Title says it all.
Like most people of my generation and older (I was born in 1956), I remember when Kennedy was assassinated. I remember Stephen King writing about the impact the news of Sputnik being launched had on (American) people of his age, and comparing it to the Kennedy Assassination in its memorability, but that may have just been him. I am the youngest member of my family, and can’t remember anyone saying or thinking anything of it.
December 7, 1941. Infamy.
Not that I was around for that or anything.
July 4, 1776. We hold these truths to be self-evident
Wasn’t around for that one either.
21 August 1968 - Warsaw pact troops (minus Romania) invade Czechoslovakia, spelling the end of the Prague Spring and the start of 2 decades of soul crushing ‘normalization’.
4 October 1994 - plane crashes into a large flat in the Amsterdam Bijlmer neighborhood, killing around 60 people.
6 May 2002 - Volkert van der Graaff kills Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, 9 days before general elections which (according to one poll) might very well see Fortuyn’s party become the greatest out of nowhere (it did gain 26 out of 150 seats) and make Fortuyn the next Dutch PM.
2 November 2004 - Mohammed Bouyeri kills Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh for making a film about repression of women in Islam juxtaposing texts from the Koran with naked bodies, and for being generally offensive of Muslims (whom he (Van Gogh, not Bouyeri) typically referred to as ‘goat fuckers’.
November 4, 1995, the day Yitzhak Rabin was shot. For me, it was as big as 9/11 - and I was in Manhattan during the latter.
Challenger. I’ve told before about how my English teacher, having had the whole day to work up a good head of steam, treated us all to an unfocused rant about how this was apparently all of our faults for paying more attention to pro sports than the space program.
Not a day but most of a week: The aftermath of the LAPD verdict in 1992. Notice how I’m phrasing that very carefully.
In all seriousness, the premiere of Phantom Menace. We saw it at the Mann, and spent several hours in line, after having been part of the month-long ticket vigil. The movie itself was kind of a letdown, IMHO, but the screening was an event.
Plenty. I’ll start with:
7/7/2005 tube bombings
11/11/1918 Armistice day.
D Day.
July 20 1969 - ‘That’s one small step…’
Dude, you’re old. Now I understand your misogynist attitude a little better.
October 17, 1989, the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I grew up in the Bay Area and I’d experienced earthquakes, and I knew that earthquakes could be really, really disastrous, but I was eleven and it was pretty traumatic to actually go through a big quake like that.
In my lifetime:
Sputnik launch.
Glenn’s orbit of the earth.
Kennedy assassination.
Moon landing.
MLK assassination.
RFK assassination.
1964 Good Friday Alaska earthquake.
Mt. St. Helens eruption.
Princess Di’s death.
End of the Vietnam War.
Nixon evixion.
I assume the OP means are there dates that stand out in your memory as dates like 9/11/2001? I’d say, not really. I have a pretty lousy memory for dates in general, so while there are plenty of historic events I’ve witnessed (at least in the sense of seeing them live on TV), I don’t really strongly associate them with the actual date they happened. I couldn’t tell you the date the Berlin Wall came down, or the date the Challenger exploded, even though I have pretty vivid memories of watching both happen on TV.
(oddly, the only “big event” I can remember the date of off the top of my head is the Colombine shooting, because I remember people speculating that they might have chosen April 20th to comemerate Hitler’s Birthday)
That was what inspired the thread, but it’s okay if the specific date isn’t there as a date. I’m pretty sure D-Day, Pearl Harbor Day, Nov/23/1963, and perhaps others more personal are there as dates, along with birthdays and marriage days, maybe even divorce days and some death days, but I was just curious if some dates stand out as dates because of some less personal past event.
The thread’s going fine, so I don’t wish to confine it any. Just responding to the assumption.
I won’t ever forget Columbine, the news coverage of kids falling through the library windows and running for cover. I was 15. School was my only safe space, and that day eliminated my last vestige of security. To this day I still become anxious sitting in classrooms. It affected me way more than 911 did.
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963. I was a sophomore in high school. Those were some uncomplicated times. The assassination was shocking in a way that I don’t think the world can be shocked any more.
I also remember the Challenger disaster. I was at work and we were watching it live on TV. Just to see it happen there before our eyes… one feels so helpless.
I was born in 1978 and here are the exact dates I can remember clearly and can remember the events of that day:
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September 30, 1990. - My parents, brother, and I moved in to our new home. That night, Twin Peaks had its second season premiere, which I clearly remember.
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July 31, 2004 - Wedding
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June 19, 2009 - Got the referral call for my adopted daughter.
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June 17, 1994 - OJ driving down the expressway during the NBA finals with the police chasing(following) him.
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July 17, 1994 - My Dad and I signed on AOL for the first time, getting me my first email account.
That is all the biggies off the top of my head. I remember the Okalahoma Federal Building bombing, but not the date of the top of my head.
Other dates are there somewhere, but these were very clear in my mind.
Thanks for the correction.
I remember extraordinary events but not the dates on which they occurred, although looking them up would be simple. I probably wouldn’t remember 9/11 either if it wasn’t a mnemonic itself and the name of the event became the date.
Examples:
Opening night of Jurassic Park
Neil O’Donnell throwing the Superbowl to Dallas
The Steeler’s 2 superbowl wins in the 2000’s
Various games Michael Jordan played
As a Deadhead and an all-around live music junkie, I remember Aug. 9th 1995 like it was yesterday, as it was the day Jerry Garcia died…
I must have recieved calls from friends in at least a dozen states (and this was before everyone had cell phones) all asking about what I had heard (this was also before we all had instant access to breaking news via the net) and sharing our various ideas on what would happen with the Grateful Dead, making plans to head down to San Francisco for any possible memorial services, and just to hear from friends who shared my love for Garcia’s music.
I know there have been much more Earth-shattering events happening on almost a daily basis both before and since, but it’s a day I can recall with crystal clarity.
That’s exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to explore in this thread. My wife can replay almost by the minute events and scenes from a day in 1956 (I forget the date but she doesn’t) and it’s spooky how well she can explain her actions that day.
I don’t have anything like that except I do remember what I was doing when I learned of the deaths of Paul Desmond and Chet Baker. The dates are fuzzy, though.
A recent PBS show about memory had a case of a woman who remembers every minute of her life! No thanks!
December 26, 2004.
My ex and I were just about to head off for a year travelling Asia, after having had a fairly bleak and unhappy Christmas day in shitty temporary accommodation. Turned on the TV in the morning, never made it to breakfast: we just sat and watched for hours in horror, mouths gaping, as many of the places we were about to visit were destroyed, and the people we would have met were killed. And the magnitude of the disaster just grew bigger and bigger and bigger for the next 24 hours - and the death toll kept rising for weeks afterwards.
In recent years, the Virginia Tech killings.
Being in the DC area, this affected us so very much as you can’t throw a rock without hitting a Tech alumni. To think this unbelievable killling spree happened to regular college kids, just sitting in classrooms, hanging in dorms, without even a fraction of a second to react or run away was heart wrenching. When I heard the story of the professor who was the holocaust survivor who gave his life by holding the door shut while his students jumped out the window… well let’s just say it still brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it now.
Being a parent myself I remember thinking of what it was like to be a parent of one of those students, hearing the story on the news, waiting for the call that your child (or children) was okay. Or not. Oh my God.
Seung-Hui Cho’s family lived only minutes away from my neighborhood. I was doing some business near their home and the day after the killings the streets were clogged with news vans, satellites, helicopters hovering ahead. That family would never live a normal life again, and they lost a child, too.