Where were you during the most important historical events of your lifetime?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

January 28, 1986: I was in high school history class, when one of the other teachers came in and interrupted the lesson to announce that the Space Shuttle had exploded.

September 11, 2001: I was in my office in downtown Washington DC, when my some of my coworkers heard about the planes hitting the WTC. My boss had a small TV in his office, so we watched that for a while. Then the announcement came for us to go home. Surprisingly, to me anyway, the Metro trains were still running. I lived in northern VA at the time and I would have normally gotten off at Pentagon station, but that was closed obviously. I don’t recall which station I ended up using, but I got home somehow.

November 4, 2008: I was at home when CNN announced that Barack Obama had been elected President

42

School features heavily in my timeline:

JFK - 3rd grade. The teacher was called out of the room. When he returned we all gathered in the quad around the flagpole to say the Pledge.

Moon Landing - Over at a friends house. We all were glued to the TV for as long as we could.

Munich Olympics - Watched it all unfold on TV. It was personal to me, because I knew the guy who finished 3rd in the 100 butterfly behind Spitz. Luckily Robin had departed for home by the time the terrorists struck.

Challenger - Getting ready to go to school. Heard the news on the radio driving in. My lead professor took one look at me and told me to go home.

9/11 - In my classroom when the news broke. My department chair (who taught in the next room) combined our classes so I could help coordinate things in the front office, checking on students and getting in touch with necessary people. Every class that didn’t have a direct TV feed gravitated to the multi-purpose room, where we set up as many TVs as we could scrounge.

43

Reagan assassination attempt. I would have been in Grade 3, maybe? People were talking about it on the school bus home.

Challenger explosion. Grade 8, news broke around lunchtime. One of my classmates’ father was an engineer with the Canadian space agency (worked on Canadarm) and was a casual acquaintance of one of the astronauts.

Quebec referendum in 1995: I’d moved to L.A. for fim school a coupel of months before. I didn’t have internet at home yet, so I either waited for the newpapers the next morning or I called folks back in Canada, I can’t remember which.

9/11: I was living here in Toronto but had gone up to Ottawa on a week vacation for my birthday (yup, it’s on that day). I was putzing around on the internet and my mom phoned from her office, telling me to turn on CNN as a plane had crashed into the WTC. I thought she meant a little single-engine private thing. As I was watching the news, the second plane went in.

Obama’s election: I was probably watching the returns, can’t remember. I recall his second election night much better. I was in the U.K. on holiday, staying in a tiny hotel room in London. I woke up in the middle of the nights, switched on the TV, watched Romney give his concession speech, sighed with relief, went back to sleep.

Trudeau’s election: coincidentally, also happened while I was in the U.K. Saw the news on my iPad while in Cardiff, watched the video of him shaking hands at Montreal metro stations.

January 6: I was home on a “work-from-home” COVID day, watching it escalate with my jaw dropping open.

44

I was in a military hospital on Guam when I was born, t the park at Clark College standing next tp My Beloved when I got married, and in Operating Room #3 at Providence Medical Center in Portland when Czarcasm Jr. was born.

45

I watched the original Moon landing, arguably one of the greatest events in history, at a neighbors house with a bunch of other people (we couldn’t afford our own TV then). It was unreal and one of the greatest things I ever saw.

I was alive when Kennedy was shot of course, but I don’t really recall it. I do recall all of the shrines that my family put up to him in their various houses, especially one of my aunt’s houses who had a ton of the things with rosaries and the like everywhere. And this went on for years…maybe even a decade after the events transpired.

I was having coffee when the space shuttle exploded, and I recall the TVs in the coffee shop all going to stories about it and how shocked people were. I was getting dressed for work when the first plane flew into the Twin Towers on 9/11, and a friend called me and told me to turn on the TV to see the ‘accident’. I did that and was watching when the second plane flew into the second tower, live. I recall the shock. Within less than a day I was getting calls from friends in New York and from my company asking for volunteers to go to the city to assist with the telecom issues going on, which I did, helping to unsnarl some of the myriad impacts to telco systems that were going through and around the Twin Towers region. It was one of the more depressing periods of my life, even though we were pretty successful in rerouting and rebuilding networks to get around the impact zone.

This wasn’t really an important historical event, but I remember the radio being on when they announced Elvis had left the planet.

