9/11 i was watching a rerun of * Little House on the Prairie* when the first plane hit. i didn’t know anything about it but whenLittle House went off i changed the channel to ABC and saw what was going on and then the second plane hit and all hell broke loose…then the towers collapsed. it was very sad. i don’t know if i changed the channel once things got bad. i think Little House was the last TV show i saw before very channel went into full news mode…
For 9/11 I was in a Wal-Mart. I heard something about a terrorist attack on the radio, and I thought someone had blown up a plane with a bomb. I didn’t find out the real story until I got home, by which time the towers had already been destroyed.
And this may not count as “Historic” but it’s a funny story anyway. I was in Army basic training during the Mike Tyson v. Evander Holyfield fight. It was late in the evening, and the Drill Sergeants made us fall in at attention while they recounted the story of the ear-biting incident.
When Lady Diana was killed, I was just leaving my company christmas party. My husband and I were not ready for the night to end, so we’d decided to join some other co-workers at a local club to continue the party.
We heard the news on the radio. My husband parked at the club, but I wanted to keep listening to the news and so we just ended up going home. I was too sad to party anymore.
Dianna—driving home from work, the news just got worse the whole way.
Elvis–working at the movie theatre.
Challenger–at the 'rents home, was moving stuff for work and spent the night there, knew something fracked up instantly.
Columbia–was driving, heard ‘overdue’. Sorry, there is no ‘overdue’ from orbit.
9/11–Had been laid off at work, was in the shower when my 6 year old son (who was scheduled to start kindergarten the next day) came into the bathroom and in Command Voice [who knew 6 year olds could do THAT] said “Mom says to get out here NOW”. Arrived dripping in front of TV just in time to see the second tower hit. First thought was 'insert pits into B-61 devices, set yield to MAX"
Robert Kennedy - I was 3 and my mother yanked me down onto my knees to pray for America.
First moon launch - I was home… riding my bike up and down the street. That was one Crazy summer.
Reagan - I was home, sick from school. I had a fever at the time and what I thought didn’t make sense to me.
John Lennon getting shot - I was in my dorm freshman year. I had an exam that day, but was considering skipping it to take the train into Manhattan.
A friend said, “Don’t be a fool. Take the exam. He didn’t know you. You can always go any time you want after exams are over.”
Challenger disaster - I was at a summer job during summer vacation. It was on TV during a break. Then the boss said, “back to work.”
1993 WTC bombing - I was at my desk which was next to file cabinets which were blocking windows. Someone walking by said, “isn’t that smoke?”. I was about 3 miles away.
1994 Snow / The 17 Snow Storms - The Fall of '93 I had finally traded in my crappy Dodge for a Ford Explorer XLT. It had push button 4x4 and was possibly one
of the best designs FORD produced before they nerfed it. That winter put it through its paces and if you know anyone who works at Ford, you can tell them, “Thank you.”
OJ Simpson Verdict - My building set up an emergency telephone chain to try to find out who had cars & who didn’t.
The PATH was blocked by an angry armed mob that wasn’t letting anyone through. I managed to get 4 co workers out of the city and to the Giants stadium parking lot.
Northridge earthquake - It was two weeks after my (then) best friends wedding & he was honey-mooning in CA. He was supposed to come home that day.
We found out later that his plane was wheels-up less than an hour before it hit.
Princess Diana - It was Sunday. I was on vacation, by the sea. I remembered looking out across the Atlantic, which was under an overcast sky that day,
and wondering why she was taken when she so clearly had so much more to do.
9/11 - I was on vacation on a cruise ship. The two days before I’d been having really odd dreams about blue tornado hitting a tall building, a red tornado hitting a flat building,
and a some sort of white tornado that Just Missed. My family teased me Mercilessly about those “bad dreams”. Then, on Tuesday as we walked towards the gang plank, dressed in beach gear,
we passed a TV screen showing smoke coming from one of the towers. I said loudly, “Why are they re-running that footage? That anniversary is in February…”
As I said the words and as we watched, the second plane hit.
(Honestly, I don’t know what it is about Me and going on vacation… but maybe next time I go, you Might want to Duck.)
