"I'll never forget where I was when I heard that..."

In My Humble Opinion
61

9/11. At work, on an Air Force base. We were sent home and didn’t go back for days.

Belushi’s death. Not because I’m such a huge Belushi fan per se or saying it was one of the most shocking etc etc etc, I just happen to remember it - I guess because it was the first celeb fatality of someone really popular with “my crowd.” I didn’t get distressed as I can’t over a complete stranger dying, but it was kind of a big “wow” (we didn’t know what a party nut he was at the time).

TMI. Happening to live nearby didn’t hurt. I remember kids saying “close the windows so the radiation won’t leak in” :rolleyes:

62

Yeah. In Haiti. :wink:

Because…

First, Obama’s just as white as he is black. But I forgot that facts don’t matter to the Obamessiah groupies :rolleyes: (PS that is not aimed at you or anyone in particular; general observation of the attitudes when he was elected)

Second, from what I’ve heard/gathered, Catholics weren’t all that enamored with JFK because of his Catholicness.

63

Here’s a few. Some meant more to me than others.

Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash - Typing class in high school. All of my friends and I had tickets to their concert the next month.

Reagan shot - Parent’s house; a guy I didn’t know that well called to ask if I’d heard. I never asked, but I kinda thought he wanted to tell someone, but none of his friends were home.

Challenger disaster - Windsor Hills apartment in Blacksburg, VA

OJ Simpson verdict - Hooters in East Rutherford, NJ

Princess Diana’s death - Brother and sister-in-law’s loft in NYC, Neil Young cranking full blast.

9/11 - I heard the first fly over my head just before descending into the subway. I heard and saw the explosion of the second plane as myself and co-workers stared up at the north tower.

Obama elected - Washington, DC apartment

64

Many of the events already mentioned I recognize as significant and certainly remember, but not with the sort of intensity or specificity I associate with “I’ll never forget where…”
I happened to be home from school the day Reagan was shot so I saw lot’s of TV coverage, including Dan Rather flipping his lid, but don’t remember if I was watching in Mom’s room or the living room. Same with elections.

The completely frozen in time moments, where I remember where I was, who else was there, practically down to what I was wearing are:

[ul]
[li]Nixon’s resignation speech. I didn’t fully understand it, but could tell it was heavy duty.[/li][li]Secretariat winning the Belmont Stakes (and therefore the Triple Crown)[/li][li]Hearing that Thurman Munson had died [/li][li]The Challenger disaster[/li][li]9/11[/li][/ul]

65

Kurt Cobain suicide - early hours of the morning, laid in bed listening to a favourite talk radio show on Virgin hosted by a great DJ called Nick Abbott. I was 18 at the time, a massive fan and I cried.

Princess Di - Laid in bed (there’s a theme here!) on a Sunday morning IIRC after a very heavy night of partying. Turned the radio on and heard she was dead. Was stunned. I remember being about 6 or 7 yrs old and watching her and Charles get married, we were all taken in to the PE hall to watch it on TV at school. I adored Prince Charles when I was little and told my mum that I’d marry him on day! Didn’t mind him marrying Diana though as I also thought highly of her too.

9/11 - I was coming out of secretarial college at about 3pm and I got a text from a the BBC news service I subscribed to saying a small aircraft had crashed in to one of the Twin Towers…made my way home and my mum and I watched the events unfold on the TV. Still remember how shocking it was and how my mum and I couldn’t believe what we were watching.

66

Ok, this thread made me try and remember the earliest “historic event” I experienced:

  • I vaguely remember Apollo 11 moon landing, we were camping somewhere and heard people talking about it. I was 5.
  • I remember my dad watching the news and hearing about the Vietnam POW’s coming home.
    -I remember coming home from school and my Mom making us watch the watergate hearings. “You’re experiencing history!” I wanted to watch Speed racer!
  • I walked into Homeroom in HS and all the girls were crying. I found out later that John Lennon had been killed.
  • My Mom was picking me up from HS Cross Country practice and we heard about Reagan being shot.
  • I was in the Navy on a 3 month Sub patrol (Somewhere off the coast of the USSR) taking readings in the engineroom when the captain announced the Challenger explosion over the ships intercom. We didn’t see any video footage until we got home a month later.
  • On 9/11 We had heard the radio report of a plane hitting the world trade center and walked out on the roof to see the smoke. I saw the 2nd plane hit from the roof of my office building across the Hudson river (Weehawken NJ) and saw the dustclouds as the first tower fell. I can say without a doubt that was THE most traumatic event I’ve witnessed! Those images will NEVER fade from my memory.
67

My family was staying at a hotel in Memphis, when Elvis died.

