Bizarrely, I have a clear memory of being very young and at my neighbors house, with the adults discussing how the Soviet Union was now deploying nuclear missiles equipped with MIRVs for the first time and closing the US advantage which would have been in 1976 and not long after my third birthday.
I remember footage of the Vietnam War being shown on. Other than the fact it was obviously soldiers fighting, and possibly having heard the name ‘Vietnam’ I didn’t comprehend anything about it. I recall that it agitated my mother and it was the first time I heard the phrase “what if they had a war and nobody came?”. For years I thought she came up with that herself :o
JFK assassination. I was in 1st grade.
I remember 22 November 1963 too. I was eight at the time and in third grade. We heard the news right after the lunch period (I remember one of the janitors coming over to my teacher and telling her *sotto **voce *that Kennedy had been shot). We were let out of school early, and when I got home my mother and older brother were huddled around the TV set. I recall bits and pieces of the coverage from Dallas, Kennedy lying in state, and Oswald getting shot live on Sunday morning. I watched every minute of the funeral procession on Monday, and it seems to me the live images were much sharper than the ones they show today.
Before this, I remember watching live coverage of a Mercury launch. It must have been Friendship 7 in February 1962, because it was an Atlas rocket and I’m pretty sure it was in the winter. I also got to see the live transmission from the Moon when Ranger 8 crashed into it in February 1965.
I have very clear memories of the night Johnson beat Goldwater for the Presidency in November 1964. Not because I was interested in the election, but because I was out playing Army on a “night patrol,” like on ***Combat! *** After the final election report on TV, I went to bed and watched an episode of Amos ‘n’ Andy.
I also have very clear memories of Halloween 1962, but absolutely no recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis, oddly enough.
The 1960 Presidential election. I was living in Boston at the time.
I was probably about four. I wasn’t in school yet, I know that. I was walking through the living room, and my mom was watching TV while ironing. On the screen was a sort of semi-circular seating arrangement in a big hall. I can still picture it exactly in my mind’s eye now, so I know what I was seeing was the UN although I didn’t know it at the time. I asked my mom what was going on, and she said they were deciding whether we were going to have a war. This would have been about 1955, so too late for Korea, right? All I knew was that I was terrified. I had nightmares about the atom bomb, so that was all I could think was going to happen – we were going to have an atom bomb dropped on us. I went outside but I was in a quiet panic that whole morning.
I think part of why the bomb was so present in my mind was because my dad had an old army buddy who worked for the Anaconda mining company. We’d stayed with them on a summer trip when they were living on a Navajo reservation, and the dad was working with a uranium mine. He gave my dad a few nuggets in a heavy canvas pouch. We were fascinated by it. A kid who lived one block over came to play and said he was going to split its atoms (by hitting it with a hammer), make a bomb and drop it (using the airplane he was going to build) on the kid he hated who lived across the street from him. Weird. Hadn’t thought about that in years.
I remember stuff about Nixon resigning vaguely (2nd or 3rd grade) - but I remember vividly stopping in my tracks during the Challenger Explosion.
I had a nightmare when I was six or seven about dying in a fallout shelter after a nuclear attack. I woke up in absolute terror, sweating profusely. I don’t think this was triggered by a news report, but by all the Civil Defense PSAs being broadcast at the time (1961–62).
Challenger disaster in 1986. This is what I specifically remember happening on TV. In fact, I went to a school with CNN(I think?) and they had it on live.
I do remember the Detroit Tigers winning the World Series in 1984 because we celebrated Tiger day in 1st grade. I don’t remember seeing it or watching news coverage, though.
Damn, you guys are young! I remember one of the 1952 presidential conventions, when I was 6. All I remember was the states’ vertical signs with their vertical lettering. It was the first time I remember seeing lettering that wasn’t horizontal.
I also remember watching Elizabeth II’s coronation, on our little Zenith TV with the 12" B/W screen. I remember seeing the throngs of people lining London’s streets as the new Queen rode through in her gold coach. Decades later, while visiting London, I saw that gold Coronation coach. It’s hideous.
I feel like mine should be the Challenger explosion. I would have been in 1st or 2nd grade at the time I think, and everyone else my age says they remember it, but I honestly don’t remember the actual event. I remember talking about it in class after it happened, but not the news of the explosion itself. I kind of wonder if maybe while other classes were watching the launch on TV our class was at lunch or something.
I remember the 1988 election a few years later, and our school’s mock election, and rumors spread around our school that Dukakis wanted to make us go to school on Saturdays. So most students were pleased to learn that Bush had won.
A year after that I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall.
My first “news memory” is really just an image, but I remember my parents watching the Huntley-Brinkley Report (the predecessor to the NBC Nightly News), in the house we lived in before my sister was born. We moved just before my third birthday, so I would have been just shy of 3, and it would have been late 1967 or early 1968.
The first news event I remember is Apollo 11; I was four. I think I’d noted in another thread here that, even at that age, I was keenly interested in the space program, and would eagerly watch TV coverage of the Apollo missions.
My Mom still has her Bible(New Testament and Psalms) they gave each school child in England. It was also a pretty early memory for her.
Off the top of my head, Muhammad Ali coming out against the Vietnam War and refusing to serve in the armed forces, in February of 1968. I was 5 1/2 years old.
As was I. I have a very vague memory of seeing Kennedy on television at some earlier time, but I cannot be sure that is an accurate recollection. But the assassination itself is seared into my memory.
Moon landing. The next thing I remember is Nixon resigning.
There’s, I think, two answers to this question.
First, the first memory I have of a national event: the 1988 presidential election, I had just turned 7. My dad hated Bush and when he won my dad pulled down a little 2’x3’ American flag that he had hung off the front porch. (Amazingly, the bracket is still there after all those years, but November 1988 was the last time it held a flag.)
The first news event I remember watching on TV that I can definitively date was when Magic Johnson announced he had HIV, which was November 1991. My dad always watched the CBS Evening News and I remember Dan Rather talking about it and having to ask dad what HIV was.
This is my first news memory as well. We listened to the returns on the radio, as we didn’t own a TV. My parents were big fans of Eisenhower, so we were all mightily disappointed when Nixon lost.
8 years later, we were all mightily disappointed when Nixon won.
Am I the first non-US news memory?
It was the days leading up to the death of Winston Churchill. I say “the days leading up to” because Churchill was on his deathbed for quite some time, and every so often programs (probably radio, though I suppose it might have been TV) would break off for “another bulletin”. For some reason (I was six at the time) I was already aware that if an animal was dying then you could hasten the process by shooting it. But
- I wasn’t aware that this was also done with people (ie a bullet in); and
- I was appalled at how inefficient the process was, as there were bullets in on an almost hourly basis, and this went on for days.
I guess I must have eventually asked about this and been put right. But I have a very clear memory of the many bullets in.
j
I remember watching Nixon resign on August 8, 1974; I was 7 years old.