Wed 6 Feb 2008
Growing up, I was taken with the way adults around me — parents, grandparents, teachers — would talk about their memories of where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot; that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. It fascinated me that there were these moments of shared context, of having experienced, separately, some revelation profound enough that it later brought people together in their memories of it having happened.
Years after the September 11th, 2001 attack on the WTC in New York, it’s clear to me that that’s my own moment, or at least the first so far.
What are yours? What other events have occupied this psychosocial slot for you? And what are your stories?
Posted by Josh Millard21 answers so far!
The Challenger disaster. I was in Mr. Leech’s geometry class in my freshman year of high school when the principal made an announcement over the intercom that the Space Shuttle appeared to have been destroyed. We ended up going down to the cafeteria where a TV had been set up.
The WTC is a moment like that too, of course, but the Challenger was the first one that I remember clearly where I was when I heard.
(I was totally going to call this out as chatfilter until I realized this was BBQ, not AskMe. Silly RSS feeds.)
The WTC is definitely the first major event that I remember, though that day was a blur of confusing. I was in grade 7. We had a school-wide lockdown around 9 AM and didn’t get let out until 11 AM. The teachers kept talking about how “something terrible had happened” but none of them told us what was up. The lack of computers in the classrooms didn’t exactly help, otherwise I’m sure we would’ve been all over Google in a second.
Eventually, it slowly trickled down to the student population that some form of disaster had happened in the US and we were on standby for more of the same. A few guys speculated that schools got bombed and that Ottawa, as Canada’s capital, was next. In retrospect, it was rather… innocent. No immediate paranoia about terrorism, no suspicion, no veiled mistrust of certain ethnicities. Just a lot of confusion. Though I must say it’s hard to remember a time when terrorism wasn’t both a subject of contention and mild ridicule. I didn’t care much for anything but Neopets and Fanfiction.Net for most of middle school, but suddenly it was like politics was everywhere. I got home and my grandparents, who had flown to Canada from China a few days prior, were watching TV and the channels just kept replaying the same vid over and freaking over again till I got sick of it. I don’t think I really understood what happened and what it meant till a few years later. It sort of became part of your way of life/thinking, y’know?
Since then, the only things that have greatly affected me were the Dawson College shootings and Virginia Tech. There’s something about the death of students that humanizes tragedy for me more than anything else. Plus one of my good friends lived across the street from Dawson. That was scary.
Columbine. I was ditching school (senior year) to go prom dress shopping with my best friend, and we wound up back at her house while her ridiculously permissive mother made us food and we watched the whole thing on TV. I had a lot of trench coat wearing friends, and one was arrested in the fallout, for being a known explosives enthusiast. It was fucked up. He later served in Iraq, bless him.
9/11 was also huge, because I had just the week before visited NYC for the first time. In fact, the episode of The Daily Show I saw, where I was referred to on air by Jon, in fact, never aired because of the attack. It was too business-as-usual a day. I went to work at 4, but nobody was coming into the restaurant. We had candles on the tables, I recall.
9/11 here. I was in college at going to~a 9:05 or 10:10am English class. Ah how I miss that class- the teacher and my love of Bruce Springsteen allowed me to pass. I could probably figure it out the exact time by looking at the times of planes crashing. I remember going to class and there were whispers- mere, crazy f’in talk of whispers- of a plane crashing into the WTCs. At first, it sounded like a mistake. Then, what? There were TWO? People in class were like, “wtf, that’s crazy talk!” Before we knew it, the college administration closed school for the day and we all went back to our dorms. We all sat in our dorm rooms with the doors open just watching what was going on. I still recall the disbelief and in a dorm of usual loud noise and constant partying, the only thing to be heard was everyone being glued to news TV.
I was also updating MeFi nonstop.
Like Phire, I remember that crazy rumors flying around. While I was an hour fifteen away from Atlanta (home of the CDC) in college, we were still pretty close to the CDC. One of the wild theories is the CDC would be attacked next bringing a biological holocaust upon us. The other being that DC was also under attack.
Challenger explosion. I was on a high school field trip to see “The Tempest” at a small theater in Boston. When we came back to the bus, it was snowing and the bus driver said that the space shuttle had exploded. We thought he was joking.
Also, 9/11. I had moved to Canada from the US just over a year prior, and had just arrived to work and heard my boss talking excitedly about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. I spent most of the morning on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a close friend in New York, and watching the news in the boardroom with my coworkers.