We were also driving through Memphis, when MLK was shot. I was too young to remember that.

68

I can’t remember where I was for any of history’s most important / notorious events.

What I will never forget, is exactly where I was when I found out my wife was pregnant with our first kid.

I was on my way to see a client, that I was moonlighting, it was a Saturday morning and she was doing “the test” alone. Baby was unplanned.

It was an awesome day! I was so happy.

69

Canadian checking in here.

Regan assasination, I was in grade 6, my teacher brought the tv into the class room.
Pierre Trudeau’s resignation-- February 29th 1984. The next day in Grade 9, we talked about it in History, and French, and Geography.

Challenger … I was writing Grade 12 math exam. I never took another math course, until I did my upgrades for nursing, my posology courses, and statistics much later.

Outbreak of Desert Storm, I was in Montreal, sitting in my minimally furnished apartment. A friend of my roommate was staying with us, she was supposed to be seeing her military boyfriend, but he returned to base as soon as the news broke. We watched all the news on a 13 inch black and white tv with rabbit ears, tinfoil, and other things to improve reception. Personally I gave up and listened to the radio, mostly. A particularly obnoxious fellow student plead tried to get out of doing a history paper that week, claiming he was too busy waiting for the end of the world. I believe he is now an MP.

I’d just as soon forget about Princess Diana’s death. My own Grandfather died that weekend, first he went for a wander (he had dementia) and then he died the next day. Yay, I get to be reminded every year. (Not so much since the 10th anniversary passed, but it never goes un-noted.) I was in nursing school and started my second week of school by getting in trouble for having incomplete homework on the Tuesday. (Then three weeks later I asked for more extensions because my grandfather was dying. I had two grandfathers die 32 days apart that year, but my excuses for missed assignments and absenteeism were sounding pretty thin.)

9/11 I had worked an evening shift the night before and stayed up late reading. (The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver) I was in Vancouver at the time. My boyfriend at the time came home from a midnight shift around 730 and told me about “a plane crashed into the WTC” I said “Yeah, okay, Its happened before…I’ll catch u p on the news later” and rolled over. Shortly after he told me about the Pentagon and I said “Holy Crap the world has gone to hell!” and got up… for a looooong tv marathon. Partway through the day it occured to me to check in on the Dope, and I couldn’t get on line.

70

This could be a false memory so might not count (I was only 2 and a half years old) but I think I remember the Piper Alpha disaster. My dad was working on the Claymore platform at the time. If my memory is correct I watched the news footage with my mother and my brother.

Dunblane massacre - 10 years old, in school. We were ushered into the assembly hall and told the basics of what happened. I remember my teacher crying.

7/7 bombings - round at a friend’s house winding down after an all-night party, watching tv when the news broke.

71

**The Beatles officially breaking up **- in my back yard.
The Challenger explosion - home sick from work.
**Nixon resigning **- at a friend’s house.
Lennon’s death - watching Monday Night Football before heading out to work.
**9/11 **- at work. What a weird day that was.
Kurt Cobain’s suicide - again, at work; heard it on the radio. Told a co-worker, thought he was going to cry.
John Kennedy Jr. helicopter crash - on vacation.
Princess Di’s death - getting ready for work in the morning.
George Carlin’s death - at work. Made me sadder than I could have imagined.
O.J.'s car chase - at home, watched it in fascination.

mmm

72

I’ve got a few new ones on my list.

