I was 29. I was always a space buff so it was a big deal at the time, but definitely not the biggest deal in my memory. In rough order:
1- JFK assassination
2- Moon landing
3- Nixon resignation
4- RJK assassination
5- 2000 election
6- 9/11
7- Katrina
8- Challenger
9- Columbia
10- Apollo 1 fire
I may have forgotten something but those are the biggest deals that come to mind. At the time, being 11 I didn’t realize the full impact of the MLK shooting and I believe his stature was magnified by his death, not that he wasn’t a truly great person. I have only the vaguest of memories of the Cuban missile crisis, I suspect my parents tried to keep us from being frightened of it. Lennon’s death and Reagan’s assassination attempt- not so much. The world is a violent place to be a celebrity, and the Reagan attempt would have made the list had it succeeded.
21 at the time, shocked and horrified when I heard about it. Before the Challenger blew up, NASA still had a “Right Stuff” mystique, at least for me. Some of my earliest memories were of watching the Apollo rockets taking off for the Moon. Astronauts were mythical larger-than-life heroes to me (well, that part hasn’t changed). Even though we had stopped leaving Earth’s orbit NASA was still the leader in the space race and still had a “can-do” anything is possible rep (once again, at least in my mind). That changed a lot after Challenger.
engineer comp geek, I recall all the events on your list, except “Walter Mondale on a tank”. I do recall Michael Dukakis on a tank, wearing a silly looking helmet - could that be what you meant?
Interesting list. I’m a few years younger than you so do not remember your #s 1 and 10, and don’t recall your #s 2 and 4 all that well. (I’m intrigued, by the way, that you have R Kennedy on your list and not King.) Certainly neither stands out in my memory as affecting ME.
Nixon would be my top one of these, followed by 9/11, Katrina, and the 2000 election, and Challenger would be next. I only dimly recall Columbia. As I have posted in other threads, the Challenger impact on me at least has to some large degree to do with McAuliffe being not just a civilian, but a teacher, and I was a teacher at the time.
Well, it depends what you mean by an “unforgettable event”. I certainly remember that it happened, but it’s not something that I think about and I haven’t the foggiest idea what I was doing at the time of the event.
I think at the time, it was the death of A civil rights leader and perhaps not THE civil rights leader. In retrospect, it was a much bigger deal and King’s legacy has certainly grown (rightfully so) over time. RFK, on the other hand, was the frontunner for the 1968 nomination and brother of a revered president slain a bit more than 4 1/2 years earlier.
Oh, yes. I remember going to Boskone a couple of weeks later and everyone was talking about it. It wasn’t as big as JFK, MLK, or RFK, but certainly unforgettable, and I can remember where I was when it happened.
Yeah, it was unforgettable, in that I remember exactly where I was. I was 23 at the time and had gone to the laundromat at the mall to, well obviously do laundry.
After putting the clothes in the dryer, I wandered off to the department store and wondered what the hell was being shown on the wall of TVs. That curly smoke plume rising up into the air. There was no sound on, and I couldn’t figure out what it was all about, but it looked intriguing.
I asked the clerk and she said “the space shuttle exploded.” Wow! Shocking. Completely shocking.
I watched the first shuttle land live on TV and was very interested in the whole program. Yeah, it is an unforgettable event.
I was 22 year old undergrad. I don’t recall it being that big of a deal and I was studying engineering. It was certainly the talk of the next few days but nothing even approaching 9/11.
From the vantage point of someone who was 14 at the time, I’d say he was still THE civil rights leader at the time - had been since Selma if not earlier - although the Stokely Carmichael - Rap Brown -Elridge Cleaver generation of black radicals was starting to overshadow him at the time he was killed.
And it was most certainly a defining event in another way: there had been race riots in other cities in the previous few summers: Harlem, Watts, etc. But when King was shot, it happened everywhere at once, not just in one or two cities, but in dozens of them at the same time.
It was definitely a big deal at the time. Reported with the same intensity as a presidential assassination or 9/11 or Britney Spears shaving her head. But after all this time, it doesn’t seem to have had as much of an impact as those other events have, although at the time it seemed like it would.
I was 35, and although it definitely shocked me, it wasn’t one of those shocks like JFK being killed, or even Pope John Paul dying after a month.
For those I could tell you where I was and what I was doing. For the Challenger, I don’t remember that. I don’t even remember if i was watching it on TV or heard it later on the news. Just the shock and later, the surprise that they shouldn’t have gone.
I was 38 when it happened. It still sticks in my craw to this day.
We had such a bright future ahead of us in space. I was raised on Asimov, Heinlein, et al. Moon landing in 1969 - wow, here we go. Now we have nothing, where we should - at a minimum - have a functional base on the moon. And sadly, the Challenger disaster played a huge role in that.
Civilians flying on the Shuttle doesn’t prove a point-- It’s a routine matter. I imagine most of the mission and payload specialists have been civilians.
Q. Did you know Christa McAuliffe had two blue eyes.
A. One blew this way and one blew that way.
I was 18 at the time and had just quit my first semester of college. I don’t remember it being a big event, I was just pissed that they kept repeating in over and over and over on the TV and there wasn’t anything else to watch (no cable at my parent’s house).
I doubt that it made that much difference either way.
I just don’t think the general public saw that there was a point in all this space stuff, once we’d won the race to the moon and the Russians dropped out of that game altogether. And I don’t think the space shuttle changed that: it was ‘OK, they’re doing something up there’ but I doubt most people had a clear idea of what they were doing, or what the point of it was.
And the fact is that the space shuttle missions resumed after a couple of years, and kept on going until just a few years ago, ceasing only because the shuttles were getting rather long in the tooth - a quarter-century after the Challenger went boom. Given that fact alone, it’s hard to blame the decline of our space program on the Challenger.
This. Lots of people at the time said they felt that flight just wasn’t supposed to happen, even before it launched.
Plus, it was the heavily publicized “teacher in space” flight.
Can’t find any references to it online, but a few years later, I read somewhere that the astronauts’ bodies were transported from a holding area to the official morgue in garbage cans in the back of a pickup truck. I’ve always found it quite believable.
