Did you youngin's (the early-20s crowd) grow up listening to the Emergency Broadcast System signal all the time like we did? I vividly remembering it all the time when I was little (they always tested it before Sesame Street) but not so much in later years.
Wow, just last night I was explaining a joke in Calvin and Hobbes to my boyfriend's 8-year-old about the Emergency Broadcast System. Not that it was funny after I explained it. These kids today!
I think we get tests here in Texas. Not only radio/tv, and Amber Alerts, but outside sirens on a regular basis. But in the twenty years I have lived in this house, I have probably had tornados within a mile or two 5 times. So we have our reasons.
It came on in the middle of the World Cup games and Comcast stopped showing the game to put up a full screen of text. I was pissed. I knew it was raining buckets. That's why I was not out on Shirley Highway.
The old whistle signal was scarier than the new bzzt bzzt bzzt that I hear nowadays. The higher probabilty of nuclear war might have colored my perceptions.
Do you remember car radios having markings for the CONELRAD frequencies? That was another reminder.
I definitely remember them. And they still do them on the radio here - heard one on NPR just a couple of months ago.
(The fact that NPR is one of only two stations I've set on my car stereo should indicate that I am not in my early 20's anymore. The other, however, is a college station.)
12: the town where I grew up had an old air raid siren from WWII (according to my parents) that still worked. By the time I was a kid able to remember it (late '70s, '80s), it was the nuke siren. That my town would get nuked was laughable, but hey.
Every now and then they'd test it. Freakiest of all the man-made sounds of my childhood, by far. I lived in a rural area, but that sound would drift over the mountains for miles on end. By the time it reached us, it was very faint but in its own way that made it even more disturbing.
10: That 8-year-old wasn't even alive when Calvin & Hobbes stopped running. Weird.
It's kind of funny that depending on who I'm talking to, being in my early 20's makes people consider me either a mere child or shockingly old. I keep going back and forth, it's giving me whiplash. Right now I'm in an "oh god, I'll be 22 in 2 months!" phase.
I'm not in my early 20s anymore, either. I was just asking if the young folk knew of 'em.
And as someone with a basement apartment, I would like to sing the praises of whoever waterproofed this place. Woo-hoo! I really expected to have water in here by now. (fingers crossed)
15. That is eerie. I think of sirens like that not as warnings of imminent attack on a little burg, but as mournful cries for the end of times. Funeral bells just before the fact.
I still have dreams about a nuke going off. I was born in the early 60's so I guess I am in the last cohort that got the full CD experience.
I vaguely remember discussing the first gulf war one day in first grade, but don't remember the cold war either. The closest thing is that I remember being freaked out by the Ronald Reagan mask a neighbor kid wore for halloween one year.
When I was ten I was in one of those annoying special programs for bright kids and we had to figure out how, as a sort of yearlong project, to solve the cold war and nuclear weapons. We read lots of articles and highlighted them. Then our team went to a competition where we were put in groups with other kids from other schools and had to negotiate. My team won by half a point. We were fifth graders and everyone else was eighth graders and I got full points in everything except for the part about respecting others' and facilitate discussion and I only got two out of three, but it's not my fault that Brian from team N was a dumbass. We won. One of the kids on my team died our senior year of high school from brain cancer.
That's a long way of saying that I have a memory of the cold war, but it was mostly a parlor trick. I was ten when the wall fell.
Like Matt, my earliest memories of events in the world are of the first Gulf War. I remember some vague stuff about Reagan, but I definitely didn't understand any of it.
When I was in 5th grade, I asked a nun at school what the Vietnam was about. She said it was an imperialist war and was wrong. I could see that would be wrong, but I thought it wasn't imperialist as we weren't trying to colonize like the Romans. She was unable to explain to me, or I to understand, that this was a different use of power. I understood it partly, but not completely.
At school here one of the professors subscribes to an e-mailing list that at the start of the school year, lists references that the incoming freshman class is unlikely to understand. Once he talked about the year the e-mail said, "This year's class has no meaningful memory of the Reagan administration."
I am trying so hard not to comment on youth's lack of experience. It is so unfair to them. It is also one of the frequent reminders that I am aging. It is so unfair (to me).
A good thing about being out of the academic racket is I don't get reminded of this ervery year. The students seem to stay perpetually young and seem to lose their memory of the past. I age and my history grows.
The first time I remember being aware of politics was the Ford-Carter election, when I was in the second grade. I remember lots of kids at school with campaign buttons pinned to them, which seems very strange in retrospect.
38: Yeah, the point of the mailing list is to remind professors to update their references and examples in class. (Anecdotal evidence suggests they need more than that: my advisor keeps asking me if I remember departmental goings on from 1996, and the junior faculty keep asking how coursework is going. yeesh.)
Years earlier, my mom forbade me from watching The Day After because I was supposedly too young (4th or 5th grade), but jeez, the teasers showed me everything I needed to have nightmares for weeks. Anyway, she said I could watch Silver Spoons instead. Turned out it was an episode in which Ricky dreamt he was President and had to decide whether to wage nuclear war.
"I remember some vague stuff about Reagan"
Now I understand why so many younger generation Chinese know practically nothing about the Cultural Revolution - the Chinese Government doesn't even HAVE to suppress or re-write history!
I suppose this happens everywhere - nearly everybody until they reach late teens/early twenties knows/understands practically nothing about government/politics/international relations etc. We all wait for the historians to get to work.
20: Surely it is no coincidence that they sound like a banshee.
49: Am I the only person with relatives who specifically threw dinner parties in order to sit around and tell family stories to the kids and explain what life was like Back In The Day?
Back in the day we used to throw dinner parties to tell stories about how back in the day we used to throw dinner parties to tell stories about how we used to throw dinner parties to tell
A tick I used when researching stuff at the tunr of the 20th century was to add 100 years to the dates. So someone born in the 1860s was my contemporary. I was able to make them be alive for me. The drawback was seeing how quickly the past became the past. Someone born in the 1860s was likely dead by 1940. It wasn't that long ago, just a bit more than a lifetime, but it seemed so ancient. Kids born today, their kids, will probably know me as some old guy in a photo. If I am lucky. Their kids will not knwo me at all.
Oh, I've heard plenty of stories about life back in the day. Both my father and my grandfather were in their late 30's when their first kids were born, so I've been filled in by primary accounts of everything from the Jazz Age on. I just don't have my own memories of much that happened before the 90's.
All of my great-grandparents were born roughly 100 years before me. It's easy to tell how old they were at various points from comparison to my age, and it leads to some interesting reflections on time and age.
56. Yeah, my greats were also abotu 100 years older than me. One of them lived until I was 2. There are pictures. I am named for him. I don't remember him at all. My grandmother's lived to 100. But if I have children these women wil just be stories and pictures. Life is short.
I suppose folks know that oldsters used to talk about where they were when the found out that JFK had been shot. That's right on the frontier for me -- I remember knowing of it shortly after, but do not remember the actual moment of learning of it.
My son was marveling the other day about what life must have been like before Windows 95. (He was born in late 1994).
Life without Windows 95. Ha! It was simpler, I'll say that. Mind you it was hard reading the punch tapes by hand. But we hired the blind to help us with that disability.
I have memories of Bush-Dukakis formed at the time of the race, at the very least which one we (I was in the booth) voted for. I have a couple of cold war is ending memories. I associate the Gulf War with the box we had by our library to put donations in. Born four or five years before teofilo and JAC.
I will spare you the long list of stuff I remember/experienced that everyone here thinks of as ancient history except to say that Charley Carp is right about the JFK assassination for my generation. I suppose for my father's generation, it was when they heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. For the generation in which most of the commenters here seem to fall, I guess it will be when they heard about the 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center.
Given how many common reference points and memories are quickly lost, as shown by everybody so far, I have to say what amazes me is what doesn't need to be explained.
A lot of popular music and television that I think of as very time-bound are nonetheless instantly recognised by people very much younger, such as my kids. I'm simply amazed at the currency of much seventies music on this blog, for instance. A couple of days ago I saw what must have been the third Three Dog Night reference in a month. I would never have expected that, and am disconcerted that that kind of stuff persists when so much else is forgotten.
I have an idea about this, but I've resolved to try to limit how much I try to express in individual comments, because I'm clearly writing in the wrong way for the form.
57 -- I think you might be my closest contemporary on this blog. (Well actually I reckon you are three years older than me and I'm pretty sure one or two people are closer chronologically but.) My wife and I were married pretty soon after the Gulf War -- well make that, we moved in together quite soon after it ended, and got married 2 years later -- and our child is close to the same age as yours.
I have no personal memory of the Vietnam War or Watergate, which I expect you Bitch and you 'Postropher both have, being as I was born in 1970; but picked up the cultural references to both quite early on. First election I really remember is 1980 though I have some fleeting images of 76 as well. (I have strong memories of the bicentennial.)
I experienced events at a remove from what will be common here, as I grew up in Canada, but I clearly remember when Eisenhower was president. My first presidential election to watch and wonder about the outcome was 1960.
72 -- that makes me chuckle a little because my first thought when I was composing my comment was to say something like "I have no personal memory of the Eisenhower administration".
M/tch, are you also the same age as me? Somehow I had got the impression you are but I'm not sure if that was based on anything you had actually posted.
9 hours from me, and probably from Texas! You'll be part of people checking in as they get up on those nights you stay up; other than that, you'll catch our late afternoon and evening threads when you get up.
Hey good news on the flag-burning front -- or at least what can pass for good news in these troubled times. Amendment defeated but the vote, 66 in favor, was the closest one yet. Ghod I hope we pick up some seats this fall. And Boo! Hiss! to my senator Robert Menendez.
The only cultural point of reference I still naturally have in common with the students is The Simpsons, though I think it's been getting less vivid over the years (for me as well as them, I don't watch it anymore).
I didn't see anybody put it this way, but this is what does it for me: college freshman entering this fall will, on average, have been born in 1988.
My kids, 16 and 13, use the Simpsons references almost as a lingua franca. And they recognise many forms, sequences and classic stories because they've seen parody versions on the Simpsons.
What amazes me, and my daughter, is that the Simpsons has run since the year before she was born. The idea of watching a show running since 1951 in 1968, as anything other than antique, does not compute for me.
I was born in 72 and have pretty good memories from the 70s and 80s. I remember the drought of 1976, for example. Mostly in terms of an endless expanse of sunny days and ice cream.
The Berlin wall came down when I was 17, so it's also pretty clear in my mind. Also, since I left school at 16, I was working before some of the people talking on this thread, and some of my students, were born!
But is continually renewed by cast changes and regenerations.
But in a way, that makes my point: in my youth, everything had to be really new. The idea of listening to music from before yesterday was alien, now it's universal. I did, but I was very historical and a musician to boot.
This is assuredly so, and probably explains a lot of our politics today. To the baby boom generation, the New Deal is just so old! Let's get rid of it and try something new!
I was born at the end of '68. I have vague memories of seeeing the evacuation of Saigon on TV, but not quite understanding what was happening. I don't remember Watergate proper, but do recall a babysitter explaining that Ford was president because the last one got fired for being a crook.
One of my favorite bar questions used to be: "What was the first scary movie you saw?" Good for establishing cultural markers. I'd leave it up to the answerer whether that meant the first movie that scared you versus the first horror movie. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory scared me—the girl who swelled up like a blueberry gave me nightmares—but Phantasm was the first horror movie I saw, which may explain a lot.
Yeah, I was thinking of that but it's hard to tease out a specific moment. The failed rescue, I vaguely remember. But mostly it's the T-shirts with Mickey Mouse saying, "Hey Iran!" and giving the finger.
Return To Oz was the first movie that really freaked me out, but I have no idea how long it had been out when I saw it. First horror movie was "Halloween", at a friend's house in sixth grade. That one had me checking the closests at night for a while.
I remember the hostage crisis as being a big deal too, but I don't think it is generationally defining in the way that JFK's assassination of the events of 9/11 are. I don't think the generation born around 1970 really has a big-deal unifying event, at least not a political one. I do think the advent of the Internet is important and unifying for a segment of that generation, and in a different way from how it is important and unifying to a much larger segment of the generation born around 1980.
Don't really remember my first horror film though I watched a couple. It wasn't really such a major part of my experience -- I didn't go to that many movies in general. I remember my younger brother was really into the horror films, and I think his first was Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street -- Checking dates at IMDB I reckon it was the latter, or else one of the Friday XIII sequels.