Also when Kurt Cobain killed himself … I was working at a radio station in Maine when the news came over the AP wire. I kept the wire printout in my “In Utero” CD case.
Not one moment. Three.
Challenger.
OJ trial
9/11
Each I remember the world ’stopping’ (no, I don’t mean for OJ to be up there with the others…but I do remember everyone, and I mean everyone talking about it.)
Definitely 9/11 for me. I’d been through earlier “big events,” but none that really resonated to me personally. I wasn’t really paying all that much attention during the Challenger explosion, I certainly didn’t watch it on TV or anything, and there had been plenty of other exploding space missions beforehand (at least that was my impression). Besides 9/11 the main things that come to mind are unsuccessfully protesting the first Gulf War, and all of the hoopla over the 2000 election.
Locally, the Loma Prieta earthquake is something most Bay Areans of a certain age can bond over (that was the big one that disrupted the World series in 1989). I recall hearing that the Bay Bridge had collapsed and assuming that the entire thing had fallen into the sea for good. But I never thought that had the world-changing scope that 9/11 did.
I remember when Kurt Cobain killed himself feeling really resentful that everybody was making it out to be the JFK assassination of my generation - at the time I was a snotty punk rock kid with a strong anti-rock star bent, and way too cool to admit liking Nirvana. The whole aftermath of it did have a strongly media-constructed feeling to me, though, and it still does. About which, in retrospect I guess all of that ridiculousness was part of what Cobain was trying to get away from.
The O.J. car chase. I was working at a newspaper that evening so it was impossible to avoid, but during my lunch break I hit a nearby used bookstore, and they had set up a portable color TV to watch the car chase there. That’s when I understood the power of national events. Even if they’re stupid ones.
9/11. That’s probably a big ‘duh’.
Ronald Reagan’s shooting by John Hinckley. It’s strange that this seemed so important at the time, when it’s trivia these days, if not primarily a vehicle for jokes. But I remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about it, and I’d wager most people around at the time do, too.
The fall of the Berlin Wall. I was just on the cusp of adulthood, and was planning a trip to Europe, my first, that coming summer. Sitting in my Dad’;s kitchen, with CNN and coffee and cigarettes, for probably 20 hours on end. “Wow. This really is history. I am seeing history on television. This changes everything.” What surprised me the most was how unaffected my Dad, his wife, my step brother and sister were. I felt like a member of the one true faith, in the land of the heretics. “Watch this. Look, the communists have lost, the Cold War is over.” I must have seemed like a raving zealot to them. I was the only one in the house who understood how important it was, and that was really strange.
That summer I stood in Potsdammer Platz, saw people still chipping away at the thing with hammers and chisels. A group of tourists were clustered around a hole in the ground, pulling at rebar, supposedly Hitler’s bunker.
I’ll never forget those days watching CNN in my father’s kitchen.
Well, mine was when Princess Diana died. I was born on her 19th birthday, (July 1st) and I’d read in a biography of hers that if you shared her birthday and sent her a card, she’d write you back. I wanted it to be special so I wanted to wait until my 19th birthday to do so… she died about 2 months after my 17th birthday.
I was babysitting for my next-door neighbors, and they came home and said, “did you hear??! Princess Diana died!” I went home and turned on the news and cried. There’s not a lot more to the story than that… I do wish they would let her rest in peace, though, and stop bringing up scandals.
Wow, I have a bunch aside from 9/11. My first was Challenger. I was in the first grade and we had a prayer service the next day for the astronauts (settle down, kids, it was Catholic school). I still have that image burned in my head of the trail of pure, white smoke breaking off into tendrils as the ship fell apart in the sky.
I was living in South Korea during the Berlin Wall. There was only one English language television station, and it was run by the U.S. military. As you can imagine, images of those young Germans dancing atop the wall persisted for some time. Though I was living in a country divided like Germany, I hadn’t yet visited the DMZ and had no real concept of what was going on. But I wasn’t too young to see those people’s faces and read the pure joy.
O.J. and Cobain are two odd ones that somehow became lodged in there as well. With the O.J. chase, I just remember switching the channels and seeing that white Bronco everywhere, even the Home Shopping Network was doing a split screen with 10k gold necklaces on one side and O.J. on the other. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this was my first “What the fuck, media?” moment. I mean, Christ, he’s just some third rate actor! (Turns out he also played some football.) I was never a big Nirvana fan, but Cobain was the first young celebrity I remember dying. I was in the car with my mom (visiting some friends from Korea, in fact), when the news came on the radio. We were on Ogden avenue in Hinsdale. So bizarre that I remember that.
