I was munching cereal watching The Price is Right waiting to go to school for exams when the coverage broke in showing the shuttle exploding.
I was in the stands for the greatest comeback in NFL history. The 1992 wild card playoff game in Buffalo against Houston. It was 28-3 at halftime. The final was 41 to 38. To talk now in Buffalo among football fans you would think there were 100 bazillion people there that day.
In the 1980s I used to have a job where I hired television directors for short-term freelance TV projects (in the UK). It was amazing how many of them claimed to have directed the TV coverage of the Live Aid concert (the one in London). Now, as it turns out, it’s quite possible that several of them were telling the truth. Broadcasting ‘Live Aid’ was a huge job, and it did involve numerous different telly directors taking care of different aspects of the project. Nonetheless, the claim crept up so often that it was clear some of these people were embroidering their work record.
In 1986, 48.1% of TV households in the U.S., 42 million subscribers, had cable television. That’s a lot of people. And virtually all cable systems had CNN.
About 15 years ago, an ad exec in Cleveland was interviewing a woman with an impressive portfolio of corporate work. Flipping through one of the pieces, the exec was shocked to find a photo of one of his friends, my father-in-law. He called my FIL and asked him if he had ever met the woman who had written the piece. My FIL replied that he certainly knew the writer of the piece – me – because I’d asked him to be in it.
She didn’t get the job.
Another, similar claim is that the wife of a famous golfer (sometimes it’s Arnold Palmer) was a Tonight Show guest. Johnny asks her if she has any superstitions, and she admits that before her husband goes out for a big game, she likes to “kiss his balls”. Johnny replies, “I bet that makes his putter flutter”.
My wife and I saw John Denver in one his last (if not his last) concert in Cerritos about 3 weeks before his plane crashed. When I heard he died, it was surreal.
For a long time I could have sworn I’d seen Joe Theisman get his leg snapped in half on live TV. Much later, after giving it some critical thought (mainly over the fact that I never watched football), I realized I must have just seen one of the thousand replays that were broadcast afterward.
In reference to ‘kids’ claiming to have been at Woodstock, might they be referring to the anniversary concert thing they did around 1993? Maybe particularly dim younguns aren’t aware that capital-W ‘Woodstock’ is not the same animal.
I readily admit to never having observed anything historically significant. I always seem just behind the curve: my friend telling me about the Challenger in the corridor at my high school, paging through my boyfriend’s (reprints?) of TMMT comics in 1986 and not being particularly impressed, not bothering to see some band called ‘Nirvana’ in 1991 at the dive bar across the street from where I worked, waking up a couple hours after both of the Twin Towers had already fallen, etc.
I suppose the closest I ever came was the day I moved to Seattle - April 8 1994. Shortly after I arrived in the morning, I walked into a bank to open a checking account. Someone mentioned in passing that Kurt Cobain was missing, and I said “missing? what?” and one of the bank workers said with some glee that “his wife” had been calling the bank trying to find out if Cobain had used his credit card recently.
Within a half-hour, my friend heard on the radio that they’d found Cobain dead. I spent part of my first weekend in Seattle at Cobain’s memorial service.
Stinkpalm raised one of my favorite topics here at the SDMB - people who “pad” their military service.
One of the most famous liars about his 'Nam service was Professor Joseph Ellis who lectured students with his first-hand accounts of battles he had never even been in.
This page http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/08/13/MN32087.DTL
(scroll down to the “War Stories” section) tells of other phonies. The worst one on that list is Joseph Yandle who conned his way out of a life sentence (murder / robbery) by blaming the trauma he suffered in combat in Vietnam. No doubt that could be very traumatizing if you actually engaged in combat and if you ever actually were in Vietnam. Yandle fails both criteria.
Paul Harvey (no cite but I do have a copy of his official military service record) claims to have joined the Army Air Corps after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and served from 1942 to 1943. Impressive sounding isn’t it? Well, he went into the Air Corps in December 1942 - a full year after the Pearl Harbor attack and he served until March, 1943 - a total of 14 weeks of service.
As almost everyone here knows, I do not have an “anti-veteran” mentality. (far from it actually). However I do have an anti-phony mentality against people who like to “pad” their resume particularly when it comes to military service.
By the way - do you know when I joined the SDMB? After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. 
Well, it’s the truth isn’t it?
What particularly bothers me is the effect that some of these fakers are having on both the VA and the Mental Health field at large. Because of the large number of people who choose to misrepresent their service, or who falsely claim to be more affected by the stresses of their service, there’s a growing push in the VA, in particular, to remove PTSD as a valid diagnosis.
I’m plugged into the VA, myself - so I sometimes get my care providers to share kvetches about the system. And the care providers I’ve talked to are rightly furious about this - they know that PTSD is real, and can be debilitating. But looking at the article that wolf_meister linked gives an idea of the problem with fakes. I have heard that there are books and websites out there that have the effect of doing little more than coaching people on how to fake PTSD for maximum benefits.
I’m not trying to criticize attempts to legitimately police people who fake PTSD, in particular, just the brainstorm that the VA and some Mental Health professionals have had about removing the diagnosis, instead of doing a more thorough investigation of the alleged sufferer’s records.
My mom’s a hypnotherapist; people go to her and experience " past lives" under hypnosis.
You’d be surprised how many people have been present at the cricifixion, saw Jesus pass through Jerusalem, or have been at any of the hotspots of the times.