None of the political moments mentioned strikes me as a generational touchstone. Ford/Carter is the first political event I remember; the Iranian hostage crisis was something I was conscious of, but not focused on. I'm only a year or two younger than apo and slol, but I've got no firsthand memory of either Vietnam or Watergate. The Reagan assassination attempt is memorable primarily because my mother was rooting for it to be successful. (Kidding, mostly.)
Part of this may be explained by upbringing -- while my parents were firmly liberals, they weren't focused on current events from a political point of view. I'm not sure what happened -- they got disgusted enough by Watergate (which from stories, they were very attentive to) that they kind of fell away from paying attention to news, maybe. But I remember as a teenager feeling completely lost in relation to El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran-Contra, and similar events because I just couldn't figure out what was going on, and I wasn't getting it at home.
I remember the JFK assassination. Both of my parents burst out in tears at something they heard on the radio.
Anyway, this explains a lot. I had assumed more people in their 30's.
The earlierst television memories of my generation would be the Summer of funerals: Martin Luther King, followed shortly by RFK. I believe that significant parts of both were carried live by all of the networks in the middle of the day. Most memorable because both featured children about my age. (and both those guys were about my father's age then, and were younger than I am now). Mass media was also filled with urban riots and Vietnam carnage. It was a bad time to be five.
Seven was a beter year. We got to watch seeveral moon landings live on a huge black and white TV weheeled dinto our in the second grade classroom (the first one was in the Summer, and I watched with family at home).
Childhood pleasures you kids missed: tv commercials for cigarettes; candy cigarettes; riding in the front seat of the car on daddy's lap.
The first movie that truly freaked me out was Runaway, with Tom Selleck being chased by killer robot spiders. Some babysitter thought it would be OK for me to watch it. Gave me nightmares for weeks.
My earliest memories are Watergate and the fall of Saigon. My father was passionately interested in the investigations at the time and I remember being instructed to watch Nixon's resignation "so you can tell your children." (In one of those bitter/funny/satisfying twists of life my father finally learned who Deep Throat was two days before he died.) The '76 election is the first one I have any clear memories of. I was allowed to watch the late returns because my mother adored Carter and the School served us peanut butter sandwiches at lunch the next day. Strangely, I just realized recently that I remember even less of the '80 election.
Still around through the 70's. Candy seems to have gotten less weird than it was when I was a kid -- while we didn't get much of it, I remember a lot of strange things like candy cigarettes.
I remember candy cigarettes. I had them at my grandmother's house, but I couldn't have been older than five or so. So maybe through '84 or so?
A friend from college was in a car accident when he was about a year old; he wasn't in a car seat, just in his mother's arms in the front and no one was wearing seatbelts. (Everyone was fine except his mom had a broken arm.)
VW Bugs had a luggage shelf behind the back seat - I used to ride in there. (Oh, not often, but I was definitely climbing around back there while the car was moving when I was little.)
When all of my id was stolen in France, the embassy attache asked me a series of weird questions to establish I was an American. One of them was "where were you when the shuttle blew up?" So I guess that was a decent unifying memory for people about my age back then.
(He also asked me who my favorite character on "Friends" was, and for a moment, I was sure I was never going home.)
First movie I remember scaring me: Ten Little Indians.
First horror movie: it was translated into French as Sous-sol de la Peur!, but it was an American movie. No, wait, before that I saw exactly five minutes of The Birds.
The weirdest thing about the Benoit lists and what kids don't remember... my sister will be the college class of 2010, and things have changed so much between her childhood and mine. I had a record player when I was seven. She had a CD player at that age. My high school class was one of the last ones to be able to handwrite essays.. She's got sparknotes (and the disapproval of a big sister.)
I remember putting the red-tipped end of a candy cigarette in my mouth, and being told "that's the fire end." Half the cigarettes I'd seen in ashtrays had lipstick on their back ends — no filters on most then — which is what I thought was being represented by the red.
I used to kneel on the emergency brake between the bucket seats in my mom's Chevette. It was great--you heard better what people in the front were saying.
OK, I'm in about the same cohort as Cala's dad, and I agree about the JFK assassination (yes, we really can all remember what we were doing). But the defining year for the late boomers was surely 1968 - les événements in France, the Tet offensive and the Prague spring all coming hard on each others' heels. I think this is the experience you can blame for most elderly leftists.
Yeah, I was in third grade. They interrupted lessons, moved us into the crass-room with a tv, and had us watch the news. The news replayed the clip over and over again, and I was really angry that my teachers made us watch the shuttle blow up so many times.
Oh hell yes. Even scarier? H.R. Pufnstuf. I still get chills thinking the bloody red atop the sea of yellow evil. The experience definitely affects my entertainment choices to this day, though I couldn't begin to explain how.
Sitting in my office in Menden, Germany, where I commanded the 69th US Army Field Artillery Detachment. One of the officers of the British missle regiment we were stationed with came to my office to tell me and to offer his condolences. Which was very thoughtful. Of course, before the day was out the Brits were joking about it: ("What's NASA stand for? Need another seven astronauts. Need another shuttle also.") I miss those guys.
I was in first grade for the Challenger explosion. (I had to look up the year.) I was home sick from school watching it on the television because my mom knew I liked astronauts & shuttles. I had an inflatable shuttle when I was about four. My mom turned off the TV really fast, and most of what I remember are the interviews later with the teacher's husband.
I was already a lawyer that morning; I forget what I was working on.
I was in wood shop the afternoon of the Kennedy assassination. Actually, we were doing a drawing unit so were sitting quietly at tables with t-squares and big sheets of paper. Women teachers ran in distraught, so the instructor pulled a transistor radio out of his desk — who knew? — and we followed it from there.
126--That sounds almost exactly like my mother's memory of JFK's death.
As a kid, I remember being vaguely annoyed when she told me this memory--"who cares where you were when you heard?"--and now I expect I'll be just as annoying to young'uns when I remember where I was when I heard about 9-11. Something to look forward to!
I remember the Gulf War very vividly, even though I was, what, 8, at the time? I think it's because it was a huge deal for the American community living in Egypt, and there was constant talk about it, and bomb threats at our school, and there was a deal struck between CNN and Egyptian National Television and we watched it constantly.
In fact, I even remember the very day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, and what I was doing, and my father trying to explain Saddam Hussein to me.
I remember candy cigarettes and the '88 election. My school (in exurban TX—wait, were there exurbs then, or merely sparsely populated suburbs?) held a mock election, and it fiercely divided the class between Mexicans (who voted for Dukakis) and whites (Bush, obv). My first vote was for a Republican.
I remember watching the '88 election on television! And my parents and their friends (Republicans) saying nasty things about Dukakis.
I also remember the '92 election, because one of the fifth grade teachers (who wasn't mine, but who I liked and would hang out with.. yeah I was one of the weird kids who always liked hanging out with teachers) came dancing into our classroom singing "happy days are here again..." and then we got a big lesson about voting by absentee ballot.
127 -- where were you? I was in my office, on Broadway between Houston and Prince, and I heard about it when my wife (watching the news at home) called. It was my first day back at work after a couple of weeks I had taken off so we could go to Shanghai and adopt our daughter. The secretary, Doris, said she had been in the bathroom and heard an airplane flying overhead, and wondered why it was so low. My boss and I climbed up to the roof of the building and saw the building burning (only 1 at that point) and then went back up when we heard a second plane had crashed, and again when we heard the buildings had collapsed. Then I started walking home -- home was then in Jackson Heights. My wife and daughter and I went to her parents house on Long Island for the rest of the week --- I think it was that week or the following one that my boss let me know my position was being eliminated.
I remember getting yelled at on the playground in second grade.
Skinny boy: "Who are your parents voting for?"
Me: "Reagan, I think."
Skinny boy: "Reagan wants to blow everyone up! Reagan like nuclear bombs! Everyone will DIE if Reagan is president!"
Me: [Runs away, cries, and has recurring nightmares about getting blown up with nuclear weapons.]
My affinities with commentators seem to have little to do with age. Slolerner is the one who seems to share the most cultural reference points with me, and he's much younger. I think I have a lot in common with mcmc, who is in my cohort, but she doesn't share enough personal impressions for me to know for sure.
I remember Gulf War I and being very upset by it. At that age (junior high) I really didn't think war was possible in my lifetime. It seemed anachronistic -- something that societies did before they knew better and this was The Future.
I don't remember much about the actual politics but remember all of the yellow ribbons and listening to that Lee Greenwood song (with the messages from the troops overdubbed) over and over on the school bus.
My (now 17 YO) brother was just learning to talk and called coverage of the war on TV "airplane news". We were all glued to CNN, especially during the initial days of the war, and when he didn't feel like he was getting enough attention, he'd toddle over and turn off the TV and announce "No airplane news!" And he would correct us whenever we said something about a helicopter because "hell" is a bad word. It's a heckacopter.
Gulf War I was my first experience of getting breaking news online -- I was glued to whatever the appropriate Usenet group was, because I couldn't deal with the idiots in the TV room at my dorm.
131 -- hey I love to read your posts but I have not quite figured out who you are yet in the way I have the others listed. Not meaning t'be exclusive though.
I remember reading the paper the morning Iraq invaded Kuwait -- particularly I remember t because the language was German, of which my grasp is less than total -- I was working as a farm hand that summer in Reithofen, Bavaria. I remember being kind of shocked when I came home what a big deal it was in the U.S.
I was in a seminar (on "Religion and the Enlightenment"--HA!) until 11am. I heard about it because this rather ditzy student I ran into mentioned: "Hey, isn't it craa-zy about that plane that flew into the world trade center? I mean, that's soo wild!" I kinda staggered off to read the news online and to write a paper for another class that afternoon (which was of course cancelled). Later I went down to Riverside Park with some friends, where we watched the tanks roll in on the freeway.
It is interesting to me how different my experience of the first Gulf War was from that of everyone who watched it on TV. You all got to see missles exploding and generals doing briefings and analysts with fancy charts. I mostly got to see a whole lot of sand.
142: I'm surprised to hear that; my wife was teaching, freshman probably, and neither she nor they knew the towers had fallen, or the second plane, or that it was anything other than an accident until noon.
It's funny, because I think I spent a lot of time asking questions about war and politics when I was very young. Part of my parents' love story was that their marriage was delayed by my father fighting in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (and my mother not being able to fly to Egypt from the US), and I was always asking my dad to tell me stories about that time. Of course, I wanted political background--why were they fighting? I think I knew that there were three wars, 1956, 1967, and 1973, by age 6 or so. Learning about the Cold War factored into all of this. Of course, I think shortly after the Cold War and The Russians were explained to me, the Berlin Wall fell, and my dad called me into the living room to watch the coverage, and I was like "whoa! cool!"
I didn't believe it as it was happening. I was home with Newt (who was a month old) and Sally, and was watching a neighbor kid as well; I heard on the radio that a plane had crashed into the WTC, and assumed that it was a small plane and an accident, and then went out to the playground because the kids were getting antsy. And then the morning was this weird stream of people showing up at the playground who knew more and more stuff, until someone said the towers had fallen, which I didn't believe at first. Kevin's dad, who had been supposed to pick him up at the playground after an hour or so, didn't show, so I took the kids home around noon. Finally found Kevin's dad, and then we put the kids in the car and drove out to friends in Jersey. (Nothing rubs in the fact that Northern Manhattan isn't treated like a real place like the fact that they didn't bother to shut down the Broadway Bridge.)
I'm still embarrassed about having left the city -- we had relatives calling and telling us it was the only sensible thing to do, and we got stampeded. We came back the next day.
Ideal, did you get any counter-battery fire? Artillery was one branch of the Iraqi army that was widely respected, and that Canadian guy — Gerald Bull I think it was — had souped-up their guns.
Jeebus, maybe I do hate America. If 9/11 wasn't called "9/11," there's an even chance I wouldn't be able to tell you the date on which the attack occured. I do remember learning of it on my through Yahoo, somehow.
Does it clear things up, IDP, if I say that the ditzy student was someone I ran into after the class, who had seen the news on tv on her way to school?
I had a 9:30 class that morning (I believe it was a literature seminar: "The Concord Writers"), and 9:30 texas time was 10:30 in New York, so we got to class and my professor was very upset and told us what was going on, and said "I'm not holding fucking class today. Go home." I skipped the rest of my classes and sat all day watching tv with my roomates and smoking cigarettes and talking to my hysterical friends in NYC.
No. I in the 101st Airborne Division and we, along with the rest of the 18th Airborne Corps, were off on the left flank of the allied forces. Most of the fighting was on the right, near Kuwait. Indeed, we (the Division, not me personally) actually kicked off the ground war a couple of weeks early by clearing out the few remaining enemy forces in our sector with attack helicopters. So, when the war started, there were no enemy forces left for about 50 or 60 miles in, and what remained ran away if they could once the war started.