JFK assassination - in class (elementary school).
Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up pictures of the moon - at home, early morning, summertime. I remember standing in front of the TV, absolutely enthralled.
Apollo 8 orbiting the moon - with my Kansas relatives at Christmas. I still find this more memorable than the actual landing.
Apollo 11 moon landing - at summer camp.
Saturday Night Massacre - at college. Heard the news from a friend as I came out of the campus movie theatre late that evening. (Impeach the Cox sacker!)
Nixon’s smoking gun tape released - on the way to or from a summer class I was taking at GWU in DC. (Don’t think I watched his resignation speech.)
Mao’s death - in New Hampshire, at the Inn at Loon Mountain.
Skylab comes down - in Washington, DC, at work.
John Lennon shot - I don’t remember where I was (in DC somewhere, I think), but I remember my first thought was along the lines of, “I guess that’ll shut up the talk about the Beatles getting back together.” Yes, I was already like this, back then. :slight_smile:
Reagan shot - in DC, at work.
Challenger explosion - visiting a friend in Williamsburg, VA.
Berlin Wall comes down - in grad school in South Carolina.
Kenya/Tanzania embassy bombings - at the school where I’d been teaching for the previous few years. A colleague told me about it.
Y2K bug decimates civilization - oh wait. Anyway, I was at home in Maryland, at my computer, watching the time zones roll into 2000 without incident.
9/11/01 - at work.
Obama’s inauguration - at home, watching over the Web. I was a bit distracted - I would meet the Firebug for the first time less than a week later, and my wife and I were frantically preparing for the trip to Russia.

73

Did you know Andy Murray then?

Doesn’t anyone remember when John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives lost to the Liberals and Lester Pearson became prime minister? :wink: I found out the next day when our class was walking back to school from somewhere. I remember it because Diefenbaker was the only prime minister I had known, and the change gave me a sense of impermanence in the world.

Moon landing – watched the TV all day with my family, except for my dad who wandered through once in a while to comment of the waste of money it was. Didn’t spoil it one bit for me.

John Lennon – not till the next morning when I heard the tail end of a news report that mentioned “the three surviving Beatles”. Although I didn’t find out which one had died until I got to work, it made me feel older all of a sudden.

Sept. 11 – found out sort of on my own without being told. Before going to work, I turned on the TV to a static shot with no commentary of a high rise on fire which I thought was odd, but I didn’t know it was a WTC tower. When the second plane hit, everything fell into place. “They finally did it,” was my reaction, and I got that feeling that nothing would be the same again.

Bin Laden – wife cried out and I went running upstairs thinking she was hurt. What a surprise!

74

Reading Panache’s list reminded me of a few events I had almost forgotten with the passage of time – Sputnik and Marilyn Monroe’s death – but I can’t say I remember exactly where I was. So here are the ones I remember clearly –

**JFK **assassination – freshman dorm at college
**Beatles **on Sullivan – still in that freshman dorm – one small B&W tv in the basement being watched by I don’t know how many 18-year-old girls
**MLK **assassination – in DC; actually what I remember most vividly was the week of riots and martial law following
**RFK **assassination – working on Capitol Hill in DC; one of a few times when all telephone trunk lines were so busy that when you picked up a phone, you wouldn’t get a dial tone
**Secretariat **in the Belmont – in my apartment glued to the TV with goosebumps forming on my arms as he just kept opening up that lead
**Reagan’s **election – and the Democrats’ loss of control of the Senate – in a bar a block from the Senate with co-workers (we worked for a Democrat); went back to the office and had another drink or two there; heard people in the office across the hall (also Democrats) cursing and throwing a few breakables against the wall
**Challenger **explosion – came back from lunch and heard about it from a guard at the front desk
Air Florida plane crashing into the 14th Street Bridge – trying to get home in treacherous driving conditions; heard it on the radio and initially assumed they must mean a small plane because I just couldn’t imagine a full-size passenger plane crashing into that bridge
**9/11 **-- at work in DC; co-worker heard about the first plane over internet radio; spent the next few hours going between offices with televisions; was outside smoking when a co-worker rushed up with the news that the Pentagon had been hit

75

I used to ask questions like “where were you when…” in order to determine a girl’s age to see whether or not I could date her. Too young=creepy. Too old (or just old enough) = possible adventure. :slight_smile:

Elvis’ death: I was next door at my best friend’s house having a sleepover. We were wee lads, staying up late, watching Project Terror, the local late-night cheesy Friday night horror flick. They broke into the show to announce his death. I was mad because we didn’t get to see the end of the Lizzie Borden flick.

The Challenger Explosion: I was in my sophomore year digging through the shelves at the college bookstore. Somebody came in and shouted the news, then bolted out the door. I didn’t take it seriously, but did manage to pay for my books and wander over to the student union where everybody was glued to the TV. Classes were cancelled for the rest of the day.

