I was at the Daytona 500 that Dale Earnhardt died in. It was the last lap of the race and the crash didn’t look that serious so everyone left. Most people found out later on tv or radio.
I was at the last game of Cal Ripken’s Streak. Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, it was a surprise when he sat out the next game.
That reminds me, my parents and I were in some fast food restaurant in Champaign, IL, at the time. We weren’t expecting it to go right past the restaurant!
I felt the “aftershocks” of the Flight 191 crash at O’Hare airport in 1979. I lived close, and the windows shook and rattled. We could see the smoke from our classroom.
I watched on TV as bodies were carried out of John Wayne Gacy’s basement crawlspace - yes, I know everyone else in Chicago did too, but not too many of them had had dinner with Gacy less than two weeks prior.
I was close enough to the Kennedy Space Center to see the clouds from the explosion of Challenger.
When Martin Luther King spoke in 1963 in Washington DC, I was there. I was so far in the back that I couldn’t really say that I participated, except that I knew what was going on. And I was there because of it.
I grew up in Arlington, VA. I worked in a chem lab in MD. from 1962-66. One of my best friends there was “Murph”, a diswasher, who happened to be black. When I tried to go to his house in Washington DC, my parents vetoed the idea. You just didn’t do that.
But I met Murph and we joined 250,000 people on the Mall stretching from the LIncoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. Incredible, but I was not really attuned to what the significance was at the time.
I was MUCH more attuned to what was transpiring when I joined 250,000-500,000 people on the Mall in 1969 in the biggest protest against the VietNam War to date. You got swallowed up by the crowd. You felt important to be there, but insignificant in the sea of humanity. But you had to do SOMETHING.
I was visiting the Atlanta Olympics when the pipe bomb exploded.
We heard, and felt, a little “boom.” It was clear that something was wrong, especially when the ambulances and police showed up. I’m a reporter so I tried to get through the police lines and reach the scene. Of course, it didn’t help that I was tanked, had no press ID and was wearing a tie-dyed shirt with a skeleton on the front. The police did not let me through.
I called in a few quotes from the scene and then worked all night helping out with coverage. (My contribution, however, was basically limited to monitoring televised news conferences.) Then I did a crowd reaction story the next day, then went home and crashed.
My grandmother defied the air-raid warning test to watch Neville Chamberlain decalre war on Hitler in the Houses of Parliament.