During the first Gulf War my older quasi-girlfriend [one of those is it platonic or is it not ones] had a younger brother who was with the 7th Armoured over there and her father, also in the army, was the guy detailed to travel round Stirlingshire informing people their sons had been killed.
I remember sitting in the nurses residence where she lived watching TV as the first air attacks happened. She was pretty freaked out, as you might expect.
I also remember one of the British newspapers leaked a story that the government had started printing call-up papers for a future contingency in which they might have to draft people. I have no idea if the story was true but it did make me think a lot about the possibility of being drafted. I was 18 at the time and prime draftee age.
You used to be able to see the towers from the street around the corner from me. I was walking to the subway shortly after the first plane hit, and saw a bunch of people looking up at it, and I watched the second plane hit. Saw the explosion.
I stayed in the city, and was tremendously lonely for a few days, because I was living by myself at the time and didn't have any friends living nearby. My mom, who lives (sort of) within walking distance, was out of town. I talked to people on the phone a lot, but didn't get to see any friends until the subway reopened. I might have made more of an effort to walk to someone's house, but didn't want to seem as freaked out as I was.
Too long for a memory of someone who was nowhere near New York, so just pretend you're the Calagrandchildren:
On 9/11 I was in a new consultants' training seminar in my very first Real Job in Cleveland. I had carpooled with another girl in her fancy black Jeep and we were in a conference room in the BP tower blearily listening to a presentation on how we should leverage our synergy or something after a night of going to a baseball game with the senior partner.
At around 10am, someone came in and switched on the TV and we thought it was a training video until we realized it was CNN and the screen was full of smoke. We were told to go home. We were in the hotel next door and we weren't allowed to go in and get our belongings and we had a very hard time getting her Jeep out of the underground parking garage because there was a bomb scare at the Cleveland airport and everyone in the city was doing their part to run madly to the barricades. The valet wouldn't give her her keys so we used her spare set, sat in traffic listening to the radio for two hours, then drove back to Pittsburgh. The next day my friend looked funny because all her makeup was in Cleveland.
Mostly I remember all the misinformation. No one knew how many planes were headed for potential targets, everyone was sure their building was next, and Cleveland cleared out pretty quick. The biggest source of confusion were the reports around Flight 93. Someone on a cell phone told us that a plane had hit Pittsburgh. Later we heard the plane went down in southwestern PA but maddeningly the national radio reports wouldn't give a town. By the time I got home I had several messages from worried college friends who hadn't heard anything but 'small town western PA.'
When I arrived at the house -- I was living at home at the time -- my sister tackled me. She was a very worried 12 year old because she just knew that office buildings had been hit with planes and her sister worked in an office building and though she knew I wasn't in New York she wasn't betting on anything.
I didn't see the footage of the crash until I got home that evening. I remember thinking 'what the hell. planes don't DO that and we don't catch it on TV when it does.'
I remember during the First Gulf War there were lots of silly songs about Saddam and my mom had a crush on a young 'Scud Stud' TV reporter.
I was in my Battery Park City apartment when the planes hit. The magnitude of what had happened and the fact that neighborhood was in danger didn't register at all - I called in and said I might work from home that day. I decided to try to go to work and went to the Bowling Green 4/5 subway station, where someone told me that the Pentagon and White House had also been attacked. I was trying to figure out what to do at that point (I didn't want to get stuck in the subway and crossing the Brooklyn Bridge didn't sound like a good idea) when all of the lights in the subway went out. I went outside and there was a loud roar and people running and I had no idea of what was going on but just ran with the crowd. Someone said the building was falling and I thought it was falling over, possibly towards us. We got enveloped in the big cloud of smoke and everything turned gray. I ran to the Staten Island Ferry terminal and hid in the men's bathroom through the fall of the second tower (which we didn't know of at the time) and until the smoke cleared. I made my way to our Wall Street office, and then went home with a coworker who lived in Chelsea and then caught a train to Long Island where I stayed with my boss for a week. There's a lot more to it but those are the broad strokes.
One of my friends here is from Israel and we were talking, a couple years ago, about the current mess in Iraq and how different it was from the first War, which I remembered as mostly a giant video game: Scuds get fired at Israel, Patriot missiles SHOOT THEM DOWN BOOM. Then I sheepishly remember that he's from Tel Aviv and probably didn't think it was fun but he laughed and said that for him, age 10, it was like a video game too and he and his friends climbed up on the roof to watch the lights in the sky because they were too young to quite understand the situation.
I was in Austin at Susan's house, and we were both sleeping in that day since we didn't hav eearly classes or strong work ethics. Her cell phone started going off at 8-9 am when her friend in NYC tried to call—by the time we woke up, the cell networks there weren't working. I remember sitting on the couch with Sue and the other couple staying at the house for a few hours, glued to the TV.
Later in the afternoon I went to my Bulgakov seminar, and I remember that it turned into a fierce and irritating debate about what a counterstrike should look like.
It's funny how different my experience was living in upper Manhattan, rather than downtown. I'm 10 or more miles from the WTC and didn't have much reason to go downtown for months after 9/11, so I've got none of the memories of smoke and dust that most New Yorkers have. I feel more like the out-of-towners who talk about it.
My mom has a complete set of Desert Storm trading cards. Just like baseball cards (with Stormin' Norman and Bush and Hussein being the rare and valuable cards) and even made by Topps.
Also, I know someone from NYC who lied about being there on 9/11. I imagine this happens frequently, like the several million Texans who watched the parade in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated.
Late to this thread, but per Clownaes's question above, I was born in August of 1968. I vaguely remember me and my older brother coming up with a scheme where we would hide and then jump out at just the right moment to catch those Watergate burglars grownups were talking about. I definitely remember the '76 election and the Bicentennial celebration.
For the 4th of July that year my mom made costumes for me, my brother, and my dad, and we did a reenactment of that "Spirit of '76" painting, marching up and down our block (there was no parade, it was just us three; lots of neighbors clapped). I was the one with the flute and the head bandage. And actually my dad was (slowly) riding his bike, to which he had attached a stick in front supporting a paper horse's head he had drawn with markers. I think there was a crepe paper tail in back, too.
I am sooo tempted to change my handle to "Sea Anonymi." But I won't. So it's up for grabs if any of the lurketariat want to claim it.
I am about apo's age, give or take a few months. I remember the Watergate hearings as some boring TV show that my parents watched. Of course, All the President's Men is now my all-time favorite movie.
My parents also had a John Denver 8-track tape. Ah, the memories. . .
I was at work when the first plane hit, and every news site on the web was completely swamped with traffic, so nobody could get updates. Finally somebody drove home and brought back a little TV and we all sat in a conference room and watched the news for the rest of the day.
I still have a working turntable and ~500 vinyl albums.
I was uptown too, LB. If I hadn't gone back to work downtown a week or so later--cough, gag--the whole event might have seemed like something I saw on TV. There were all of those terrifying fighter-jet noises for a month, though...
I was watching on our kitchen tv, getting the kids ready for school. I turned on between planes, but they had already gone live. The kids remember it very clearly, 11 and 9. When the second plane hit, it was plainer what was happening. An hour later, at work, I started monitoring it largely from the net, although I had a shortwave set. I was already heavily into blogs then, TPM was then my favorite. Do you remember what he'd spent the summer obsessed with? Chandra Levy.
On 9/11, I was in Austin in my second year of law school. I heard about the first plane hitting on NPR that morning, and by the time I was getting in the shower, both towers had been hit and they had gone to continuous coverage. The TV pictures of smoke coming out of the buildings reminded me of the earlier attack in '93: bad, sure, but not that bad.
So I was listening to NPR in the shower when suddenly the announcer (it's strange that I can't remember who it was now, Steve Inskeep?) just stopped talking for what was probably only seconds but sounded like a very long time. He then started sort of stammering and trying to get his voice back to announce that one of the towers was falling. I jumped out of the shower and turned the TV back on, and seeing the South Tower fall was when it really hit home that shit, this was serious.
I went to the law school because I was sort of a TA for a Bankruptcy class (I was enrolled in the class, but I was also a Research Assistant for the prof and I would often help distribute handouts and whatnot), and I wasn't sure if classes would be cancelled or anything. The prof was old-school, and as I had expected he insisted on having class and going about all our normal business normally to show those bastards they couldn't scare us. I definitely respected that, but I don't think anyone actually learned anything that day.
I wasn't at work. I was going to go in later. Instead I had gone to an AA group that meets Tuesday mornings in the US Capitol.
Afterwards some of us went for breakfast in the House Member's Dining Room. The waitress came by and told us about the 1st plane but didn't describe the damage. We just assumed it was a small plane and, although the weather was fantastic in DC, that NYC was foggy. She then told us about the second plane. That was odd.
I finished eating and left by the south entrance. I could then clearly see a huge cloud of smoke coming from Virginia. It semed to be from the airport, the Pentagon, or Crystal City. It was very heavy and dark and broad-based so I guessed it wasn't the airport. I got in my car and turned on the radio. That's when I heard it was the Pentagon. In all this time the Capitol remained unevacuated. (I was parked on the grounds, so I could see that everything was still calm. I heard that they started the evacuation shortly after I left.)
I headed home as I knew I wasn't going to work. I worked in the Pentagon. (My office was around an apex corner from the stricken wedge, so even if I had been there the worst I'd have dealt with was some smoke.)
My wife and I were in her crappy rented room way out in the bleak 'projects' on the northern edge of Prague and since we didn't have a TV or a radio we didn't even know anything had happened until the 10th.
On the 10th my wife was off working and I was in an internet cafe and had what seemed like a wierd email from a friend talking about being in the subway at the WTC but being 'OK'. I had no idea what he was talking about.
So we went off to my wife's sister's to watch the news. Czech news coverage was somewhat tasteless. One channel had slow mo' footage with Carl Orff's 'Carmina Burana' playing over it and a big voice intoning 'Utok na Ameriku'.
Also, the US embassy in Prague was surrounding by i) flowers, ii) heartbreakingly sweet drawings by Czech kids and iii) heavily armed Czech paramilitary style police. We passed one Skoda with a guy snoozing in it and on the passenger seat beside him was a pile of guns.
M/tch -- weird -- I don't think I had realized before just now that you're a lawyer. Had you mentioned that very often in your other comments, and I was just oblivious to it? I was wondering when reading one of your comments just yesterday, what you did for a living.
See, that's me looking at the 9/11 (where the date is written the wrong way round but where I've accepted the convention that that is how that day gets labelled) adding 1 day and getting the 10th.
I was at work when the first plane hit, and every news site on the web was completely swamped with traffic, so nobody could get updates. Finally somebody drove home and brought back a little TV and we all sat in a conference room and watched the news for the rest of the day.
I remember realizing how completely useless the internet was in terms of providing accurate, up-to-the -minute info on something like 9/11. I had a small radio in my desk drawer, and after I overheard an officemate mention something about planes hitting the World Trade Center I turned it on to NPR in time to hear Bush's speech announcing the attacks. People from adjoining cubicles and I were gathered around that radio for a good while.
Yes, the Cuban missile crisis and the JFK assassination are among my earliest memories. I should have earlier, but didn't pat much attention. Television and media were less important in the fifties.
But the above two were evening TV events, and we could go play. But they pulled us out of class to watch John Glenn, and that is a stronger memory.
Yeah, in any sane system 9/11 is the 9th of November, though.
It's only because 9/11 is such an iconic label and it would be churlish or rude to quibble about it every time it comes up that I use 9/11 to mean 11th of September.
71: I'm two years older than you, then. We lived together during the war, which of course actually means I lived alone in a town where I didn't know anyone. Fun times!
Re. Vietnam and Watergate--I have vague memories of them in the background, yes, as things my parents cared about deeply. There's video of them carrying me in an anti-Vietnam demonstration, for instance. But I don't have any "real" memories in the sense of understanding them: what I know I've learned from history. I imagine PK's memory of the current war will be much the same: as a vague sense of a Bad Thing that his parents were upset by, and as the base experience for a belief that War is Bad.
A friend of mine was in Prague on 9/11 and was deeply frustrated by her inability to get proper news coverage on any of the stations. She says she feels like she doesn't understand what happened the way that everyone else does.
Mr. B. had stayed home sick, so we slept in. When we got up he turned on the tv and they were talking about closing the border with Canada. I made some joke about "are we at war with Canada now?" and then the news kept talking about local stuff (by now it was mid-afternoon) and things were sounding weirder and weirder. Then they went back to New York and showed the footage of the first plane hitting the tower, and I said to Mr. B. who was in the bathroom, "omg, a plane hit the World Trade Center" and then, of course, found out it was actually two.
