I was home recovering from surgery, missing second grade. I oddly remember having a premonition it would happen.
Challenger explosion. 7th grade, rolling TV cart, gifted program classroom.
I remember going with my mother to the polls when she voted in the 1956 presidential election, when I was almost 5, but a better answer was when Sputnik was launched, when I wasn’t quite 6…
The moon landing. I was just over a year old, and I remember mostly an argument between my Dad and Grandfather about whether I should be allowed to stay up and watch. I remember my Dad saying “She’s not going to remember it” and my Grandfather saying “But she’ll be able to say that she saw it.” And I made a conscious decision to remember what I was seeing on the TV.
It’s fascinating, because I can pull up that image, but without the udnerstanding that should be attached to it. Nobody bothered to explain to me what we were seeing, so it’s just a fuzzy, grainy black and white picture and the sound of static-y breathing. There are a lot of other details about the room etc.
And maybe the most fascinating of all is the fact that I knew the concept “remember” and was able to decide to do so. And it worked.
Challenger explosion for me also, when I was 9. We weren’t watching it at school, but our teacher told us about it when we were waiting in line to return to class from one of our thrice-daily bathroom breaks.
When I was a Very Little Nemo, my family took a vacation in Florida. One of the things we did was go to Cape Kennedy to watch a rocket being launched. Thanks to Wikipedia, I found out that what I watched was the launch of Mission AS-201, an unmanned test of the Block I Apollo Command/Service Module and the Saturn IB launch vehicle, on February 26, 1966.
If that’s not a famous enough event, I’d go with the death of Elvis Presley in 1977. I was at home in the kitchen and they announced his death on the radio. My brother and sister were outside and I went and told them.
Chernobyl. I was walking with a friend to the YWCA on the base where we were living in Germany, to buy sweets. We met my sister and some of her friends, and they told us that we weren’t allowed to walk on the grass and should go home. We went and bought sweets. A few years later, I was at boarding school and we were gathered in the hall one evening to be told of the outbreak of the Gulf War. I remember being terribly afraid that my father or brother (who were both in the army) would be sent away immediately before the next time I was due to go home.
It’s so interesting to read all these memories about teachers delivering bad news. I was one of the teachers who had to tell a school full of girls in London that we’d just been bombed (7th July 2005). I wonder what they remember.
Nixon’s resignation speech.
It’s the earliest memory I have that I can prove actually happened.
Two early memories:
- August 1945, I was 3. Newspaper picture of the A-Bomb at Hiroshima
- December 1948. The first Auburn-Alabama game since 1907! I was there!
The fall of the Berlin wall, I guess. I remember that day, and I’d have been about 11.
The RFK assassination. Well, sorta. It happened at night on the other coast while I was asleep. The next morning my older sister was frantic that “Senator Kennedy’s been shot!”
I have vague memories of the 1944 election or rather of my elementary school being used as a polling place. I was a couple months short of 8. But the event I really remember is Roosevelt’s death. I was now a couple months past 8 and it was like the world had come to an end. I ran out onto our steps and was just stunned. Then I remember the 1948 election very clearly and the utter surprise when Truman won.
I have the same memory of the same election (but not the summer mother!) I was four then. The better answer would be the next year, when a tornado ripped through town. Not only do I remember seeing houses torn up, I remember seeing coverage on TV.
I remember watching the evening news about the Shah of Iran being overthrown. That was in '79, so I’d have been 6. I obviously had no comprehension of what was happening. I remember being very concerned that my parents weren’t more concerned, because I thought something terrible had happened to my Grandfather, who I knew as “Grandpa Shaw”.
I also have vague memories of when I heard about the Pope being shot, Reagan being shot and Lennon being shot, but those memories aren’t nearly as clear, and not even in any clear order in my mind.
The Challenger. Though I didn’t actually see it happen, but I remember when I found out.
May 18, 1980–the day Mt. St. Helens blew up in Washington State. I was five and lived about ninety miles east of the volcano. Late in the morning a huge grey cloud moves slowly toward town and then blocks out the sun. We were playing outside and our mom herded us into the car to grandma’s house a mile away. It was just like a blizzard, only gray; we even wore scarves and coats even though it wasn’t cold at all.
The Challenger. I was almost 8, and it was the day of my school’s talent show, which I was performing in. Because of that, my grandparents were in town, and that’s the only reason we had the TV on before school that morning - my grandparents liked to watch Good Morning America (or one of those morning shows). They showed the shuttle launch, and we were all watching when it exploded.
Probably the RFK assassination when I was about 3 1/2. I would have been in my house and the memory is rather vague; what I remember is having a nightmare about it from watching the TV news.
The next things that come up would be the Munich massacre–my mother was freaking out about it, and then the US withdrawing troops from Vietnam–my mother was asking my father why they didn’t ring churchbells like they did when WWII ended. Both of those times I was at my house.
Nixon resigning. I was 6. I remember my mother being very interested in watching his speech. She told me he was a bad man.
I’m not that old, so 9/11 for me. I was only ten at the time, but I still remember that morning as if it were yesterday.
My uncle’s family was vacationing in New York at the time, and that morning they had actually planned on going to the roof of the TT’s. Had my aunt not partied excessively the night before & not had a hangover that morning, they’d have been there & probably wouldn’t still be alive today.
As my uncle says, “It was the first time in my life that my wife’s headache actually helped me.”