I have some rather vague memories of the Shepherd and Glenn space flights, but the first really vivid memory I have of an international event was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I distinctly recall a strong personal fear that we were all about to disappear in a nuclear fireball. I would have been 7 at the time.
Kennedy-Nixon debate live on TV. I was with my parents in our neighbor’s living room, all the adults watching. I was ten, too young to care or pay much attention, but remember Kennedy’s and especially Nixon’s faces in grainy* black and white.
- Rabbit ears picture quality
The 6pm news coverage of the fall/liberation of Saigon, with the helicopter lifting off from the embassy, and aircraft getting tipped overboard to make space for another landing on US aircraft carriers. I was almost 6.
I’m going with Sputnik, October 1957.
Hank Aaron hitting a home run in the World Series. I think it was the '57 Series, in which case I was 3, but it may have been the '58 Series. If that’s not sufficiently notable event (and I don’t know why it wouldn’t be), I remember listening to the 1960 election returns in the morning before school. Everyone in the family was for Kennedy, so I decided to be contrarian and be for Nixon. Obviously at 6 years old, I had no clue about politics.
I was in Spokane for that and we had half an inch or so where I lived. Everything was whitish out, so there was an reflex to put on an overcoat before going out. But it wasn’t cold at all; it’d been a nice sunny day before the ash.
I find myself trying to calculate the age of all the Dopers in this thread, based on the memories they are reporting. I think I am in the upper percentile of age, at 64, although certainly not the oldest.
The earliest clear memory I have of an national/international event that I remember was watching the space shuttle Challenger explode on on January 28, 1986 and the speech Reagan gave later that night.
Unless you count watching Hulk Hogan beating the Iron Sheik to win his first WWF championship in 1984 because I remember watching that match repeatedly.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, or the Loma Prieta Quake, if that counts as a “national” event.
Nixon’s first election. We had a mock election in my first grade class, and Nixon handily won it, although Johnson would have done well in that particularly ballot since one of the boys in the class shared his last name.
The next would have been Apollo 11. We don’t have a TV, and went to a neighbor’s house to watch, but it was later than our bedtime so we didn’t see the actual moon landing.
Kennedy-Nixon campaign of 1960.
Roughly 1/4 of the people who’ve posted in this thread so far remember either the 1960 election, or some earlier event.
Launch of first Space Shuttle just pips Wedding of Charles and Diana.
With only a couple of earlier exceptions, I remember every event mentioned in this thread. The joy of being old.
And I’m glad we skew older. I was afraid of getting some “Diana’s death” responses.
The presidential campaign of 1960, because much noise was made about Kennedy being Catholic. I was only 6 at the time but as a good Catholic child, I knew that we were right and all the rest of the people were wrong, so why would they be upset about having a president who was on the right side??? 
No, I wasn’t a particularly political child.
Martin Luther King’s murder.
The 1960 Presidential election; specifically, the Kennedy-Nixon debates. I grew up in Boston, where the whole thing was huge.
I remember the JFK assassination, and also being shown how to hide under our desks or go into a fallout shelter during the Cuban missile crisis. I also have a vague memory of the ceremony where we got a new flag when Hawaii became a state, but my impression was that it was after 1959. I believe I started attending half-day kindergarten when I was five, so probably 1960 or thereafter.
Regards,
Shodan
I have vague memories of the talk of a 49 star flag that never became official after Alaska got statehood but I can’t put a date on it. It wasn’t necessarily before Hawaii entered the Union. Definitely in the first grade the teacher showed us one but that would have been 1961.
The JFK assassination is probably stuck the minds of everyone old enough to remember. It was like a death in the family. The curtains were drawn, people came over, food was shared, and everyone talked in hushed tones while sitting around the TV.
Oddly, the first time I was aware of an “international story” was the Congo Crisis of 1960, when Katanga seceded. I remember hearing about it on the radio and suddenly realizing that there were people very far away and that very bad things were happening to them, some of them little kids like me. I started reading my parent’s newspapers for articles and paying attention when the news segments came on radio and TV. I never really talked about it with my parents and I don’t think it registered with them like it did with me. I was eight.