It was kind of an odd way to recreate the shock that everyone else had gone through a few hours earlier. Anyway, later all our friends and Mr. B.'s siblings came over to hang out at our place and watch TV and argue about whether or not we should automatically assume it was The Arabs.
186: I remember classes being cycled through to watch John Glenn, which was weird because there was nothing to see after the launch, which I had seen at home, I think. What you saw was one of two graphics: model Mercury capsule in front of slowly turning globe, and back of a pilot's helmet in front of a slowly turning globe.
One thing that struck me that day as I drove home was how unpanicked DC early on. I live a few miles south of the Pentagon (I love my commute) and drove ove the inner 14th St. bridge (sometime-HOV) and passed the building. I could see plenty of gawkers pulled over in the main line of 395 and the smoke billowing from the building. I felt a sense of some relief when I saw which side got hit. The building's renovation project had just finished in that area and folks were still moving into the offices. It wasn't until about 10-20 minutes after I passed the Pentagon that I heard sonic booms. The Air Force had arrived.
After I got home I watched about 30 minutes of TV before I couldn't take it anymore. I got my bike out and rode around the area. By then the reaction had set in and the roads were jammed.
In the days after, many chains ordered their DC area stores closed. So 2 or 3 days later Starbucks in Georgetown was still closed for security reasons. Yet, locally owned coffee shops were open.
I was a senior in high school on 9/11, I first heard about it from my choir conductor. Didn't realize that it was a big thing at first--classes kept going for a few hours after, until they sent us home after lunch. Strongest memory is of a good friend of mine; his father used to work in the Pentagon as a civilian lawyer for the army, but he had retired about a month before. We found out later that he had gone in that day to meet with (I think) the person who took over his job, and was among those killed. I was in English class with him half an hour before it all happened, I remember him just talking and laughing like on any other day. Our whole group was at his house pretty much continuously for the next week.
Yeah, all of my co-workers were getting their news from the internet and when I called them from our Wall Street office to tell them I was OK, they didn't believe the stuff I was telling them because it was like nothing they were seeing online at the time. I warned one of my co-workers who lived near me that she'd better find somewhere else to spend the night and we probably weren't going to be able to get back in our apartments for weeks and she dismissively said I was overreacting and we'd be back home that evening. I wanted to be like "Hello? Are you covered in soot? I'm covered in soot. I think I know what the hell I'm telling you."
M/tch -- weird -- I don't think I had realized before just now that you're a lawyer. Had you mentioned that very often in your other comments, and I was just oblivious to it? I was wondering when reading one of your comments just yesterday, what you did for a living.
I can't find the fairly recent post where I laid out my current life history (probably from January or February; why are the archives so hard to find anything in these days?), but I was a lawyer in NYC for a short time before deciding I really wasn't into it, whereupon I worked in a bakery there for a number of months, and then moved to Belgium for a number of months, and am now back in Texas. I'm currently doing development type work for the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas, and studying for the July Texas Bar (I'm not entirely sure why).
I was in Italy when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out, but not in Rome, where English language periodicals were easy to come by. My Italian being mostly limited to "where is the bathroom" and "another bottle, please", I couldn't quite figure out exactly what had happened, but it was clear that the US had been caught doing something very bad in their newly liberated playground.
When we got back to the villa that night, I was able to turn on CNN International and the BBC to get the whole story.
Living in St. Louis, I was woken up (I think I'd slept through my Contintental Rationalism class, but I'm not positive) by my father calling to tell me that two plane's had hit the Twin Towers. I said that was strange, but didn't yet understand that it meant a purposeful attack, being still half-asleep. My father got that point across to me. I got into the shower to wake up, and started to wonder if security had been increased on the water supply yet, and if this was be part of a larger series of attacks.
Not being in New York, while I recognized the geo-political importance of the events, it had very little personal effect. I remember talking to my parents a couple of weeks later, where they said everyone was still very down about it around them, while it didn't seem to change people's affect where I was. On the day of I was (I'm not sure if this says good or bad things about me) wondering what kind of uptick in domestic antipathy towards Muslims and people who looked Muslim would occur and whether we'd respond with a missle strike or somethign against whomever we thought was responsible. I paid a lot more attention to over-flying planes for months afterwards.
199 -- okay -- I remember that post except for the lawyerin' part. Just me being oblivious I guess.
198 -- I wanted to be like -- cool. I was wondering recently how one would say this, I thought it would probably just be "I was like" but apparently not.
I was born in 1982 but I have a crapload of references to older stuff that virtually none of my peers are familiar with, because my constant reading material was the "Bloom County" and "Doonesbury" and "Washingtoon" books my parents had lying around, as well as "Pogo" (although a lot of "Pogo" strips are just insanely boring when nobody can explain the context to you, especially the 30-40% of them that were parodies of the McCarthy hearings) and the books of P.G. Wodehouse and E. Nesbit.
I still have very strong opinions about James Watt, Caspar Weinberger and Jeane Kirkpatrick based on reading Bloom County at around 10 years old.
I suppose this happens everywhere - nearly everybody until they reach late teens/early twenties knows/understands practically nothing about government/politics/international relations etc.
I don't think I ever had a history class get past World War II. At least half of them ended in either the Gilded Age or just before the Depression. (final class: "And then there was a depression, because banks weren't insured. And then there was a war, which made everything better."
Return To Oz was the first movie that really freaked me out, but I have no idea how long it had been out when I saw it.
Oh man, those Wheelers were SO scary.
I don't think I actually saw a horror movie until I was in college. I saw no need to scare myself.
I remember Gulf War I and being very upset by it. At that age (junior high) I really didn't think war was possible in my lifetime. It seemed anachronistic -- something that societies did before they knew better and this was The Future.
I don't remember much about the actual politics but remember all of the yellow ribbons and listening to that Lee Greenwood song (with the messages from the troops overdubbed) over and over on the school bus.
Same thing for me, except that I was 7 or 8. I remember some student's mom had been over there and she gave a big speech to the whole school and it was the biggest event I'd ever experienced.
During the 1992 election I was in 5th grade. My "gifted" class went around and did a survey of who the kids wanted to be president. Bush got about 85% of the votes, presumably because of name recognition.
I vaguely remember one of the smarter kids warning us about Perot because Perot wanted to do away with summer vacation.
I started watching the nightly news when I was three, and read the newspaper every day from the time I could make out most of the words. My parents bought me a dictionary and a globe so I could find the words I didn't understand, and see where in the world all these things were taking place. By the age of 8 I was arguing with my dad about politics and whether Reagan should be re-elected.
I'm 28 and I remember Reagan being shot, I remember being afraid of Gorbechev, and then being impressed with him not much later. I remember the Soviets in Afganistan and I remember how exciting it was when Reagan and Gorbechev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces arms limitation treaty.
I remember Bruce McCandless II and his Manned Maneuvering Unit, the first un-tethered space walk (that was The! Coolest! Thing! EVAR!!!). I was the reason my whole second grade class watched the Challenger explode—because I wanted to be an astronaut. I remember answering my parent's friend's questions of, "So, do you still want to be an astronaut?" with, "Yes, sometimes things blow up. I still want to go."
In fact all of my early memories are of politics or major world events. In my head I can still see the grainy video of the MMU outside the shuttle, but I can't remember what any of my teachers looked like, or their names. I can't remember any of my friends names from before about 6th grade. Except for the pictures, I can't remember what the house I lived in looked like or my first dog's name. All my early memories are of other people, other things, in far off places.
I can't figure out if that should make me sad.
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I Can't Put Esquire After My Name |
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06-28-06 10:36 AM
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I hapenned to be wearing a shirt that day that said "I
I was in Pittsburgh when 9/11 occurred...as you may remember, the news stories were about two planes striking in NYC, one in Washington, and one in Pittsburgh. (it was actually in a rural area over an hour away, but you know how small the amounts of data are that actually get transmitted to people by news stories.) There were certainly plenty of calls from people to make sure I was all right...and I just kept saying "I don't think Pittsburgh was hit by a plane. All the stores are closed, though. Are they hiding the facts?" A day later everyone knew where the other plane had crashed, though.
Of course, walking through the campus, I heard that R.E.M. song playing through at least four different windows. Smartasses.
I was DJing a 2am-6am shift at UNC's student radio station when a stranger called out of the blue to tell me that Gorbachev had been overthrown in a coup. For some reason, I was kinda shaken by the news.
IDP, do you remember the Nixon-Kennedy debates? I am also waiting for Gary to show up and tell us that his earliest memory (political-type) memory is the appointment of one of Eisenhower's Assistant Attorneys General from when he (Gary) was still in the womb. I kid because your memory appears to be prodigious.
Instead I had gone to an AA group that meets Tuesday mornings in the US Capitol.
Leo?
I see that this was a joke, but with all the anonymity around here I often wonder as I hit the "Post" button whether the bit of personal info I'm about to divulge will prompt someone to ask a similar question of me.
I also sometimes imagine a scenario wherein I'm hanging out with some old friends from college, and one of them will say something which will prompt me to do a double-take and say, "Holy shit! Standpipe??!!"
My memory and tendency to replay my life, looking for turning points and roads not taken, has given me no end of grief on B's threads the last couple of days; I need some serious letting-go.
I do remember the Kennedy/Nixon debates, but not following the issues. I'm sure it was gibberish to me. My brother has one of the first names of the candidates, I have the other, so my dad assigned us who to root for. My dad was pretty far left, he must have thought there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between them.
Gary, on the other hand, although 18 mos old at the time, may well have been trying to explain Quemoy and Matsui, as well as the missile gap. But did we listen?
I once had a summer job watching, on fast forward, pretty much every Universal (I believe it was them, small chance of a different company) newsreel made between the early 50s and the early 60s. The company I was working for had bought the rights to all of them, but the previous cataloging was inaccurate and they didn't know what was where on the tape, and I had to find out. Otherwise I would never have heard of Quemoy and Matsui. One of the other things I remember first (and until very recently only) learning about from those was when the small group of Puerto Rican nationalists started shooting in the Capitol building.
I was startled to hear a group of college students in the mid-90s split down the middle, in defining the first major news story of their memory, between the Challenger disaster and Magic Johnson's announcement that he had HIV.
This was a group of mostly white, middle- and upper-middle class kids. Maybe it's the difference between being a basketball fan and not, or being particularly plugged in to celebrity stories as opposed to world events. I was amazed, though -- I would have thought of two or three dozen other events before I would ever have named that one.
That was the summer after I graduated from high school. My mom woke me up (at around noon, natch) to tell me about it. I remember very clearly thinking we were going to get involved in a military intervention in a Russian civil war, and being pissed that all my college plans had just got sent out the window.
I remember the '92 election pretty well, but just because my parents were really enthusiastic about it. They even got me a t-shirt with a picture of Clinton wearing sunglasses and playing the saxophone. My mom also had a friend of hers who worked at the Capitol give my Cub Scout pack a tour of the place just before innaguration, and we got to go up to the platform where Clinton was sworn in a few days later. The construction workers were still installing the belletproof glass panels when we were there. I was very excited watching the ceremony on tv, I kept yelling "I was standing right there!" I'd say it was because I was in third grade, but an equivalent situation would probably get a similar reaction from me even now.
I worked 3rd shift in 2001, and my shift ended at 9am EDT. I remember a co-worker cracking a joke about a drunk pilot (the news services were reporting it was a light plane) and then wondering why all the news sites had gone down simultaneously. I was stuck for a while working on an issue, and was there long enough for us to figure out that there was a lot more going on than one drunk pilot. When I got in my car to go home that morning, the BBC was talking about the leader of the Northern Alliance being assassinated and I remember thinking, Who the fuck are they? Ah, ignorance. I couldn't sleep that day because I was freaked out by the news, so a roommate whose office's cable was out called me and I relayed events, sitting at home alone and watching CNN with his cat. He was telling me that a friend of his from college worked in one of the towers when they started collapsing.
We lived out in the country but under a flight path at the time (everything here is under a flight path) and when I finally went to bed around 2pm that day I couldn't go to sleep for all the silence.
The big 'I remember where I was' thing for me was definitely the Challenger explosion. I was in 6th grade, it was a teacher work day, I was watching the launch on TV. I knew immediately that it was destroyed, and picked up the phone to call my best friend (also a space nerd) to tell him to turn on the TV. I got a busy signal, hung up, got a call from him a few minutes later; we'd been trying to call each other at the same time. I cried so hard over it that it broke me of any stupid 'boys don't cry' bullshit I might have acquired by that point.