The Fall of Communism: (Don’t think this has been mentioned yet) I was stationed in Germany. Our Commander held a formation and didn’t tell us what was happening, but he gave us **DIRECT ORDERS **not to cross borders out of Western Germany, due to military actions and what not. Once my buddy and I found out what was going on, we booked a flight the next day on a civilian German flight straight to Berlin to go see it for ourselves. Got some great pictures. One of the locals even gave me a sledgehammer and let me take a few whacks at the wall. I still have the pieces and the pictures.

Desert Storm: I was in college, enrolled in ROTC. My plans were to graduate, go to med school and then return to active duty Army as a doctor. I had a contract with the Army, had been (tentatively) accepted to med school and everything, given that I could graduate. When the US launched their invasion, my primary ROTC instructor pulled all of us aside and said that all bets were off, as far as scholarship students and contracts that were already signed, based upon “the needs of the Army”. The justification was that “War superseded all previous agreements”. So I was assigned to the Field Artillery instead of the Army Medical Corps. At least they let me graduate college first.

Kurt Cobain’s Suicide: I happened to be stationed in WA state and had the day off, so I decided to go sightseeing around downtown Seattle. I was on 2nd street trying to find Sub-Pop records (the indie label) offices on that day. It was weird. The sky was overcast (natch), but the whole area had this kind of gloom and sadness to it. I didn’t find out what had happened until later that afternoon.

The OJ Chase: I had money on the NY Knicks game that night. We were on East Coast time, and the chase happened on the West Coast. The game wasn’t even at halftime yet, but the station cut the game and went to the live feed of the highway chase. I was ticked. I lost my bet, but couldn’t see why. Grrr. (That’s what I get for betting on the Knicks, eh?)

9/11: I didn’t really experience the whole event until around 1 PM EST. I opened my real estate office at 8 AM, as usual, and started upon my daily routine. We had no TV or radio in the office, and the sales team people never showed up until around noon anyway. Most mornings I was alone until at least 10 AM. My boss called the office shortly after the first plane struck the tower and asked “What are you doing at work?” My reply was, “It’s Tuesday. I always work on Tuesdays. Why?” She said something like “Don’t you know…Oh, my God…” and hung up. That was when the second plane struck. I thought she was just being silly and didn’t know anything was wrong until I went across the street to get lunch only to find that the doors to the Shopping Mall were locked. Then I went back to work and started looking at the internet and found out what had happened. Then it got real for me.

The Columbia Explosion: A bit of schaudenfreude here. My psycho live-in G/F and I were in the middle of a free-for-all screaming fight with the TV on in the background. They started showing footage of the event, and me, being from TX, caught interest, as it happened over the Dallas skies. I managed to get her to shut up enough so I could pay attention, and she managed to stop her insane attack enough to feel sympathy for the sadness of the event. So I caught a break, but I was still sad about it.

The DC Sniper: I lived in Silver Spring, MD at the time, and worked in Bethesda, MD. Close to the DC line. After Desert Storm, I always figured if it was your time, it was your time, so since they didn’t have any real profile of either the shooter or targets, I just went about my business as usual. I took the bus to work on a daily basis. Sometimes I was late. I usually took the route that the bus driver was shot to work. On that day, I was actually on time and took the bus as usual. If I had been late, I would have been on the same bus that the driver was shot. Once I found out, I had a moment of “cheating the devil” and decided to take the rest of the day off. (But I got a friend to pick me up from work and drive me home.)

The Virginia Tech Shootings: I worked in the DC/MD area. It was 8 AM, and my boss’s boss was yelling at me to find my boss, who hadn’t showed up yet for this uber-important meeting today. I started doing my usual – calls to the cell, calls to the home, texting, emailing, trying to figure out where he was, why wasn’t he answering and why he wasn’t at work. It was about a half hour later that somebody came by my desk and told me what was happening. That was when I made the connection that my boss had a daughter who was a junior at V. Tech and lived in the dorms. I stopped my attempts and told his boss what was going on. They cancelled the meeting. I felt like a jerk about the whole thing, but not as bad as my boss’ boss later on that week. (She turned out okay in the end, but it was still a scary event for all his family.)

76

Nope - didn’t mean to imply I was at Dunblane itself! My school was about 150 miles away.

77

I see that now.:o If you were there, I guess you’d remember more than just being ushered into the hall and being told what was happening.

78

A few of these memories are just totally wrong. It’s kind of fun to wonder which ones.

Yeah, yeah, I know, you’re SURE you remember. But it’s well established that these “flashbulb memories” can, in some cases, become totally distorted over time.