Those are all of the key historical events I recall watching on TV or hearing on the radio sort of live. Unlike Forrest Gump, I wasn’t actually at any of these events physically, but I did see some amazing stuff live on TV during my years on this mud ball.

46

I think my first memory of a significant news event was probably the Six Day War. It wasn’t called that at the time, but did remember constant updates on the nightly news of the ‘Middle East Crisis.’

My older sister woke me up one morning exclaiming that “Senator Kennedy’s been shot!” I knew who JFK was, but had no idea who “Senator Kennedy” was. I do remember later hearing one of my relatives saying that the shooter was ‘an A-Rab.’

I have no memories of any of the Moon landings. I remember the coverage, but no actual landings. When Apollo 11 landed, since it was on a Sunday in July, I was probably out fishing with my uncle.

I was listening to the radio when the DJ mentioned that there were reports that Elvis had died.

For John Lennon and Marvin Gaye both, I woke up during the night, and noticed that they were playing their songs back to back (back then, I slept with the radio on). In both cases, the DJ mentioned at some point.

I was in the parking garage, about to go into work when I heard about the WTC bombing and the OKC bombing.

I was at work when:
The Challenger exploded – I overheard a co-worker saying he had just heard it on the radio
Reagan was shot – Roommate called me
The OJ chase began – had a radio in the office at the time
9-11 – My mother called me asking me if I had heard about that plane crash. I had just dropped off my wife at the airport some hours earlier. :open_mouth:

I was walking into a convenience store to get a drink, when I saw the newspaper headline showing that ‘East meets West’ with a pic of people standing on the Berlin Wall.

The OJ verdict:
The news reports said that the verdict would be delivered at [some time that I don’t recall]. At the time, I lived in an apartment complex only a few miles from work, so I went home for my lunch break to see the verdict. I stood stunned for a few moments at the ‘not guilty’ verdict, then walked outside to go back to work. And so was everybody else! There were people leaving apartments left and right getting into their cars and leaving. There was a cable or phone tech in the parking lot, and he quipped to me, “I guess now that everyone’s heard the verdict, they’re going back to work!”

I had slept late one morning. When I got up, my wife, who had been up for some time informed me that “They’ve lost contact with the Shuttle Columbia.”

Trump’s victory: I had assumed that Hilary was going to win easily, so I didn’t follow the results. I walked into our cafeteria at work the next morning, and I saw on the TV that Trump had enough electoral votes to win.

47

Kennedy assassination - I was in 4th grade. The principal made the announcement to the whole school and I remember crying.

Moon landing - I remember watching the grainy B&W broadcast at home on TV - I was 15.

Watergate - I had just graduated high school when the break-in occurred, and I was in the Navy in San Diego when Nixon resigned.

Challenger explosion - I was working at Naval Air Station, Jacksonville, FL. A bunch of us went out on the roof of our building to see if we could see the launch. We saw the debris contrails, then everyone crowded around a tiny TV that one of our coworkers happened to have at his desk.

OJ verdict - still working in Jax - watched the announcement on closed circuit TV in the office. Absolutely couldn’t believe it.

Death of Princess Di - My husband woke me - he’d been watching TV when the news was announced. We were living in King George, VA at the time.

9/11 - Working at NAS, Jacksonville again - we had TVs in the office and we all watched in horror. Shortly thereafter, then closed the base and sent us all home for a couple of days. The traffic heading out the gate was insane. I remember hearing helos flying overhead over the next few days, wondering if something bad was going to happen.

Everything that’s happened since June 2004, I’ve been where I am now.

48

Challenger disaster: I was in kindergarten. We covered a different letter of the alphabet each week and that week we had just gotten to the letter R. The teacher had already rolled in the TV on a cart before class. Right before the alphabet section she stood in front of the TV with a sad face on and said, “Today I was going to show you all a rocket launch but it blew up and everyone on it was killed.” Then we watched the Challenger explode.

Yes, I know it was a shuttle. S was the next week and we were only 5-6.

USSR dissolution: My parents and sisters and I went over to my dad’s parents for Christmas as usual. We found the TV on to the news where Gorbachev was making a speech while Christmas music blared from the stereo in Grandma’s room. My uncle wanted to watch the end of the Soviets. My aunt had Strong Opinions about the place of politics at Christmas.

9/11: I was in college. A classmate and I were going up to a rural high school to observe a class for one of our education classes. I was driving. The radio was on the local rock station that played Howard Stern in the morning. Howard & Co kept saying things like “I can’t believe that happened! That was unbelievable! What’s going on?”