JFK assassination: In gym class in junior high. They stopped play; we sat on the floor while the PA explained what had happened. A couple of my classmates burst into tears. During JFK’s funeral, I saw my father cry for one of two times in my entire life.
Moon landing–at the bar of the North Forty in Ithaca, NY. I was kitchen staff. The owners closed early and we all sat there watching the bar TV. Also memorable for my first vodka gimlet.
John Lennon–at work at CBS. I actually left work to go stand outside the Dakota and mourn my youth, which died at that moment.
9/11–across the street from the World Trade Center at Four World Financial Center. Got to work early; heard about the first plane; thought it was some small tourist job and called to say that I would probably be home early. As I hung up, a senior manager walked by to say that another plane had flown into the other tower. It took me about half a second to think “Terrorism” and then I rapidly figured out what I needed to take with me (almost nothing) and left the building. I looked up at the Twin Towers on fire–very briefly, I know that trauma is worse the longer you are exposed to it–and walked down to the Jersey ferries, crying with rage. Very odd feeling. Just typing this, it comes back. I had worked in WTC 1 for a few weeks; I had a vivid personal sense of the hell it had just become for many people. On the ferry, the woman behind me turned to her friend and said “Well, we’ll probably get the whole week off now!” I turned around and glared at her and said “Do you actually think anyone cares about that?!? There are people DYING up there right now. Have some respect. Have some respect!”
I went back to work two days later in temp facilities in Jersey City, and exactly a month later I woke up sobbing and couldn’t go to work. Spent about two hours on the phone with a shrink. Better now.
I also know where I was when I heard about the deaths of Rudolph Nureyev, Christopher Reeve, Pete Seeger, Duke Ellington, and Tommy Makem. And Paul McCartney–though that turned out to be a publicity stunt? wild rumor? case of group-think? at any rate: false.
A Christmas party in August? 
Sure you didn’t mesn JFK instead of RFK? Because that puts you in your freshman year at 15-16, young for college, old for high school.
Was your summer job in the southern hemisphere? Challenger blew up a few days after Superbowl XX.
Armed mobs in NYC due to the OJ verdict?
On 9/11 I was in my 3rd year of medical school. I didn’t have any classes or work that day so I woke up late, around 11 AM US central time. I checked my email and saw one from the president of the university. It wasn’t at all detailed, it merely said something to the effect of offering condolences and prayers to those affected by the disaster on the east coast. I’ve always followed hurricanes closely, so I assumed that Hurricane Erin, which was in the Atlantic at that time, had struck a major city and caused severe flooding or wind damage. I went back to bad and didn’t realize what had happened till a few hours later when I got up and turned on the TV.
I was 19 on 9/11, and working at a Blockbuster in Indianapolis. The gardener, who worked for the building complex, came in and told us about the attack on the first tower. We had it on DirecTV the rest of the day. When I got home, my parents hadn’t seen the footage yet, so they put it on CNN, and I went to play a video game-- I couldn’t take it anymore.
JFK assassination - I was in 8th grade, the school office put the radio broadcast on all of the speakers in the classroom with no explanation, and it was in the middle of a news report, it took almost ten minutes before the words “President is shot” filtered through. They canceled school the next day, Friday. When I went to church on Sunday morning, everybody was talking about Oswald having been shot (we hadn’t had the TV on in the morning).
Bobby Kennedy assassination - It was the day after the California primary, and it was the last week of school before I graduated from high school. It was the day of the traditional Senior Picnic, where all of the graduating seniors took the day off and went to a local park all day. It was on the radios while we were driving.
Challenger explosion - I was home, having called in sick (I wasn’t) and sleeping in. It was on the TV news when I got up.
9/11 - I was driving into work in downtown Los Angeles and listening to NPR on the radio. The announcers were hysterical. When I got to work, everybody was trying to find out what was going on on the Internet, but all of the news websites were down. I finally found the local college news station carrying NPR and we listened there. TPTB at work told us all to go home because they were worried that planes might be crashing into Los Angeles skyscrapers, too.
Diana’s death - I was in a bar and they put up the news on the TVs.
The only Event I have very clear memories of was 9/11. It was right before I got up to go to school (high school in Havre, Montana, as I was seventeen when it happened*) so I was laying face-down in my bed when my mom came in and told me a plane had hit one of the towers. I thought “Oh great, a Cessna just hit the World Trade Center. What the Hell was it doing so far off course?” and I remembered the B-25 that hit the Empire State Building.
