So.. where were you?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
101

I found out about Diana ’ s death after we spent all day looking for (and eventually finding) my Grandfather who had wandered off that day due to Alzheimer’s disease.

The next day he died.

It took me years to tolerate the mention of Diana ’ s name. My other Grandfather died October 2nd of the same year. That September sucked. Even worse was asking twice for exemptions from nursing clinical to go to my Grandfather’s funeral. (Right, didnt you use that excuse Last month?) I actually brought in obituaries to back up my claims.

102

The big ones I recall are:

Reagan shooting: I remember someone telling our teacher when I was in 2nd grade, who informed us, but told us that as far as they knew, he wasn’t dead.

Challenger explosion: Mr. Doggett, our 7th grade computer teacher stopped our class and told us the news. We then were released to our homerooms for the rest of the day.

9/11- I’d actually taken the day off work for a job interview later that day, and was asleep when a friend called kind of frantic asking if I was watching the news. Got up and saw what was going on.

Columbia disaster: I was asleep until just about 8:00 that morning, when I woke up out of a sound sleep with no real reason. Then, a couple of minutes later, my roommate starts banging on my door saying I want to get up and see this, without saying what “this” is. Went downstairs in a hurry, and find him in the backyard looking up- so I looked up, and there it was- we live in DFW, so it was right there in the southern sky. I’m fairly convinced that whatever loud boom that people report having heard is what woke me up at nearly exactly 8 am that morning.

103

I have an alibi for all of these.

Regards,
Shodan

104

I remember when Baby Jessica was that well, i was watching Rags to Riches on NBC when the bulletin broke in. Next thing you know, they’ve got her out of the well. 9/11 was my JFK moment though.

105

I remember when FDR died. My dad was in the back yard doing things that people do when winter is turning to spring, and a neighbor came over and told us that President Roosevelt had died. I was six. One of those moments that has no meaning at the time, but you put it away and get it out later for further reflection.

106

Not a big news story, but as I was drinking my morning tea, the radio announced “This just in from Stockholm. The Nobel Prize for Literature…” and my first thought was “Have I ever even heard of the winner?” before the announced concluded “has been awarded to Bob Dylan.” Talk about a jaw dropper.

107

Born in the US in December, 1970 here, grew up and have lived/worked in NYC for almost all of my life, just for context.

1980 - I remember hearing of John Lennon’s murder on the news in the morning after it happened (very late the previous night) while getting up for school. My mom always had the radio on in the morning, and that’s all they were talking about. The TV was on for coverage, too.

1986 - The Challenger explosion - I remember a teacher running door to door through our high school spreading the news. One of the teachers at our school had been in the running until quite late - a finalist or semi-finalist - to be on that flight, and lost out to Christa Macauliffe, so awareness of it was pretty high.

1989 - The Fall of Berlin Wall. I remember watching live news coverage on my parents’ TV as streams of people poured through now-unchecked gates and danced on top of it, and the feeling that this was, impossibly, the end of the Cold War that seemed for my entire life could only have one ending (global thermonuclear annihilation).

1994 - The OJ Simpson “white Ford Bronco” chase goes live on every. single. channel, right in the middle of a tense game in the NBA Finals, featuring my New York Knicks. For the only time in my life, I literally “called up the TV station to complain”. Apparently I was not the only one, they apologized but the switchover to the Bronco feed was mandated from the top.

1995 - The verdict of the OJ Simpson Trial. Possibly my most memorable “where was I at that instant” story. I was working in midtown Manhattan (near 49th St. and 5th Ave.), and the verdict was to happen right around lunchtime. Some primal instinct, not based on any TV or radio suggestion, compelled me and my friend and a large mass of people to hear the live verdict together, in public, as we walked over to 6th Ave. where many TV news broadcasts have their studios. The crowds on 6th Ave. in the upper 40s overflowed the sidewalks and into the streets.

When the verdict started being read, midtown Manhattan came to a stop, a complete and silent halt, which I have never seen before or since (not even for Sept. 11th). All pedestrians froze, all motor traffic halted, green light or no, yet nobody honked, as we all listened intently: “…we find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the…” And upon the “not guilty” phrase, an enormous, collective groan went up, and people immediately resumed their normal patterns. Traffic started flowing, people started moving, I heard more than one person settling a bet on the verdict as they walked off, and so on.

2001 - Yeah, September 11. I was again working in midtown Manhattan, this time near 51st St. and Madison Ave., and was in a “town hall” type of team status meeting from 8:30 to 9:30am. This was before many of us had any kind of “live streaming” device, only cell phones, and of course, we were not supposed to be making or receiving phone calls at a meeting. Only a few of the top execs had Blackberries, including the one running the meeting.

As other people spoke, he kept glancing at him Blackberry. He said nothing, but let everybody go around the table giving updates and whatnot. Then, as the meeting wrapped up (a little after 9:30am - it ran over, as usual), he said, “By the way, everybody, my wife has been sending me strange messages about a plane landing on the World Trade Center or something. Let’s go turn on the news. Apparently there’s a second plane now…?”

The first plane hit the Towers at 8:46am, and the second plane - the one that proved the first one was no accident - at 9:11am. We all lived and worked in NYC, in financial services, and nearly all of us had friends, family, former co-workers downtown, or even lived downtown ourselves. I still can’t believe he let that routine meeting run on while that was going on, but in his defense, it was just so inconceivable that he probably didn’t realize what was actually going on until close to 9:30.

108

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded, I was in eleventh grade. I recall hearing about it as I was walking up the stairs to my classroom.

When Princess Diana died, my wife and I were driving to Pittsburgh on vacation, as it was Labor Day weekend. We heard the news on the radio.