I do, however, remember the Reagan shooting, and have very vague memories of seeing Carter on TV. I also remember being given a yellow ribbon to wear when I was in kindergarten and the Iranian hostage thing was going. I remember having very vivid dreams about it, but remember nothing about the events themselves.
I was wearing a shirt that said "I [heart] you, Saudi Arabia" (complete with picture of dude on a camel), and my best friend was wearing a shirt that said "Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society". That's when we figured we should go home.
226: Foiled again. If only it weren't for those pesky commenters. Or, alternatively: Nah, it's only my repeatedly stated gender which long-time commenters are confused about.
On election night in '92, everyone in my dorm was glued to the TVs in the TV lounges. I was on an elevator, that opened facing one of those lounges, and when it stopped on a lower floor to let on some drunk fratboy I heard them calling it for Clinton and the fratboy yelled, "THAT'S MY MAN, WOOOOOOO!" and I remember thinking, What on earth made this guy like Clinton?, which just goes to show that I have a total tin ear.
I was 14 in '88, but looked older, and the woman at the registration table at my parents' polling site tried to give me ballots because she thought I was a voter. She didn't realize I was there because my parents made us go with them every time they voted in hopes we'd realize how important it was.
My memory of the Challenger is about the same as JM's, I think. Maybe we even went to the same school (unlikely). Although it's a vague enough memory that I wonder if I was actually at home.
I remember Bush's inauguration in 1988 specifically enough to remember watching it on tv, and not caring.
At the start of the first Gulf War my junior high organized an antiwar protest. The administration threatened to suspend anyone who walked out of afternoon classes, but no one was punished. My thought process was that I guess I'm against the war, but I haven't really given a lot of thought to it, and, oh, I'm 12 and no one really cares if I protest. The students organizing things were convinced they'd get the walkout on tv and have some kind of an impact. I didn't walk out and to this day I'm completely indifferent on whether or not I should have walked out. I remember my parents asking me what it would take for me to join in a protest and thinking, why don't you ask me again if I'm ever in a position to do something that matters.
I slept in on September 11th, waking up at about 11 am pacific time after everything was over. I remember wondering, quite earnestly I suppose, if I really should be going to grad school instead of doing something like working in foreign affairs. I began classes two weeks later. I would say that those attacks, plus the current war in Iraq are what finally convinced me that I'd better start paying attention to politics specificaly rather than just current events generally. The first major election I ever voted in was the California recall in 2003. I've been registered since 1997, but only because I marked the voter registration box on my driver's license application; had I gotten my license before I was 18 I may never have registered at all.
That's exactly what I said to a couple friends that day. And later on in the evening, sitting with my roomates on the back porch, I said that if it turned out to be Muslim fundamentalists, that this country was going to go to hell in a handbasket and that world politics was about to get seriously, seriously fucked up.
I don't remember an elementary school song, but the school's name sounded like a hurried weather phenomenon. I don't think very many people went to that (private) elementary school and my (public) middle school in a neighboring town, but that may have only applied to people in my grade.
I don't remember the Magic Johnson announcement, but I do remember when he went on Nick News (w/ Linda Ellerbe) and talked to a bunch of kids who were HIV-positive. I have a surprisingly clear memory of that whole episode, come to think of it.
A respected co-worker and superior came up to me, with tears in his eyes, and said "Magic Johnson has aids." I'm sure I responded appropriately, but I was amazed at the significance it had for him.
I was born in '71 and I remember the hostage crisis. When it first started I was at my Polish grandparents' house and I remember I kept getting shushed because everyone (aunts, uncles, parents) were intently focused on the news. For a long while I assumed that the crisis was taking place in Poland since that side of the family was so interested.
I used to work in the World Financial Center, but quit my job and moved to St. Louis about two weeks before 9/11. That day we were supposed to fly from St. Louis to Denver at 10am. We drove instead.
Y'all are dredging up some memories. The event that most upset me when I was a kid was when Samantha Smith died in a plane crash. She was just about my age, and similarly politically obsessed, and cute, and I had a big crush on her, and had seen her on the Tonight Show and suddenly...dead. It was on the news for a day or two, not really a big deal, but I was stunned for weeks.
Something I've been wondering, since I don't really have a good sense of the timeline...was Magic Johnson around the time when AIDS stopped being seen as an exclusively homosexual disease?
I was very aware of Ted Kennedy's run in 1980. I think my dad knew someone working on the campaign. I probably became aware of the Chapaquidick problem at that time.
I remember Chappaquiddick, and how it took place during the moon landing in '69. I remember the Martha's Vinyard sheriff, one of those temporary national figures who ends up getting a little paragraph obit — don't know that he's dead yet. Dominic Arena.
I can't think of what elementary school you might have gone to--certainly not mine, at any rate. We might have been at the same middle school, though. Had it been closed for a couple of years and reopened as a magnet school, only shortly to run almost entirely out of money?
You sure it wasn't about the S-K breakup?
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:07 PM
Funny, because I sounded very much like the Emergency Broadcast System attention signal when I heard the news.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:08 PM
Did you youngin's (the early-20s crowd) grow up listening to the Emergency Broadcast System signal all the time like we did? I vividly remembering it all the time when I was little (they always tested it before Sesame Street) but not so much in later years.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:10 PM
I do. And I saw it the other night, too—it interrupted Deadwood.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:11 PM
Oh, man. Seeing it on TV would be even cooler. Did it scroll the text or was it the awesome color separation bars?
(Interrupting Deadwood - not so cool, though.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:13 PM
Yeah, I remember it.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:14 PM
Huh. Wikipedia says the tests were phased out in 1997. I would have guessed sooner. I doubt my little brothers would know what it is.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:17 PM
That sounds about right. I remember them on PBS when I was a little kid, but not so much later.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:19 PM
I definitely remember them on TV all the time when I was a kid. But I'm not in my early twenties anymore (sniff).
Posted by Sommer | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:31 PM
Wow, just last night I was explaining a joke in Calvin and Hobbes to my boyfriend's 8-year-old about the Emergency Broadcast System. Not that it was funny after I explained it. These kids today!
Posted by A White Bear | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:33 PM
I think we get tests here in Texas. Not only radio/tv, and Amber Alerts, but outside sirens on a regular basis. But in the twenty years I have lived in this house, I have probably had tornados within a mile or two 5 times. So we have our reasons.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:39 PM
It came on in the middle of the World Cup games and Comcast stopped showing the game to put up a full screen of text. I was pissed. I knew it was raining buckets. That's why I was not out on Shirley Highway.
The old whistle signal was scarier than the new bzzt bzzt bzzt that I hear nowadays. The higher probabilty of nuclear war might have colored my perceptions.
Do you remember car radios having markings for the CONELRAD frequencies? That was another reminder.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:44 PM
Hey, AWB, are you around??? Hint, hint.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:44 PM
I definitely remember them. And they still do them on the radio here - heard one on NPR just a couple of months ago.
(The fact that NPR is one of only two stations I've set on my car stereo should indicate that I am not in my early 20's anymore. The other, however, is a college station.)
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:44 PM
12: the town where I grew up had an old air raid siren from WWII (according to my parents) that still worked. By the time I was a kid able to remember it (late '70s, '80s), it was the nuke siren. That my town would get nuked was laughable, but hey.
Every now and then they'd test it. Freakiest of all the man-made sounds of my childhood, by far. I lived in a rural area, but that sound would drift over the mountains for miles on end. By the time it reached us, it was very faint but in its own way that made it even more disturbing.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:49 PM
10: That 8-year-old wasn't even alive when Calvin & Hobbes stopped running. Weird.
It's kind of funny that depending on who I'm talking to, being in my early 20's makes people consider me either a mere child or shockingly old. I keep going back and forth, it's giving me whiplash. Right now I'm in an "oh god, I'll be 22 in 2 months!" phase.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:50 PM
I'm not in my early 20s anymore, either. I was just asking if the young folk knew of 'em.
And as someone with a basement apartment, I would like to sing the praises of whoever waterproofed this place. Woo-hoo! I really expected to have water in here by now. (fingers crossed)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:52 PM
And I definately remember those tests, but only from when I was pretty young. Color bars and all...drove me insane.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:54 PM
You're only 21, Matt? I thought you were older, what with the real job and all.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:55 PM
15. That is eerie. I think of sirens like that not as warnings of imminent attack on a little burg, but as mournful cries for the end of times. Funeral bells just before the fact.
I still have dreams about a nuke going off. I was born in the early 60's so I guess I am in the last cohort that got the full CD experience.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:57 PM
Perils of dropping out of school. You have to start, like, paying bills and everything. Consider this a public service announcement.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:58 PM
Will do.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 10:59 PM
I have no memory of the Cold War.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:00 PM
Consider this a public service announcement
weeeeOOOOeeeeeOOOOOOOOsshhhhh.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:01 PM
23 - Wow.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:03 PM
I vaguely remember discussing the first gulf war one day in first grade, but don't remember the cold war either. The closest thing is that I remember being freaked out by the Ronald Reagan mask a neighbor kid wore for halloween one year.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:03 PM
Consider this a public service announcement
With guitar?
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:03 PM
hm?
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:06 PM
When I was ten I was in one of those annoying special programs for bright kids and we had to figure out how, as a sort of yearlong project, to solve the cold war and nuclear weapons. We read lots of articles and highlighted them. Then our team went to a competition where we were put in groups with other kids from other schools and had to negotiate. My team won by half a point. We were fifth graders and everyone else was eighth graders and I got full points in everything except for the part about respecting others' and facilitate discussion and I only got two out of three, but it's not my fault that Brian from team N was a dumbass. We won. One of the kids on my team died our senior year of high school from brain cancer.
That's a long way of saying that I have a memory of the cold war, but it was mostly a parlor trick. I was ten when the wall fell.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:07 PM
28 - Given that this thread is about what people in different age cohorts do and do not know, I should have guessed.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:08 PM
Who are The Clash?
(kidding!)
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:10 PM
Like Matt, my earliest memories of events in the world are of the first Gulf War. I remember some vague stuff about Reagan, but I definitely didn't understand any of it.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:10 PM
28: YOU KIDS GET OFFA MY LAWN! (23 too. And the one who claimed not to be alive when Echo and the Bunnymen were around.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:10 PM
Get back to work, Bruce.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:11 PM
I have no memory of the Cold War.
Holy shit.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:12 PM
Somewhat a parlor trick.
When I was in 5th grade, I asked a nun at school what the Vietnam was about. She said it was an imperialist war and was wrong. I could see that would be wrong, but I thought it wasn't imperialist as we weren't trying to colonize like the Romans. She was unable to explain to me, or I to understand, that this was a different use of power. I understood it partly, but not completely.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:13 PM
At school here one of the professors subscribes to an e-mailing list that at the start of the school year, lists references that the incoming freshman class is unlikely to understand. Once he talked about the year the e-mail said, "This year's class has no meaningful memory of the Reagan administration."
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:15 PM
I am trying so hard not to comment on youth's lack of experience. It is so unfair to them. It is also one of the frequent reminders that I am aging. It is so unfair (to me).
A good thing about being out of the academic racket is I don't get reminded of this ervery year. The students seem to stay perpetually young and seem to lose their memory of the past. I age and my history grows.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:17 PM
The first time I remember being aware of politics was the Ford-Carter election, when I was in the second grade. I remember lots of kids at school with campaign buttons pinned to them, which seems very strange in retrospect.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:18 PM
37: That was probably my year, or maybe the one before.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:19 PM
37 - That would be the Beloit Mindset List.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:19 PM
38: Yeah, the point of the mailing list is to remind professors to update their references and examples in class. (Anecdotal evidence suggests they need more than that: my advisor keeps asking me if I remember departmental goings on from 1996, and the junior faculty keep asking how coursework is going. yeesh.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:20 PM
Oh, thanks Becks!
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:22 PM
2. They have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era, and did not know he had ever been shot.
Yup, entering class of 2002.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:23 PM
My dad once GA'd for a professor who made frequent references to Vietnam. This was in the mid-90s.
(I was 2003.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:23 PM
#9 on that list is Orwellian. I wonder how many other references they slip in?
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:25 PM
Oops. Graduating class of 2002. I was 2001. It's not listed anymore, but if this is 2002, then:
8. They are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up.
Is probably an exaggeration. I was home from school and I watched it on the little television in the kitchen.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:27 PM
I was in high school when the wall fell.