“What is going on?” my classmate and I yelled at the radio. The whole twenty minute drive we had no idea what had happened. When we got to the school, the secretary at the desk was on the phone with a shocked look on her face. She signed us in and we observed the class. We got back in my car and turned the radio back on. The station had switched over to CNN or some other news station. By that point both towers had fallen. When I got back to my dorm room I found my roommate watching CNN. “Oh my god, it is true,” I said.

We spent the rest of the day glued to the TV. Most classes were cancelled. Not my night class, though. We had a test and the professor refused to cancel it.

49

I “witnessed” the Columbia disaster. I was in my front yard in the North Dallas suburbs just before leaving for my daughter’s soccer tournament. I saw the “sparks” but didn’t realize that meant something went wrong even though I had seen a previous re-entry at night. Later some people said they had heard the explosion, but I don’t recall the noise.

When we arrived at the soccer fields one of the moms was listening to a portable radio and told me about it. I was clueless up until then.

50

I had just gotten home from morning classes at the junior college when I turned on the TV and saw Dan Rather with the ocean behind him. This can’t be good, I thought. Sure enough, the Challenger explosion had happened earlier, triggering (for me) a solid week of rage directed at NASA.

51

To this day, the most enthralling tv I have ever watched.

52

Not one of the most important events, but I was on vacation at Disneyworld in 1996. We were scheduled to fly home on Saturday, July 27. I turned on the TV and Tom Brokaw was on at 6:00 a.m. Before I even knew he was talking about the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics I told my wife, "This can’t be good!

53

The first historical event I have real memories of is the assassination of MLK Jr. I live in Memphis so it was a big deal. I remember wondering why the adults were so agitated about the riots, which to my young mind were happening very far away. Since most of them were racists, that was their only concern. I was too young to really understand the situation.

My birthday is July 21 so the night of the moon landing I was very excited that this was happening sort of on my birthday and we got to stay up past midnight (and now it was my birthday!) to watch. I remember going out to look at the moon and thinking “men are up there - on my birthday!”.

I worked part time in a hospital during my first years in college. We heard that Elvis had died but at a different hospital. People at my hospital knew people at the other one and rumors were flying fast and furious about how he had died.

When the shuttle program started, I watched all the launches. I remember coming home and one of my roommates told me that the Challenger had exploded. I said “I didn’t even know there was a launch today”. It had gotten so commonplace, it wasn’t exciting anymore. I felt bad about that.

I was just pulling into the parking lot of the grocery store when I heard on the radio that John Lennon had died. I forgot about groceries and went back home to tell my boyfriend.

I was asleep when the events on 9/11 happened. I didn’t need to be at work until 10 a.m. I always hit the snooze button 4 or 5 times before I get up. It finally sunk in that there was only talking, no music. I heard “the greatest tragedy in American history” and I thought “what the hell has happened now?”. I got up and turned on the TV. This was apparently right after the 2nd tower had fallen. It was just panic and chaos. I couldn’t make sense of anything I was seeing. I went to work and asked my boss to please explain to me what was going on. We had a TV in the conference room and spent most of the day in there.

Election day 2016 was a crazy day. I had to take my mother in for tests at the hospital at 6 a.m. I dropped her off there and went to work. And the power was out. I sat in the dark waiting for others to arrive. People took turns powering up their laptops on the emergency circuits and someone plugged in a coffee maker on one. (It was a large outage so running down the street to Starbucks wasn’t an option.) I really needed coffee so walking up three flights was worth it. By the time it was decided we could just go home, the power came back on. But the day was pretty much a bust. I left at 2 to go pick up my mother, got her home and went home myself. I was so tired that I decided to take a nap around 6. I thought I’d sleep a few hours and get up to celebrate Hillary’s win. Yeah.

I’m retired now and didn’t get up until around 1 p.m. on Jan. 6. I made some coffee and turned on the TV to see just how bad things were. I was pretty amazed that it was worse than I had imagined even though I know you should never underestimate the worse Trump can do.

54

The Suez Crisis happened in 1956, the year I was born. But there could still have been troop movements in 1957.

The first crisis/historical event I recall was the Cuban Missile crisis; they scared us all in London by testing the early warning sirens. An eerie sound.

55

I agree that 100 years from now historians will have a very different perspective.

