I don’t know if this qualifies as a news event but I witnessed the first Apollo launch, which was a test of the rocket with an Apollo unit attached to it. I was five years old at the time and my family was taking a vacation in Florida.
The Tet Offensive. January 1968. My dad used to listen to the radio news in the morning, and I can remember lying in bed with him, hearing the daily body counts
Also, being up early with dad to watch an Apollo lift off, probably the same year. He thought it was more important than I did.
I can recall sitting on the living room floor and watching men walking on the moon. I doubt it was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, because i would have been not quite 2 during the Apollo 11 mission…I was 5 during the Apollo 17 mission, so that puts an upper limit on it. Of course,I can’t swear that it was live, but I’m pretty sure it was…it must have been something ‘special’ to have made such an impression on me.
The earliest event that I can pinpoint would be the Watergate hearings. I can recall being upset because Mrs. Panos, who watched me in the afternoons, wouldn’t let me watch “my shows” because she wanted to watch the hearings.
News of the Berlin Wall going up, August 1961. Heard on a local AM station, but via my Dad’s big Zenith Transoceanic radio (as a teenager I replaced the tubes and actually got some shortwave stations on it).
A bit earlier, I remember my parents discussing whether they should stock up on sugar, presumably at the time of Castro’s takeover in Cuba, but I didn’t know the underlying event prompting the discussion.
This is the one for me, too. That image is burned in my mind. I can see just as clear I could then, standing in my family’s living room all those years ago looking at the TV and asking what all that stuff was on the ground and my mom telling me it was people.
I vividly remember being at JFK’s funeral parade. I was 3 1/2, my Dad was an officer in the Air Force and we attended as a family. I was in awe of the Presidents horse, rider-less, of course, with his boots backwards in the stirrups.
I also remember the first moon landing, watching on the old black and white Dumont TV in mom and dads bedroom because it got the best reception.
Either the shooting or the aftermath of the shooting of Governor George Wallace.
His campaign motto was, “Vote for George Wallace. You know where he stands.”