I went to school as normal, but spent the whole day shuffling from class to class in a kind of a daze, watching CNN in every classroom.
*(Yes, that means I was in high school when Columbine happened. I still can’t remember it. I don’t really know why.)
It was RFK… JFK died before I was born. And I still remember the dorm & the conversation re: John Lennon… but if he was shot in '80, then it had to be the first anniversary. Sorry.
Challenger did blow up in winter… it was after I graduated & it was a summer job that I didn’t have sense enough to quit until later. Jobs can get like that when you are a kid: weekly paycheck, get up, do the job, cash your check on Friday. But I was there at company “X” when it blew up.
Armed Mobs after the OJ verdict? With clubs, shoulder bulges & waist band bulges? With cops with sniper rifles on roof tops and cops with k-9 units on the street? I drove my (and those other people’s) asses through and away from Journal Square slow-and-easy-like.
It was so tense, if anybody Sneezed there would have been shots fired. You weren’t there, I was, I’m glad that I (slowly) drove away from there that day.
Thanks for all your close scrutiny though.
PS- When are YOU going to answer those same questions, ‘Cadillac man’?
Earliest: In 1963 I was 9 years old and playing with some coins in my living room when my Mom came in with a neighbor and turned on the TV. They explained that someone important had been shot.
July 1969: I was on the beach in Laguna Beach, CA when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. “Tranquility base here…the Eagle has landed,” could be heard up and down the beach.
In 1979 I was on a Los Angeles RTD bus heading home from work when I heard that John Wayne had died.
March 1986: I was in the kitchen of a French household (I was a houseguest) watching TV when the Challenger exploded.
August 1995: I was building my well house when the radio reported that Jerry Garcia had died. I’ve never been a Dead fan but Garcia was still a seminal figure in music.
There are more as we get closer to 2016 but you get the idea.
I have earlier memories, but the earliest one I can put a date to is JFK’s funeral. We were living in Arkansas at the time, and I couldn’t figure out what happened to all the regular TV shows.
I was in third grade then. I watched the funeral procession. I remember, for the first time, seeing the symbolic riderless horse, with boots turned backwards in the stirrups, and my mother explaining it to me.
Concorde crash: I was on a train in Sweden. The picture of the plane in flames was all over the newspapers on the train, but I couldn’t read the stories because I couldn’t read Swedish.
Challenger (the first one): I was at work, my first job after graduation. It was quarter to twelve, and I was thinking about lunch, and we had the news on the radio in the drafting room, listening to the launch live.
9/11: I had called in to work ill, and was reading the SDMB when I spotted the thread about it…
Reagan being shot: I was in high school chemistry class, and someone came running in.
OJ car chase: I was visiting my aunt in British Columbia. We turned on the BCTV news to find footage of a slow-motion car chase dominating the reports. We were very puzzled: why was this incident involving a foreign sports celebrity taking up so much of the news?
Princess Diana: weirdly, I don’t remember the moment of hearing about the event at all, even though I was strangely and intensely affected by it later.
Let’s see- challenger - god yes we were all sitting in a classroom watching.I was in the 5th grade, and my teacher made SUCH a big deal. A teacher was going into SPACE! So we saw the tragedy in real time.
9/11- I heard about it initially on the radio , headed to court. At recess we all flurried to our phones. My co-workers were apparently glued to tv in the break room and the window but I was home watching vicious replays.
Count Blucher- were you a college freshman at 16? Well done lad!
Oh, oops. Just a company party, not a christmas party.
Moon landing- I was a toddler but have a clear memory f my dad being very excited
Challenger- sophomore in college. Waiting for chem class to start when a friend ran in late and told us
Lady Diana- had just moved to San Deigo and was eating dinner with my son when it came on the news. I remember my husband was traveling with my stepson at the time.
9/11- Had just put my son on the bus to school when my sister called that it appeared a plane hit the WTC. Was on phone with her, now watching tv, when the second plane hit. Put a video on for my daughter, went up to my room and was watching the news, on the phone with a neighbor when the pentagon was hit. Was driving to my son’s elementary school when I heard the towers fell.