I’ll nominate the changes going on in China, beginning with Nixon’s trip and continuing to right now. From a pariah “cult of personality” communist state with a third-world level of living for most people to a high-technology trade partner with - however you want to describe the current government. It remains to be seen what will be the standard of living there and how their government will treat with the rest of the world - acting as the “biggest bully on the block with a chip on the shoulder” or achieving a more mature outlook.

(Post WWII changes in India - by education - might also be included.)

The following is quoted from a BBC website (March 8, 1996):
The most influential American journalist of the generation between the wars died about 20 years ago, Walter Lippmann. When he was asked, at the end, when we were obsessed with the Soviet Union, what was the worst thing the world had to fear? He said, after a long pause, “China on the loose”.

56

In the afternoon on March 11, 2011, I was walking down the street in Ichigaya, Tokyo right about here, towards a Starbucks above the train station when the ground shook worse than I have ever felt it. I was on the sidewalk and was concerned about glass falling from the multistory building so I went out into the street as all the cars had come to a stop.

The large plate glass windows of the Starbucks where shaking as if some invisible giant where beating them with drumsticks. Terrified customers were huddled under those tiny tables.

Because we were out of power for several days, I didn’t actually see the video of the tsunami until after some of my American friends did.

For 9-11, I had just come home from work and having a couple of drinks. I turned on the TV to watch a movie and saw the news and it took a bit to understand that this wasn’t a movie. Both planes had already hit but the towers hadn’t fallen yet.

For the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, I was visiting my sister and her family in Georgia. Her (now ex-) very conservative husband and I were in the kitchen and talking politics. My sister had fled to the living room much earlier and just as the discussion was getting heated she called that we needed to see it.

57

The ABC New York affiliate had the Channel 7 4 o’clock movie every day. Sometimes it was a movie kids would like, sometimes it wasn’t. Every now and then they would have monster movie week. A whole week of Godzilla, Gamera and tiny Japanese twins who spoke in unison. What do you think is more enthralling, Godzilla or a bunch of old men talking?

I was 6 years old.

58

I was sitting in our cramped Iowa City living room on December 29, 1978, watching the Gator Bowl on black-and-white TV when Woody Hayes slugged a Clemson player after he intercepted a critical Ohio State pass.

I couldn’t understand why the commentators took so long to acknowledge the fateful incident.

59

Kennedy assassination - I was only 2 so I have no memory of that.

Moon landing - I was going to turn 8 nine days later. I watched it on TV with my parents. I’m not sure what time of day it was, but I feel like it was kind of late at night because I had my PJs on and I kind of remember my parents saying that I could stay up later to watch it.

POW David Wheat’s return home 1973 - My 6th-grade teacher wheeled in the big B&W TV and we watched him get off the plane.

Elvis’ death - I was folding laundry for my mom and heard it on the radio.

John Lennon’s death - I was sleeping when my mom came into my room to tell me.

Diana’s death - the whole family was sitting around a campfire at the cabin when someone (who was inside watching TV) came out to tell us.

Challenger - I was at work when someone announced it.

Oklahoma City bombing - I was at work when a vendor’s salesman called and told me that he had heard the country was being bombed.

9/11 - I was at work working on payroll when another tenant in the office building came in and said that a plane had crashed into one of the towers in NYC. (I don’t think I even knew what the towers were at that time.) My boss had an old computer monitor that also doubled as a TV. So we set that up. I remember I was watching it by myself (my boss was on a phone call) when the second plane hit. I ran into his office to tell him. What a day that was. My son had a high school soccer game that day after school. It was a beautiful fall day, the sky was as blue as ever. They played Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA before the game. I also remember hearing a lot of jets flying over the house (we live just a couple of miles from an Air National Guard) that night around 10:00. It was very unnerving.

Michael Jackson’s death - I was just pulling out of the grocery store’s parking lot when I heard it on the radio but only caught the end of the announcement. I remember thinking, they couldn’t be talking about Michael Jackson.

Some of these are exactly historical, I guess, but they’re moments that stand out to me.

60

Missed this one. I do recall watching on TV both in the run-up to this and when they actually were on the wall and breaking it down. I recall how amazed people were that this was happening…something many never thought would happen. I also recall the aborted coup attempt by radical elements of the CPSU trying to take out Gorbachev, and how I thought that perhaps this thing was about to turn really, really bloody. And the relief when it didn’t and the old CPSU just sort of collapsed in a whimper. I watched a lot of this unfold on the nightly news.