Years earlier, my mom forbade me from watching The Day After because I was supposedly too young (4th or 5th grade), but jeez, the teasers showed me everything I needed to have nightmares for weeks. Anyway, she said I could watch Silver Spoons instead. Turned out it was an episode in which Ricky dreamt he was President and had to decide whether to wage nuclear war.
Thanks, mom.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:29 PM
"I remember some vague stuff about Reagan"
Now I understand why so many younger generation Chinese know practically nothing about the Cultural Revolution - the Chinese Government doesn't even HAVE to suppress or re-write history!
I suppose this happens everywhere - nearly everybody until they reach late teens/early twenties knows/understands practically nothing about government/politics/international relations etc. We all wait for the historians to get to work.
Posted by Her Torquewrench | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:29 PM
20: Surely it is no coincidence that they sound like a banshee.
49: Am I the only person with relatives who specifically threw dinner parties in order to sit around and tell family stories to the kids and explain what life was like Back In The Day?
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:32 PM
Who needs a memory hole when time will do it for you?
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:32 PM
50: That may be a southern thing.
Just to clarify, I was entering class of 2003, graduating class of 2007.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:35 PM
Back in the day we used to throw dinner parties to tell stories about how back in the day we used to throw dinner parties to tell stories about how we used to throw dinner parties to tell
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:35 PM
A tick I used when researching stuff at the tunr of the 20th century was to add 100 years to the dates. So someone born in the 1860s was my contemporary. I was able to make them be alive for me. The drawback was seeing how quickly the past became the past. Someone born in the 1860s was likely dead by 1940. It wasn't that long ago, just a bit more than a lifetime, but it seemed so ancient. Kids born today, their kids, will probably know me as some old guy in a photo. If I am lucky. Their kids will not knwo me at all.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:39 PM
Oh, I've heard plenty of stories about life back in the day. Both my father and my grandfather were in their late 30's when their first kids were born, so I've been filled in by primary accounts of everything from the Jazz Age on. I just don't have my own memories of much that happened before the 90's.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:46 PM
All of my great-grandparents were born roughly 100 years before me. It's easy to tell how old they were at various points from comparison to my age, and it leads to some interesting reflections on time and age.
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:47 PM
my earliest memories of events in the world are of the first Gulf War
Okay, my husband was in that war, and we got married just when it ended. You are nowhere near old enough to be a grownup.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:51 PM
The 1918 Beloit Mindset List. (Like most things McSweeney's, not that funny but a cute idea.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:52 PM
56. Yeah, my greats were also abotu 100 years older than me. One of them lived until I was 2. There are pictures. I am named for him. I don't remember him at all. My grandmother's lived to 100. But if I have children these women wil just be stories and pictures. Life is short.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-27-06 11:55 PM
I suppose folks know that oldsters used to talk about where they were when the found out that JFK had been shot. That's right on the frontier for me -- I remember knowing of it shortly after, but do not remember the actual moment of learning of it.
My son was marveling the other day about what life must have been like before Windows 95. (He was born in late 1994).
Posted by CharleyCarp | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:14 AM
Life without Windows 95. Ha! It was simpler, I'll say that. Mind you it was hard reading the punch tapes by hand. But we hired the blind to help us with that disability.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:24 AM
I can touch the floor with my palms quite easily. When I'm sitting down.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 1:18 AM
This is the wrong thread, isn't it.
In that case I don't have much of a memory of the Regan Adminitration, but I do remember the 1980s.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 1:19 AM
I don't remember the Reagan Administration either.
(I'm actually sober, but quite tired.)
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 1:21 AM
I have memories of Bush-Dukakis formed at the time of the race, at the very least which one we (I was in the booth) voted for. I have a couple of cold war is ending memories. I associate the Gulf War with the box we had by our library to put donations in. Born four or five years before teofilo and JAC.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 1:36 AM
I don't have any memories of the Cold War, and I'm easily old enough to. I also know that The Clash are a musical group, but that's all.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 2:40 AM
*expires from old age*
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 4:27 AM
Where's John Emerson to make me feel less aged?
I will spare you the long list of stuff I remember/experienced that everyone here thinks of as ancient history except to say that Charley Carp is right about the JFK assassination for my generation. I suppose for my father's generation, it was when they heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. For the generation in which most of the commenters here seem to fall, I guess it will be when they heard about the 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center.
Now you kids get off my lawn!
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 4:45 AM
Given how many common reference points and memories are quickly lost, as shown by everybody so far, I have to say what amazes me is what doesn't need to be explained.
A lot of popular music and television that I think of as very time-bound are nonetheless instantly recognised by people very much younger, such as my kids. I'm simply amazed at the currency of much seventies music on this blog, for instance. A couple of days ago I saw what must have been the third Three Dog Night reference in a month. I would never have expected that, and am disconcerted that that kind of stuff persists when so much else is forgotten.
I have an idea about this, but I've resolved to try to limit how much I try to express in individual comments, because I'm clearly writing in the wrong way for the form.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 5:20 AM
63 -- but do you remember the Goneril administration?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 5:49 AM
57 -- I think you might be my closest contemporary on this blog. (Well actually I reckon you are three years older than me and I'm pretty sure one or two people are closer chronologically but.) My wife and I were married pretty soon after the Gulf War -- well make that, we moved in together quite soon after it ended, and got married 2 years later -- and our child is close to the same age as yours.
I have no personal memory of the Vietnam War or Watergate, which I expect you Bitch and you 'Postropher both have, being as I was born in 1970; but picked up the cultural references to both quite early on. First election I really remember is 1980 though I have some fleeting images of 76 as well. (I have strong memories of the bicentennial.)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 5:56 AM
I experienced events at a remove from what will be common here, as I grew up in Canada, but I clearly remember when Eisenhower was president. My first presidential election to watch and wonder about the outcome was 1960.
Posted by i don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:03 AM
72 -- that makes me chuckle a little because my first thought when I was composing my comment was to say something like "I have no personal memory of the Eisenhower administration".
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:07 AM
And you probably thought that because it is so typical for boomers. You may not remember any president before Carter.
Posted by i don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:10 AM
I'm pretty sure one or two people are closer chronologically
LB, ac, and I were all born in '70 or '71, I think, and some of the anonymi are around that age too.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:18 AM
What time is it there, Weiner?
Posted by i don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:20 AM
Yeah, and I think you, Bitch, and LB are the posters I feel like I have the most in common with. Huh.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:21 AM
M/tch, are you also the same age as me? Somehow I had got the impression you are but I'm not sure if that was based on anything you had actually posted.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:23 AM
IDP, 10:22 pm on Wednesday. I'm "working" late on my presentation for Monday.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:24 AM
9 hours from me, and probably from Texas! You'll be part of people checking in as they get up on those nights you stay up; other than that, you'll catch our late afternoon and evening threads when you get up.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:30 AM
I remember when all this were nowt but fields.
Posted by gonerill | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:47 AM
Hey good news on the flag-burning front -- or at least what can pass for good news in these troubled times. Amendment defeated but the vote, 66 in favor, was the closest one yet. Ghod I hope we pick up some seats this fall. And Boo! Hiss! to my senator Robert Menendez.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:49 AM
The only cultural point of reference I still naturally have in common with the students is The Simpsons, though I think it's been getting less vivid over the years (for me as well as them, I don't watch it anymore).
I didn't see anybody put it this way, but this is what does it for me: college freshman entering this fall will, on average, have been born in 1988.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:52 AM
(Bill Frist: "Old Glory lost today."
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:57 AM
)
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:57 AM
My kids, 16 and 13, use the Simpsons references almost as a lingua franca. And they recognise many forms, sequences and classic stories because they've seen parody versions on the Simpsons.
What amazes me, and my daughter, is that the Simpsons has run since the year before she was born. The idea of watching a show running since 1951 in 1968, as anything other than antique, does not compute for me.
Posted by i don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 6:58 AM
I believe you watch Doctor Who, IDP, which started in 1963.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:07 AM
I was born in 72 and have pretty good memories from the 70s and 80s. I remember the drought of 1976, for example. Mostly in terms of an endless expanse of sunny days and ice cream.
The Berlin wall came down when I was 17, so it's also pretty clear in my mind. Also, since I left school at 16, I was working before some of the people talking on this thread, and some of my students, were born!
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:08 AM
87 -- but the Simpsons is recognizably the same show it was in its first few seasons, whereas Dr. Who changes radically every little while.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:10 AM
I don't get the allegedly lack of cultural reference points with the young'uns though. I listen to most of the same music they do, etc.
I share *their* cultural reference points, they just don't share mine.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:11 AM
But is continually renewed by cast changes and regenerations.
But in a way, that makes my point: in my youth, everything had to be really new. The idea of listening to music from before yesterday was alien, now it's universal. I did, but I was very historical and a musician to boot.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:11 AM
in my youth, everything had to be really new
This is assuredly so, and probably explains a lot of our politics today. To the baby boom generation, the New Deal is just so old! Let's get rid of it and try something new!
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:14 AM
I was born at the end of '68. I have vague memories of seeeing the evacuation of Saigon on TV, but not quite understanding what was happening. I don't remember Watergate proper, but do recall a babysitter explaining that Ford was president because the last one got fired for being a crook.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:18 AM
One of my favorite bar questions used to be: "What was the first scary movie you saw?" Good for establishing cultural markers. I'd leave it up to the answerer whether that meant the first movie that scared you versus the first horror movie. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory scared me—the girl who swelled up like a blueberry gave me nightmares—but Phantasm was the first horror movie I saw, which may explain a lot.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:25 AM
My dad says that JFK's assassination and the moon landing were the big ones for his generation (he would have been ten and seventeen then.)
Me, pretty much 9/11. Maybe the challenger explosion, which I remember pretty clearly, but I don't remember the date.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:31 AM
I'm only a little younger than apo, and have similar recollections---a little of Watergate, less of Vietnam. Definitely Reagan getting shot.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:35 AM
The Iranian hostage situation is a big one for me, though that took place over a long period, rather than a singular event.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:35 AM
The Iranian hostage situation
Yeah, I was thinking of that but it's hard to tease out a specific moment. The failed rescue, I vaguely remember. But mostly it's the T-shirts with Mickey Mouse saying, "Hey Iran!" and giving the finger.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:37 AM
Return To Oz was the first movie that really freaked me out, but I have no idea how long it had been out when I saw it. First horror movie was "Halloween", at a friend's house in sixth grade. That one had me checking the closests at night for a while.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:37 AM
I remember the hostage crisis as being a big deal too, but I don't think it is generationally defining in the way that JFK's assassination of the events of 9/11 are. I don't think the generation born around 1970 really has a big-deal unifying event, at least not a political one. I do think the advent of the Internet is important and unifying for a segment of that generation, and in a different way from how it is important and unifying to a much larger segment of the generation born around 1980.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:41 AM
Don't really remember my first horror film though I watched a couple. It wasn't really such a major part of my experience -- I didn't go to that many movies in general. I remember my younger brother was really into the horror films, and I think his first was Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street -- Checking dates at IMDB I reckon it was the latter, or else one of the Friday XIII sequels.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:45 AM
None of the political moments mentioned strikes me as a generational touchstone. Ford/Carter is the first political event I remember; the Iranian hostage crisis was something I was conscious of, but not focused on. I'm only a year or two younger than apo and slol, but I've got no firsthand memory of either Vietnam or Watergate. The Reagan assassination attempt is memorable primarily because my mother was rooting for it to be successful. (Kidding, mostly.)
Part of this may be explained by upbringing -- while my parents were firmly liberals, they weren't focused on current events from a political point of view. I'm not sure what happened -- they got disgusted enough by Watergate (which from stories, they were very attentive to) that they kind of fell away from paying attention to news, maybe. But I remember as a teenager feeling completely lost in relation to El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran-Contra, and similar events because I just couldn't figure out what was going on, and I wasn't getting it at home.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:52 AM
I remember the JFK assassination. Both of my parents burst out in tears at something they heard on the radio.
Anyway, this explains a lot. I had assumed more people in their 30's.
Posted by Yamamoto | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:58 AM
The earlierst television memories of my generation would be the Summer of funerals: Martin Luther King, followed shortly by RFK. I believe that significant parts of both were carried live by all of the networks in the middle of the day. Most memorable because both featured children about my age. (and both those guys were about my father's age then, and were younger than I am now). Mass media was also filled with urban riots and Vietnam carnage. It was a bad time to be five.
Seven was a beter year. We got to watch seeveral moon landings live on a huge black and white TV weheeled dinto our in the second grade classroom (the first one was in the Summer, and I watched with family at home).
Childhood pleasures you kids missed: tv commercials for cigarettes; candy cigarettes; riding in the front seat of the car on daddy's lap.
