing him a Merry Christmas and telling him the best escape route from the back of the store. He left, I got untied, called the cops, went home and heard that John Lennon had just been shot by a stranger. I thought the world had gone mad and was having rather harsh thoughts, just then, about how crazy people with guns should be handled.
My favorite Lennon Death anecdote: when Keith Richards (who was in NYC that night) heard the news he grabbed a knife and went out looking for the killer. Hardcore.
I was 12 years old (turned 13 the next month). I remember sitting at my desk in Miss Vass’ geography/civics class, and the principal came on with the announcement. The class sat there, stunned, when Miss Vass turned on the TV, and the footage kept repeating.
It was the first time I’d ever seen a grown-up cry.
[ol]
[li]JFK - I was 10. We were out playing baseball when our teacher called us back into the school. She was crying. When I got home, so was my mom. I lived outside of Washington, DC at the time; my dad took us to watch the funeral procession.[/li][li]Martin Luther King. I was in high school. It sparked riots in DC. They sent us home. My mom was freaked out.[/li][li]RFK. My friend David told me on the way to school. I was stunned.[/li][li]John Lennon. I answered elsewhere[/li][li]9/11. I was on vacation at the Jersey Shore. I was out riding my bicycle. I got back to the condo, and my brother started yelling at me: “Where have you been?” Well heck, I was just riding my bike. I was treated to live footage…[/li][/ol]
The two that stand out the most to me are the deaths of Elvis, I was 8 and I remember coming on the television. I have a vivid memory of standing next to my brother’s crib, telling him that Elvis had died.
The other was Jimmy Stewart dying. I used to tell my boss that on the day Jimmy Stewart died, she could count on me not showing up for work. As it was, it happened over the 4th of July weekend and I cried while watching it on the news. I don’t know why, but I still get a little choked up about his death.
I was in grade school when JFK was shot. They sent us home early from school but didn’t tell us why. I heard rumors from other kids on the way home that he’d been shot and wasn’t sure whether to believe them or not. It had to be a big deal if they sent us home early so I guess I believed the rumors. My mother was crying when I got home and confirmed that not only had he been shot but that he was dead. We, and most of America, spent the next 3 days watching TV from when we woke up until we went to sleep. America came to a stand still for 3 days. I doubt anything will ever hit America in quite the same way again. When 9/11 happened, for me, it didn’t have the same impact. Kennedy’s death was so unexpected and there was so much hope tied up with him and his administration. 9/11 in retrospect seemed inevitable. It’s form was horrible but it’s happening at all was only a matter of time.
The other celebrity death that really struck me was Bob Marley’s. I heard it on the radio in a youth hostel in Basel. The radio was tuned to Radio 1 from Luxemburg. They were broadcasting in English. I wasn’t even a big fan. Somehow, being where I was invested the death with greater significance.
Kurt Cobain: I was in Hawaii getting dressed for my sister’s wedding when it came on TV.
Princess Di: Again at a wedding in San Diego this time.
John Lennon: Was up late listening to the radio (WLUP in Chicago) when I was supposed to be asleep (11 y/o at the time)
John Belushi: WLUP again. I remember Steve Dahl being pretty broken up about it.
Elvis: My family was just pulling into the parking lot of George’s House of Steel (a restaurant somewhere outside of Chicago) when it came over the radio.
Hubert Humphrey: All I remember is my aunt being upset because the soap operas got pre-empted.
One night I turned on the radio in the car and heard a really really long block of the Ramones, and I just knew Joey was gone without hearing the announcement. Fuck!
And I think I can top the Lady Di blowjob with this one:
I heard that Steve Allen died one morning on the radio a few hours after I actually picked up his remains and delivered him to the mortuary. I simply didn’t recognize him. He died in an ER in Encino, and when the call was dispatched to me they gave me his middle name instead of his first name (Valentino IIRC). So I get there and they give me his full name as “Steven Valentino Allen”. It still doesn’t click. Then I meet his wife and son who are there (failing to recognize Jayne Meadows), then I get a look at the body. He’s dressed casually (I don’t think I’d ever seen Steve Allen on TV in anything less than a suit and tie) and he’s not wearing his glasses. There was no press around to tip me off, and no one said anything to make me think there was anything special about this body, so to me this is just another pickup in the middle of a very busy night, and after it was over I just moved on to the next call.