Seldom you hear of a client who has been a small-time farmer in France all his life, and whose high-point in life was he saw the bishop visiting the church in his village. 
I really passed by Michael Richards in Hollywood right before his famous racial-slur incident. I was as little as two feet away from him. That’s all I got.
And the already-mundane story is less impressive when you consider that I passed him by in the hallway of the Hollywood Improv right after his bit in a comedy show I arrived late to.
Alas, my brush with celebrity fades into oblivion forevermore…or does it?
A coworker has been telling a story about “meeting” the actor who plays Hyde on That 70s Show and “almost going to Denny’s with him” (but deciding not to, on a whim) after a Modest Mouse concert in LA. And you know what I say to that. (Never even mentions the actor’s name! Homework, people!)
I’m pretty sure I saw the events of 9/11 unfold live (I recall my parents waking me up between the time the first tower went down and the second plane hit). I think it was 7-something AM here. We were a military family and lived in the DC area from my birth until a few years before the attacks; my mom had had an office in the part of the Pentagon that was hit. (Of course, that part was being renovated and nobody or almost nobody was in there at the time. I do remember that a few family friends struggled to escape the wreckage, including an asthmatic paraplegic who had a harrowing bout with smoke inhalation. Don’t remember the details, except that everyone survived and eventually returned to full health.) It’s an understatement that the events of that morning were pretty important to us, but I can’t say it changed our lives much more than any other military family.
As joemama said of the Challenger explosion, 9/11 was a somber day at my high school. I remember a kid playing John Lennon’s “Imagine” on his guitar in front of the entire student body and staff (probably about 275 people total) in the Commons. We talked about it all day in every class; not a single hour was actually devoted to Physics, Spanish, or whatever was normally planned. I remember a lot of confusion and a lot of anger from all around. I remember being incensed by an administrator putting a bumper sticker on her office door on Tuesday, September 18th that read something like “Schools should get all the money they need and the Air Force should have to hold a bake sale to buy a new bomber”. OTOH, I also remember counseling a Korean illegal-immigrant friend that night who felt guilty about having no emotional reaction to the attacks. I told him that it was OK to feel unsure or even apathetic about the whole thing. Don’t remember much else about the conversation.
My high school whipped itself into a similar frenzy at the two San Diego-area school shootings and the emergence of the DC snipers. Did those things all happen within a year or so, or are they just clustered together in my memory because the events of those days were similar for me?
I remember watching the OJ chase live; I was on a field trip and I had no idea what the significance of the whole thing was. I would’ve been 7 at the time. I can’t remember for the life of me where we were, although I know we were in Maryland.
A favourite amongst guys of my generation in this hick burgh was how many of them claim they saw concerts by The Clash and Bob Marley in the late 70’s, early 80’s. One of my best friends was a manager in the box office of the hall Marley played at and tells it was a) only half full and b) one of the worst gigs he has ever heard so I usually call BS on anyone who claims to have been there and been blissed out by a thronging crowd of dope smokers to sweet reggae sounds and *I * was at that Clash concert and I love to let folks spin their tales of a nights raucous punk rockery only to gently ask when they are done " and what song did they open with?"
mm
Along these lines, I know I’ve seen footage of a black man on a game show falling victim to the “doe…knob” exchange. I was pretty young when it happened, but I remember it clearly enough. At the time, I didn’t get what was supposed to be funny about this (I still don’t, actually) but the audience thought it was hilarious. The host tried to keep his composure, but he started laughing after a few moments.
And my school was watching the Chellenger launch on a big TV in the gym. I think the teachers tried to carry on like normal after the explosion, but they weren’t very successful. I was the first person to tell my mother about the explosion.
“I was at Woodstock!.. Fed off a flower child… spent the rest of the day staring at my hand.”
I hope I’m not venturing out on thin ice here, but there’s a poster, who I think is not around any more, who was a member of the Five Americans. Now, I don’t doubt him on that, but I’m skeptical of his claim that he was in Led Zeppelin’s hotel room for the Red Snapper Incident. According to Hammer of the Gods, it was Vanilla Fudge who was there that night. The Five Americans, or just this guy himself, could have been hangers-on, but I dunno. One band and their crew take up a lot of space. Two bands means less free space. Add groupies, and I’m not sure there’s room for a third band.
I saw it live. I was home sick from school and we had a satellite-- one of those great big black wire mesh things. (My uncle was a big tech buff and always bought the latest electronic gadgets.)
In the early days, the satellite was great. We had a decoder chip installed (which later was made illegal and we had to have it removed.) I can remember watching live news feeds from all over the country, watching the newscasters do their last-minute primping before the feed went live. You could also see raw footage clips, though as a kid, I often didn’t understand what I was seeing because the commentary hadn’t been dubbed in yet. One thing I really liked was that after you got done watching a show, you could flip to the West Coast feed and watch it again. Primative Tivo!
I’m not saying they’re all telling the truth, but it’s possible that most of the guys who attend that stuff are the guys who were more devoted “career” military than draftees into the world of grunt combat. My husband was a machine gunner’s mate and he never goes to that stuff. He’ll go to see a brick his sister bought him or something, but is not one to hang with his old marine buddies. Just a thought.
In this neck of the woods, apparently everybody saw Springsteen play in some little club by the shore before he became famous.
Springsteen must have given about a million concerts in little clubs by the shore.
I saw it live, too, but not on TV. I was going to Herbert Hoover Jr. High School “on the Space Coast” in Florida, and we were watching the launch from the athletic field.