Posted by an irregular | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:59 AM
The first movie that truly freaked me out was Runaway, with Tom Selleck being chased by killer robot spiders. Some babysitter thought it would be OK for me to watch it. Gave me nightmares for weeks.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 7:59 AM
First movie that scared me: The Wizard of Oz. But that doesn't date me nearly as well as if I said Twister.
Posted by sam k | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:04 AM
35 gets it exactly right.
My earliest memories are Watergate and the fall of Saigon. My father was passionately interested in the investigations at the time and I remember being instructed to watch Nixon's resignation "so you can tell your children." (In one of those bitter/funny/satisfying twists of life my father finally learned who Deep Throat was two days before he died.) The '76 election is the first one I have any clear memories of. I was allowed to watch the late returns because my mother adored Carter and the School served us peanut butter sandwiches at lunch the next day. Strangely, I just realized recently that I remember even less of the '80 election.
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:04 AM
Cala, your dad is younger than I am. Whew!
What strikes me as odd is how many cultural reference points we all share, and what they are.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:05 AM
candy cigarettes;
Still around through the 70's. Candy seems to have gotten less weird than it was when I was a kid -- while we didn't get much of it, I remember a lot of strange things like candy cigarettes.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:05 AM
candy cigarettes
We've come a long way.
Posted by Yamamoto | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:09 AM
I remember candy cigarettes. I had them at my grandmother's house, but I couldn't have been older than five or so. So maybe through '84 or so?
A friend from college was in a car accident when he was about a year old; he wasn't in a car seat, just in his mother's arms in the front and no one was wearing seatbelts. (Everyone was fine except his mom had a broken arm.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:10 AM
VW Bugs had a luggage shelf behind the back seat - I used to ride in there. (Oh, not often, but I was definitely climbing around back there while the car was moving when I was little.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:11 AM
When all of my id was stolen in France, the embassy attache asked me a series of weird questions to establish I was an American. One of them was "where were you when the shuttle blew up?" So I guess that was a decent unifying memory for people about my age back then.
(He also asked me who my favorite character on "Friends" was, and for a moment, I was sure I was never going home.)
First movie I remember scaring me: Ten Little Indians.
First horror movie: it was translated into French as Sous-sol de la Peur!, but it was an American movie. No, wait, before that I saw exactly five minutes of The Birds.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:15 AM
The weirdest thing about the Benoit lists and what kids don't remember... my sister will be the college class of 2010, and things have changed so much between her childhood and mine. I had a record player when I was seven. She had a CD player at that age. My high school class was one of the last ones to be able to handwrite essays.. She's got sparknotes (and the disapproval of a big sister.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:16 AM
I remember putting the red-tipped end of a candy cigarette in my mouth, and being told "that's the fire end." Half the cigarettes I'd seen in ashtrays had lipstick on their back ends — no filters on most then — which is what I thought was being represented by the red.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:16 AM
So I guess that was a decent unifying memory for people about my age back then.
10th grade Latin class -- it went around the classroom in whispers, and then an announcement came over the PA.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:17 AM
I used to kneel on the emergency brake between the bucket seats in my mom's Chevette. It was great--you heard better what people in the front were saying.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:17 AM
OK, I'm in about the same cohort as Cala's dad, and I agree about the JFK assassination (yes, we really can all remember what we were doing). But the defining year for the late boomers was surely 1968 - les événements in France, the Tet offensive and the Prague spring all coming hard on each others' heels. I think this is the experience you can blame for most elderly leftists.
Posted by OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:19 AM
When all of my id was stolen in France
Europe loses a lot of its appeal when you've nothing but superego left.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:19 AM
Yeah, I was in third grade. They interrupted lessons, moved us into the crass-room with a tv, and had us watch the news. The news replayed the clip over and over again, and I was really angry that my teachers made us watch the shuttle blow up so many times.
Then came all the dark playground jokes.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:21 AM
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory scared me
Oh hell yes. Even scarier? H.R. Pufnstuf. I still get chills thinking the bloody red atop the sea of yellow evil. The experience definitely affects my entertainment choices to this day, though I couldn't begin to explain how.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:21 AM
where were you when the shuttle blew up
Sitting in my office in Menden, Germany, where I commanded the 69th US Army Field Artillery Detachment. One of the officers of the British missle regiment we were stationed with came to my office to tell me and to offer his condolences. Which was very thoughtful. Of course, before the day was out the Brits were joking about it: ("What's NASA stand for? Need another seven astronauts. Need another shuttle also.") I miss those guys.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:23 AM
Well played, monsieur Stropher.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:23 AM
What were the last words of the Challenger's pilot?
"No, BUD Light!"
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:25 AM
I was in first grade for the Challenger explosion. (I had to look up the year.) I was home sick from school watching it on the television because my mom knew I liked astronauts & shuttles. I had an inflatable shuttle when I was about four. My mom turned off the TV really fast, and most of what I remember are the interviews later with the teacher's husband.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:27 AM
I was already a lawyer that morning; I forget what I was working on.
I was in wood shop the afternoon of the Kennedy assassination. Actually, we were doing a drawing unit so were sitting quietly at tables with t-squares and big sheets of paper. Women teachers ran in distraught, so the instructor pulled a transistor radio out of his desk — who knew? — and we followed it from there.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:30 AM
126--That sounds almost exactly like my mother's memory of JFK's death.
As a kid, I remember being vaguely annoyed when she told me this memory--"who cares where you were when you heard?"--and now I expect I'll be just as annoying to young'uns when I remember where I was when I heard about 9-11. Something to look forward to!
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:37 AM
I remember the Gulf War very vividly, even though I was, what, 8, at the time? I think it's because it was a huge deal for the American community living in Egypt, and there was constant talk about it, and bomb threats at our school, and there was a deal struck between CNN and Egyptian National Television and we watched it constantly.
In fact, I even remember the very day that Iraq invaded Kuwait, and what I was doing, and my father trying to explain Saddam Hussein to me.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:40 AM
I remember candy cigarettes and the '88 election. My school (in exurban TX—wait, were there exurbs then, or merely sparsely populated suburbs?) held a mock election, and it fiercely divided the class between Mexicans (who voted for Dukakis) and whites (Bush, obv). My first vote was for a Republican.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:41 AM
Seems I remember a dream where Saddam Hussein was dispensing bowling shoes...
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:42 AM
LB, ac, and I were all born in '70 or '71, I think, and some of the anonymi are around that age too.
Yeah, and I think you, Bitch, and LB are the posters I feel like I have the most in common with. Huh.
Ca - you don't include me because Wham and Duran Duran had less of an impact on your life, right?
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:43 AM
I remember watching the '88 election on television! And my parents and their friends (Republicans) saying nasty things about Dukakis.
I also remember the '92 election, because one of the fifth grade teachers (who wasn't mine, but who I liked and would hang out with.. yeah I was one of the weird kids who always liked hanging out with teachers) came dancing into our classroom singing "happy days are here again..." and then we got a big lesson about voting by absentee ballot.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:45 AM
H.R. Pufnstuf. I still get chills thinking the bloody red atop the sea of yellow evil.
You aren't the only one.
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:45 AM
I had a record player
I can clearly recall the series of clicks the arm made when it lifted off the end of the last track and returned to the outer edge.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:47 AM
127 -- where were you? I was in my office, on Broadway between Houston and Prince, and I heard about it when my wife (watching the news at home) called. It was my first day back at work after a couple of weeks I had taken off so we could go to Shanghai and adopt our daughter. The secretary, Doris, said she had been in the bathroom and heard an airplane flying overhead, and wondered why it was so low. My boss and I climbed up to the roof of the building and saw the building burning (only 1 at that point) and then went back up when we heard a second plane had crashed, and again when we heard the buildings had collapsed. Then I started walking home -- home was then in Jackson Heights. My wife and daughter and I went to her parents house on Long Island for the rest of the week --- I think it was that week or the following one that my boss let me know my position was being eliminated.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:47 AM
I remember getting yelled at on the playground in second grade.
Skinny boy: "Who are your parents voting for?"
Me: "Reagan, I think."
Skinny boy: "Reagan wants to blow everyone up! Reagan like nuclear bombs! Everyone will DIE if Reagan is president!"
Me: [Runs away, cries, and has recurring nightmares about getting blown up with nuclear weapons.]
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:50 AM
My affinities with commentators seem to have little to do with age. Slolerner is the one who seems to share the most cultural reference points with me, and he's much younger. I think I have a lot in common with mcmc, who is in my cohort, but she doesn't share enough personal impressions for me to know for sure.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:50 AM
I remember Gulf War I and being very upset by it. At that age (junior high) I really didn't think war was possible in my lifetime. It seemed anachronistic -- something that societies did before they knew better and this was The Future.
I don't remember much about the actual politics but remember all of the yellow ribbons and listening to that Lee Greenwood song (with the messages from the troops overdubbed) over and over on the school bus.
My (now 17 YO) brother was just learning to talk and called coverage of the war on TV "airplane news". We were all glued to CNN, especially during the initial days of the war, and when he didn't feel like he was getting enough attention, he'd toddle over and turn off the TV and announce "No airplane news!" And he would correct us whenever we said something about a helicopter because "hell" is a bad word. It's a heckacopter.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:50 AM
Gulf War I was my first experience of getting breaking news online -- I was glued to whatever the appropriate Usenet group was, because I couldn't deal with the idiots in the TV room at my dorm.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:53 AM
131 -- hey I love to read your posts but I have not quite figured out who you are yet in the way I have the others listed. Not meaning t'be exclusive though.
I remember reading the paper the morning Iraq invaded Kuwait -- particularly I remember t because the language was German, of which my grasp is less than total -- I was working as a farm hand that summer in Reithofen, Bavaria. I remember being kind of shocked when I came home what a big deal it was in the U.S.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:53 AM
I had a record player
I can clearly recall the series of clicks the arm made when it lifted off the end of the last track and returned to the outer edge.
My daughter is so into vinyl now she's dusted off a tabletop player with attached speakers and is running it nearly constantly. Born 1990.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:54 AM
I was in a seminar (on "Religion and the Enlightenment"--HA!) until 11am. I heard about it because this rather ditzy student I ran into mentioned: "Hey, isn't it craa-zy about that plane that flew into the world trade center? I mean, that's soo wild!" I kinda staggered off to read the news online and to write a paper for another class that afternoon (which was of course cancelled). Later I went down to Riverside Park with some friends, where we watched the tanks roll in on the freeway.
I worked on Wall St. Mondays and Wednesdays.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:55 AM
I remember the Gulf War very vividly
It is interesting to me how different my experience of the first Gulf War was from that of everyone who watched it on TV. You all got to see missles exploding and generals doing briefings and analysts with fancy charts. I mostly got to see a whole lot of sand.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:56 AM
142: I'm surprised to hear that; my wife was teaching, freshman probably, and neither she nor they knew the towers had fallen, or the second plane, or that it was anything other than an accident until noon.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 8:59 AM
It's funny, because I think I spent a lot of time asking questions about war and politics when I was very young. Part of my parents' love story was that their marriage was delayed by my father fighting in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (and my mother not being able to fly to Egypt from the US), and I was always asking my dad to tell me stories about that time. Of course, I wanted political background--why were they fighting? I think I knew that there were three wars, 1956, 1967, and 1973, by age 6 or so. Learning about the Cold War factored into all of this. Of course, I think shortly after the Cold War and The Russians were explained to me, the Berlin Wall fell, and my dad called me into the living room to watch the coverage, and I was like "whoa! cool!"
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:00 AM
I didn't believe it as it was happening. I was home with Newt (who was a month old) and Sally, and was watching a neighbor kid as well; I heard on the radio that a plane had crashed into the WTC, and assumed that it was a small plane and an accident, and then went out to the playground because the kids were getting antsy. And then the morning was this weird stream of people showing up at the playground who knew more and more stuff, until someone said the towers had fallen, which I didn't believe at first. Kevin's dad, who had been supposed to pick him up at the playground after an hour or so, didn't show, so I took the kids home around noon. Finally found Kevin's dad, and then we put the kids in the car and drove out to friends in Jersey. (Nothing rubs in the fact that Northern Manhattan isn't treated like a real place like the fact that they didn't bother to shut down the Broadway Bridge.)
I'm still embarrassed about having left the city -- we had relatives calling and telling us it was the only sensible thing to do, and we got stampeded. We came back the next day.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:01 AM
Ideal, did you get any counter-battery fire? Artillery was one branch of the Iraqi army that was widely respected, and that Canadian guy — Gerald Bull I think it was — had souped-up their guns.