The Columbia disaster is another. My wife and I were on our way to Wisconsin to visit some friends. It was early, the sun was fighting off the morning fog as we drove past quiet farmlands. The announcer said that the shuttle had come apart over Texas and the debris was spread for miles. I looked around at the soy fields whizzing by, imagining a white streak ripping across the sky.
I’m interpreting this as “the first big event where you remember exactly where you were and how you found out”, and not “the first big event *that was personally meaningful to you* where you remember exactly where you were and how you found out”, in which case the answer for me would be the Challenger explosion. I was in junior high, and I actually found out about it because someone at school was making jokes that made no sense at all. “Where is Christa McAuliffe spending her next vacation? All over Florida.” or the like. I was like “huh?”, and then someone told me the Space Shuttle blew up. I just figured they were joking. When I found out it was real, there wasn’t any particular emotional resonance (about the same as if someone had said there was a house fire somewhere and a few people got killed, or a multi-car fatal pile-up on the freeway), but for some reason I remember where and how I found out about it.
Oh, and Columbia is a weird case for me: for some reason, I only found out about it last year.
I was 13, home from school that day. The TV news bulletin broke into the regular programming and said that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Tx.
A reporter on the scene said that JFK was shot in the neck from the front. That report was never aired again.
1.When JFK was shot, I was in junior high. They teachers told us nothing. They told us to gather our things and go home as quickly as possible. It was so scary because the faculty was acting so weird. We were all freaked out. The first thing we thought was a bomb threat. Then we all thought maybe the US was under attack.
2.9/11. I was on my way to work. They were playing “Good Times-Bad Times by Led Zep when they broke in with the news.I thought omg we’re going to war.
3.Challenger. I was living in Florida at the time and saw it happen. A moment forever etched in my memory.
Awful story …
Challenger: I’m a sixth grader. I’m in English class and I’m ticked that the Science class next door is getting to see the shuttle go up. Suddenly, I see the science teacher come in and whisper to the English teacher, and they both head for the door. Deciding to let off a bit of snark, I wisecrack, “What happened? Did the Space Shuttle blow up or something?”
As for 9/11, I was en route to work in an ‘L’ car when I overheard someone in the car talking on his cell phone — he must have gotten his call right after it happened, because he was the first to hear about it. He didn’t announce anything, but he was sitting right behind me, and I said, “Excuse me, did you just say … “. Once other people overheard him confirm it, cell phones across the car got whipped out and calls were rapidly made: I didn’t have one at the time, so was listening as other people announced news as they got it from family-friends over their phones. Went to work, where they had a TV set up in a conference room, and then at 11 offered us all the chance to go home. I tried to stay and work but was really too distracted, especially since the tallest building in the United States was 0.8 miles from where I worked …
Challenger-after a break in biochemistry craft the professor announced that the shuttle had apparently been lost; at the first available chance we all found th nearest TV to follow the story
9-11-The tech in the blood gas lab told me her sister had called to say a plane had hit the WTC. We both assumed it was a small private plane that had screwed up when she called back to say a second plane had hit. We tried to get on the internet but every news site was overwhelmed and that’s when we knew something was up. Once again everyone drifted to the nearest TV and work slowed to a crawl as those who had any new info rushed to spread the word to those who were tied up in the OR.
Columbia-lying in bed on a Saturday morning, slowly waking up to NPR as was my habit in those pre-family days, I was jolted up when I heard Bob Edwards say out of the blue “The space shuttle Columbia has apparently disintegrated over Texas as it was returning to earth”
“craft” should be “class”. I have no idea how I did that.
Reagan getting shot is the first, I was young, my brother had just given me his guinea pig that morning and I ran downstairs to find it dead.
Challenger, 4th grade Sr. Mary ellen came running in to tell the teacher to turn the TV on.
WTC, at work in a cubicle way far away from the rest of the workers and I heard the chatter starting. MefI was the only site I could get to with decent updates so I started reading them off to my coworkers.
Surprisingly, as I really didn’t and don’t think of her much…Princess Di’s death. I was in a Moxies restaurant and the waitress came to our table crying, just to tell us the news. I was such a strange thing for the waitress to do that it really stuck in my head.
Of course, I remember 9/11 and OJ and Challenger and a host of other major events, but her death is what really stands out.