When 9/11 happened, I was right there on the scene. I was biking to work from my home in Queens, and one minute, I looked ahead of me and the World Trade Center was fine, the next minute, I looked ahead of me and saw smoke coming out of one of the towers. I did not see the plane actually hit it, I assumed it was simply a fire. By the time I got over the Williamsburg Bridge, I could see smoke coming out of both towers and I was wondering how a fire could have spread from one tower to the other. I made it to my office, about 5-6 blocks away from Ground Zero, and that’s when I was told that it was airplanes. Then, a little less than an hour later, the whole building shook, and the windows showed nothing but black dust, and we were told that the towers fell and we should evacuate.

109

Anyone remember where you were when this thread was started?

110

July 16, 1999 - I’m holding down the office when someone comes in and says “You heard Kennedy’s plane is missing?”

I think “What? The President’s plane is missing? What’s he talking about, Kennedy’s death. That happened in November.” Finally I say “What are you talking about?”

Him: John F. Kennedy Jr’s plane is missing.
Me: You’re kidding right?
Him: No. His plane is missing.
Me; You’re kidding.
Him: No.
Me: Please tell me that is not ture.
Him: Turn on the television.

111

Didn’t Princess Diana’s death take place while SNL was on? it was a repeat though.

With 9/11, i was in the library and ABC was on. Anyway the TV was mute, but i was near it, so when i saw the “Special Report” slide, i knew something really terrible had happened, so put the volume on and learned at that point that a plane had crashed into the WTC. then i saw the second plane hit, and all hell broke loose. then the Pentagon was hit soon after. It was a event i won’t soon forget.

112

For most events, I was either at home, school or work, so I’ll just mention a few strange circumstances.

Cuban Missile Crisis - I was just a kid, but I remember my father coming home from a business trip that took him driving through Arkansas. He had seen troop transports, tanks, artillery and all sorts of stuff being moved on the road. He was scared shitless, and he had fought in World War 2.

George Wallace shooting - I was walking through the appliance department at a Sears when I saw the news on the TVs. I was with a friend who immediately had a panic attack and had to be taken home.

9/11 - I was dropping off my daughter at her college on my way to work when the news of the first plane hitting the WTC came over the radio. The very first reports I heard suggested it was a small plane, but somehow I knew that wasn’t true.

Apollo 11 - I confess that I did NOT see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

113

I happened to walk into my mom’s living room just in time to witness George Brett’s pine tar incident.

114

Moon walk - watching on a little black & white TV while my grandma was saying it was all staged.

Nixon leaves office - remember seeing the headline in the morning paper: NIXON RESIGNS above his bowed, departing head and realizing how much I had been snowed by a president I had been trained in school to respect.

OJ Verdict - waiting in the car line at BoJangles.

Di’s death - remember seeing the headline in the paper and thinking “Good. No more news stories about her.”

First time US declares war on Iraq - remember driving home at night and hearing President George HW Bush making the announcement. I pulled off to the side of the road, wept, and wondered why the world permitted itself to be run by insane idiots.

9/11 - heard a coworker saying that a plane flew into the World Trade Center tower and thinking it was another Cessna plane that flew off course, since that had happened several times previous to this event. We all crowded into one room that had a functioning TV and watched the second tower fall. Remember on the drive home, there wasn’t a plane in the sky and how unusual it looked.

Trump elected - After seeing the results on the web, I was so upset, I yelled at my boss and got wrote up for it.

115

The Challenger explosion - I had just finished a class and was heading off of campus.
Princess Di - I got out of the shower and my husband told me.
9/11 - I was home sick from work and my husband finally got in touch with me, I had been sleeping. I turned on the tv and watched in horror and tears the rest of the day.

116

:slight_smile: Indiana

117

On December 7, 1941 we were just returning from a weekend at the family farm (via Ford Model A, no less) and I went into the living room and turned on our Philco. A news broadcaster was reporting about the sneak Jap attack on Pearl Harbor.

Getting off an elevator in St. Louis and hearing about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Just getting up from breakfast and hearing the wife excitedly relaying the news about the 911 attacks.

118

I was in third grade when JFK was killed. The principal came to each classroom to let us know, rather than an announcement over the intercom. I’d recently attended the funeral of my great grandmother, and it was the first time I saw grownups cry, I hadn’t know they did that. My teacher and the principal both looked like they wanted to cry but they didn’t.

I’d come home in the morning and turned on the TV, to see Dan Rather and wondered why. That was the Murragh Federal building. At first I thought it was a movie of some sort, then was horrified to find out it was real.

I didn’t see the Challenger blow up and didn’t hear about it for a couple hours. I don’t really remember where I was at that time.

For 9/11 I was at work. A co-worker came in and said he’d heard on the car radio that a plane had flown into the tower. I was annoyed at him because I thought he was pranking us, he could do that and make one believe. Then he assured us he was not joking so we ran into another room where there was a TV. That something so huge could disappear so quickly was stunning.

119

The Sputnik launch.
John Glenn’s orbit of the earth (I still have the newspaper from that day).
Alaska Statehood announcement.
John Kennedy’s assasination (high school math class).
1964 Alaska earthquake (sitting at the dinner table on Good Friday)
Nixon’s election (I was in Vietnam).
Nixon’s resignation.
And a lot of the ones already mentioned.

120

It was July 5, 2017. I had just lit the charcoal for some steaks we hadn’t ended up grilling on the 4th because at the Parker Ranch rodeo my son had eaten fried Oreos with whipped cream and chocolate syrup, inexplicably spoiling his appetite for dinner. As I was waiting for the flames to die down, I saw a thread I could respond to and was gearing up to tell my tales…

…and then stopped when I realized it was a zombie. :smack:
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