The Blizzard of 1967.
I remember the 1960 election because my brother and I cried because Nixon had lost and we wanted him to win (why, I don’t recall, besides, I got better).
I remember the first moon landing, and my favorite part of it was being allowed to eat breakfast in the living room. I was about to start kindergarten.
Back in those days, TV was line-of-sight only. The world was 20 years from overseas TV. I remember going to a movie theater in Boston the next day to watch the coronation (in color). I specifically remember my mother saying that we would probably watch the next coronation live. Mom said the film was likely developed on the plane.
Televisions were so expensive back then. It would be another year before we owned one. We rented one occasionally. I remember watching The Today Show with Dave Garroway and J. Fred Muggs (the monkey), but I can’t say for sure when I first saw it.
Up until 2016 I would have not thought it quite hideous, merely guilty of some rococo excess. But now my reaction has been influenced by certain other people who have vulgar yet expensive tastes, so I do indeed consider it hideous.
I was six years old when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. I remember thinking it was cool, but didn’t really know the implications of it. My eight-year-old brother, however, was super into everything space-related, and as the little brother, I was excited with him.
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens: May 18, 1980. We were in the ashfall zone (about an inch). I remember putting on our winter clothes and going to our grandmother’s house.
I was going to say the 1960 presidential election (oddly, it never occurred to me that we had a sitting president), but this. My older brother’s nickname was Spud, so I ran around the back yard incessantly babbling about Spudnik (which I thought was its real name. Spud was scanning the sky with binoculars and getting increasingly irritated. When (what I many years later realized was) a small plane flew low overhead, nothing visible but blinking lights, he yelled,“There! That’s Sputnik. Go to bed!”
The 1956 election when I was just under 5. My mother took me with her when she voted using the cool New York voting machines.
I remember the 1988 election. I don’t remember the election so much as my dad’s reaction to the results: he hated with the fire of a thousand suns any republican candidate and when Bush won he pulled down a small flag that had been attached to the side of the house–one of those little 3ft ones that stick out at a 45° angle. I don’t know what message he was trying to send (and still dont, he’s pretty patriotic in the traditional sense) but down the flag came… but he never took down the little bracket that the flag pole had attached to. It wasn’t particularly high, maybe 7 feet off the ground. For years that little bracket has stayed on the side of the house and every time it actually catches my attention I briefly remember Bush beating Dukakis. My brother lives in the house now and the bracket is still there, 31 years later.
ETA: I had just turned 7 in November 1988.
I remember bringing in the morning paper in June of 1968 and the headlines about RFK’s murder. I was 7. I can’t think of anything earlier.
The RJK assassination in 1968. I don’t know if I was aware of it or was told about it, but I remember realizing this was the second Kennedy to be assassinated.
Also, I don’t know when the news coverage of the Vietnam War began, but it was on the nightly CBS news.I don’t recall exactly when, but one day it dawned on me that the soldiers weren’t just firing into the jungle, but there were real people on the other end.
Some of the earliest Mercury flights. My parents were not big space fans, but they felt this was important and allowed me to get up really early to watch. After that it was the funeral of JFK. I remember my mother explaining to me the significance of the riderless horse in the procession.
The election of JFK. Didn’t understand what it was all about but my parents were happy about it. Next thing after that must have been Alan Shepard’s Mercury flight making him the first American in space and my surprise at finding out that those damn Russkies had been in space before we were.
JFK being assassinated. I was in first grade.
John Lennon’s murder when I was three and a half. My parents cried and explained that a bad man had made their favorite singer die. For years I thought that Someone had jumped out of the bushes near his home and stabbed him.
I also remember JFK’s assassination and that of Lee Harvey Oswald. I didn’t understand a lot but I knew that he was very important and that “everybody liked him”. Before that I know I saw I saw the buddhist monks immolating themselves, which happened three weeks earlier.
In the UK news I asked my mum some awkward questions about news I heard on the radio. The first was over the Aldermarston anti-nuclear marches. I was puzzled when they said the police were arresting people (probably because this seemed at odds with how the protesters had earlier been referred to as they included all sorts of dignitaries). I asked mum if the marchers were bad people - as hitherto I thought only bad people got taken away by the police. Even more awkward was the Profumo affair (government ministers sleeping with party girls who were also sleeping with a Russian diplomat). The press were all agog over the whereabouts of one of the girls - who had been spirited away to a Mediterranean island. “Mum,” I asked “Who is Christine Keeler” and why do they want to find her?" Poor mum didn’t know what to tell me!
I want to thank this thread for making me feel old and young at the same time.
I remember John Glenn’s orbits in 1962. I would have been in first grade. And of course JFK’s assassination the next year.
The earliest event I can remember, (on a radio news broadcast) was the death of the famous Yankee first baseman, Lou Gehrig. I think this was in June of 1942. And just several months after that, again over the radio - “THE JAPS HAVE JUST BOMBED PEARL HARBOR!”
I put this last in all caps as that was certainly the way it was broadcast.