The stupid thing was that even after it was all over the news the next day, I still didn’t realize who I had driven to the funeral home. For the next several days I wondered which mortuary had gotten him. It finally dawned on me about a week later when I got called to transport him again, this time to the Coroners office. Turns out he was involved in a minor fender bender a few hours before he died and the Coroner wanted to have a look at him. This time they told me who he was when I was dispatched, and when I got to the mortuary to get him I lifted the sheet to read the toe tag and was surprised to see my own handwriting on it. That was probably the biggest “DUH” moment of my life.
Hubert Humphry. He happened not too long after my grandfather died of cancer, so my sister and I heard the reports of his spiralling in, and we gave each other a play-by-play of HH’s condition because we’d just seen it . Pretty heavy stuff for a couple of teenagers not yet old enough to drive.
Challenger and Columbia Astronauts
Stevie Ray Vaughn. I’d just become a big fan of his, too.
Di was a meh for me, but it upset my wife a lot. She has an obsession with Brit royalty.
Yassir Arafat was momentous, because he was my first-ever score in the Death Pool.
Dale Earnhart. Not that I’m that much of a NASCAR fan, but I figured any coot that old and still driving was immortal.
Mission Specialist Judy Resnick went to my high school. Although I was only in 7th grade at the time, the junior high was sort of an annex of the high school, and so half my teachers had also been her teachers. They were a mess the next day.
Also, one of my two second-grade teachers was Resnick’s cousin. Every year Resnick would speak to the class via telephone as part of our science lessons. I still remember that call, 23 years later, and of course after Challenger there’s no way I’d ever forget it.
I remember listening to KMEL as I did laundry when Chuy Gomex announced Tupac died. I was in the car with my mom, going to MAss when Biggie died. And I was at work when I heard about Aaliyah. I went up to the office and heard yet another Aaliyah sogn on the radio and I asked “What is this, all-Aaliyah weekend?!” Yup.
I remember the day that River Phoenix died because I heard it on the news before high school and no one would believe me that whole day that he was dead.
I remember when Johnny Cash died because I had just gotten dressed for work and after hearing that I went back and changed into a long black mourning gown.
And my two saddest: Kurt Cobain and Hunter S. Thompson. I was in high school when Kurt died and it took me months to get over it. And I will never, ever forgot the morning last February when my husband called me at work and told me Thompson was dead, and I burst into tears and wept the whole day.
One of the few celebrity deaths that I remember distinctly is because of the irony of it.
When new reports started flashing on the TV about Princess Diana being horribly injured in a car crash, my friends and I all gathered around the hospital television to watch. You see, on that same night, all of us had gotten the call that our friend John was finally succumbing to AIDS and wasn’t expected to live through the night. So there we all were, sitting out in the waiting room, going in one at a time to pay last respects and talk to his family, as the Princess Diana saga unfolded. Our pain was somehow being reflected on the television, our mourning re-enacted on a larger scale. It was… surreal.
John passed away sometime in the early morning, as the initial “Oh my God, she’s dead” passed into “Who can we blame for this?”. Leaving the hospital, I dropped by a 7-11 to pick up a Washington Post. In large headlines, the paper announced Diana’s death. But a smaller irony was one of the above-the-fold headlines: “AIDS cure reaches new breakthrough” or some such. Just a bit late, that.
Let’s see…
I was having sex and foolishly had the radio on when I heard about Princess Diana’s car accident. That news alone injured my ladyfriend’s mood; the announcement not long afterward that Diana had died ended the night’s nookie entirely.
I was riding the bus to work when I opened the newspaper and saw that Chris Reeve was dead. Ruined the morning for me.
I was babysitting my little sister on a snow day when the Challenger exploded.
I was having sex again (with a different sub) when the Columbia exploded.