Posted by i don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:02 AM
Jeebus, maybe I do hate America. If 9/11 wasn't called "9/11," there's an even chance I wouldn't be able to tell you the date on which the attack occured. I do remember learning of it on my through Yahoo, somehow.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:04 AM
Does it clear things up, IDP, if I say that the ditzy student was someone I ran into after the class, who had seen the news on tv on her way to school?
(That seminar met damned early in the morning.)
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:05 AM
Hey does anyone happen to remember what day of the week it was?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:06 AM
Ah -- Tuesday. So it was probably actually my second day back at work.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:07 AM
It is kind of funny that you left town, LB. I might have done so, though, if I'd known anyone who lived outside the city.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:07 AM
I had a 9:30 class that morning (I believe it was a literature seminar: "The Concord Writers"), and 9:30 texas time was 10:30 in New York, so we got to class and my professor was very upset and told us what was going on, and said "I'm not holding fucking class today. Go home." I skipped the rest of my classes and sat all day watching tv with my roomates and smoking cigarettes and talking to my hysterical friends in NYC.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:08 AM
Ideal, did you get any counter-battery fire?
No. I in the 101st Airborne Division and we, along with the rest of the 18th Airborne Corps, were off on the left flank of the allied forces. Most of the fighting was on the right, near Kuwait. Indeed, we (the Division, not me personally) actually kicked off the ground war a couple of weeks early by clearing out the few remaining enemy forces in our sector with attack helicopters. So, when the war started, there were no enemy forces left for about 50 or 60 miles in, and what remained ran away if they could once the war started.
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:08 AM
Most people who lived in Manhattan couldn't, though. We could because we live a block from an open bridge, but anyone downtown was pretty much stuck.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:09 AM
During the first Gulf War my older quasi-girlfriend [one of those is it platonic or is it not ones] had a younger brother who was with the 7th Armoured over there and her father, also in the army, was the guy detailed to travel round Stirlingshire informing people their sons had been killed.
I remember sitting in the nurses residence where she lived watching TV as the first air attacks happened. She was pretty freaked out, as you might expect.
I also remember one of the British newspapers leaked a story that the government had started printing call-up papers for a future contingency in which they might have to draft people. I have no idea if the story was true but it did make me think a lot about the possibility of being drafted. I was 18 at the time and prime draftee age.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:10 AM
You used to be able to see the towers from the street around the corner from me. I was walking to the subway shortly after the first plane hit, and saw a bunch of people looking up at it, and I watched the second plane hit. Saw the explosion.
I stayed in the city, and was tremendously lonely for a few days, because I was living by myself at the time and didn't have any friends living nearby. My mom, who lives (sort of) within walking distance, was out of town. I talked to people on the phone a lot, but didn't get to see any friends until the subway reopened. I might have made more of an effort to walk to someone's house, but didn't want to seem as freaked out as I was.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:13 AM
Too long for a memory of someone who was nowhere near New York, so just pretend you're the Calagrandchildren:
On 9/11 I was in a new consultants' training seminar in my very first Real Job in Cleveland. I had carpooled with another girl in her fancy black Jeep and we were in a conference room in the BP tower blearily listening to a presentation on how we should leverage our synergy or something after a night of going to a baseball game with the senior partner.
At around 10am, someone came in and switched on the TV and we thought it was a training video until we realized it was CNN and the screen was full of smoke. We were told to go home. We were in the hotel next door and we weren't allowed to go in and get our belongings and we had a very hard time getting her Jeep out of the underground parking garage because there was a bomb scare at the Cleveland airport and everyone in the city was doing their part to run madly to the barricades. The valet wouldn't give her her keys so we used her spare set, sat in traffic listening to the radio for two hours, then drove back to Pittsburgh. The next day my friend looked funny because all her makeup was in Cleveland.
Mostly I remember all the misinformation. No one knew how many planes were headed for potential targets, everyone was sure their building was next, and Cleveland cleared out pretty quick. The biggest source of confusion were the reports around Flight 93. Someone on a cell phone told us that a plane had hit Pittsburgh. Later we heard the plane went down in southwestern PA but maddeningly the national radio reports wouldn't give a town. By the time I got home I had several messages from worried college friends who hadn't heard anything but 'small town western PA.'
When I arrived at the house -- I was living at home at the time -- my sister tackled me. She was a very worried 12 year old because she just knew that office buildings had been hit with planes and her sister worked in an office building and though she knew I wasn't in New York she wasn't betting on anything.
I didn't see the footage of the crash until I got home that evening. I remember thinking 'what the hell. planes don't DO that and we don't catch it on TV when it does.'
I remember during the First Gulf War there were lots of silly songs about Saddam and my mom had a crush on a young 'Scud Stud' TV reporter.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:13 AM
Scud Stud
Arthur Kent.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:15 AM
I was in my Battery Park City apartment when the planes hit. The magnitude of what had happened and the fact that neighborhood was in danger didn't register at all - I called in and said I might work from home that day. I decided to try to go to work and went to the Bowling Green 4/5 subway station, where someone told me that the Pentagon and White House had also been attacked. I was trying to figure out what to do at that point (I didn't want to get stuck in the subway and crossing the Brooklyn Bridge didn't sound like a good idea) when all of the lights in the subway went out. I went outside and there was a loud roar and people running and I had no idea of what was going on but just ran with the crowd. Someone said the building was falling and I thought it was falling over, possibly towards us. We got enveloped in the big cloud of smoke and everything turned gray. I ran to the Staten Island Ferry terminal and hid in the men's bathroom through the fall of the second tower (which we didn't know of at the time) and until the smoke cleared. I made my way to our Wall Street office, and then went home with a coworker who lived in Chelsea and then caught a train to Long Island where I stayed with my boss for a week. There's a lot more to it but those are the broad strokes.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:18 AM
Yes! And Stormin' Norman.
Another Gulf War memory -- not mine:
One of my friends here is from Israel and we were talking, a couple years ago, about the current mess in Iraq and how different it was from the first War, which I remembered as mostly a giant video game: Scuds get fired at Israel, Patriot missiles SHOOT THEM DOWN BOOM. Then I sheepishly remember that he's from Tel Aviv and probably didn't think it was fun but he laughed and said that for him, age 10, it was like a video game too and he and his friends climbed up on the roof to watch the lights in the sky because they were too young to quite understand the situation.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:19 AM
I was in Austin at Susan's house, and we were both sleeping in that day since we didn't hav eearly classes or strong work ethics. Her cell phone started going off at 8-9 am when her friend in NYC tried to call—by the time we woke up, the cell networks there weren't working. I remember sitting on the couch with Sue and the other couple staying at the house for a few hours, glued to the TV.
Later in the afternoon I went to my Bulgakov seminar, and I remember that it turned into a fierce and irritating debate about what a counterstrike should look like.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:20 AM
It's funny how different my experience was living in upper Manhattan, rather than downtown. I'm 10 or more miles from the WTC and didn't have much reason to go downtown for months after 9/11, so I've got none of the memories of smoke and dust that most New Yorkers have. I feel more like the out-of-towners who talk about it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:23 AM
My mom has a complete set of Desert Storm trading cards. Just like baseball cards (with Stormin' Norman and Bush and Hussein being the rare and valuable cards) and even made by Topps.
Also, I know someone from NYC who lied about being there on 9/11. I imagine this happens frequently, like the several million Texans who watched the parade in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:25 AM
I'm glad I didn't get on the subway that morning, because my destination was the World Trade Center stop on the E.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:28 AM
re: 163
It's the same for me. I lived in Queens and worked in mid-town (and was up in White Plains on the day of the attack).
Posted by Idealist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:28 AM
Late to this thread, but per Clownaes's question above, I was born in August of 1968. I vaguely remember me and my older brother coming up with a scheme where we would hide and then jump out at just the right moment to catch those Watergate burglars grownups were talking about. I definitely remember the '76 election and the Bicentennial celebration.
For the 4th of July that year my mom made costumes for me, my brother, and my dad, and we did a reenactment of that "Spirit of '76" painting, marching up and down our block (there was no parade, it was just us three; lots of neighbors clapped). I was the one with the flute and the head bandage. And actually my dad was (slowly) riding his bike, to which he had attached a stick in front supporting a paper horse's head he had drawn with markers. I think there was a crepe paper tail in back, too.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:28 AM
75: some of the anonymi are around that age too.
I am sooo tempted to change my handle to "Sea Anonymi." But I won't. So it's up for grabs if any of the lurketariat want to claim it.
I am about apo's age, give or take a few months. I remember the Watergate hearings as some boring TV show that my parents watched. Of course, All the President's Men is now my all-time favorite movie.
My parents also had a John Denver 8-track tape. Ah, the memories. . .
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:31 AM
I was at work when the first plane hit, and every news site on the web was completely swamped with traffic, so nobody could get updates. Finally somebody drove home and brought back a little TV and we all sat in a conference room and watched the news for the rest of the day.
I still have a working turntable and ~500 vinyl albums.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:37 AM
For some inexplicable reason, I owned 8-track tapes of Molly Hatchet and Grand Funk Railroad as a sixth grader, despite not having an 8-track player.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:42 AM
I was uptown too, LB. If I hadn't gone back to work downtown a week or so later--cough, gag--the whole event might have seemed like something I saw on TV. There were all of those terrifying fighter-jet noises for a month, though...
God, Becks, that's a pretty awful story.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:45 AM
I was watching on our kitchen tv, getting the kids ready for school. I turned on between planes, but they had already gone live. The kids remember it very clearly, 11 and 9. When the second plane hit, it was plainer what was happening. An hour later, at work, I started monitoring it largely from the net, although I had a shortwave set. I was already heavily into blogs then, TPM was then my favorite. Do you remember what he'd spent the summer obsessed with? Chandra Levy.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:45 AM
I just realized that I am older now than my parents were at the time of the Watergate hearings. Very, very weird.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:48 AM
My mom has a complete set of Desert Storm trading cards.
That's unbelievably awesome.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:49 AM
On 9/11, I was in Austin in my second year of law school. I heard about the first plane hitting on NPR that morning, and by the time I was getting in the shower, both towers had been hit and they had gone to continuous coverage. The TV pictures of smoke coming out of the buildings reminded me of the earlier attack in '93: bad, sure, but not that bad.
So I was listening to NPR in the shower when suddenly the announcer (it's strange that I can't remember who it was now, Steve Inskeep?) just stopped talking for what was probably only seconds but sounded like a very long time. He then started sort of stammering and trying to get his voice back to announce that one of the towers was falling. I jumped out of the shower and turned the TV back on, and seeing the South Tower fall was when it really hit home that shit, this was serious.
I went to the law school because I was sort of a TA for a Bankruptcy class (I was enrolled in the class, but I was also a Research Assistant for the prof and I would often help distribute handouts and whatnot), and I wasn't sure if classes would be cancelled or anything. The prof was old-school, and as I had expected he insisted on having class and going about all our normal business normally to show those bastards they couldn't scare us. I definitely respected that, but I don't think anyone actually learned anything that day.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:50 AM
I wasn't at work. I was going to go in later. Instead I had gone to an AA group that meets Tuesday mornings in the US Capitol.
Afterwards some of us went for breakfast in the House Member's Dining Room. The waitress came by and told us about the 1st plane but didn't describe the damage. We just assumed it was a small plane and, although the weather was fantastic in DC, that NYC was foggy. She then told us about the second plane. That was odd.
I finished eating and left by the south entrance. I could then clearly see a huge cloud of smoke coming from Virginia. It semed to be from the airport, the Pentagon, or Crystal City. It was very heavy and dark and broad-based so I guessed it wasn't the airport. I got in my car and turned on the radio. That's when I heard it was the Pentagon. In all this time the Capitol remained unevacuated. (I was parked on the grounds, so I could see that everything was still calm. I heard that they started the evacuation shortly after I left.)
I headed home as I knew I wasn't going to work. I worked in the Pentagon. (My office was around an apex corner from the stricken wedge, so even if I had been there the worst I'd have dealt with was some smoke.)
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:51 AM
On 9/11 I was in Prague.
My wife and I were in her crappy rented room way out in the bleak 'projects' on the northern edge of Prague and since we didn't have a TV or a radio we didn't even know anything had happened until the 10th.
On the 10th my wife was off working and I was in an internet cafe and had what seemed like a wierd email from a friend talking about being in the subway at the WTC but being 'OK'. I had no idea what he was talking about.
So we went off to my wife's sister's to watch the news. Czech news coverage was somewhat tasteless. One channel had slow mo' footage with Carl Orff's 'Carmina Burana' playing over it and a big voice intoning 'Utok na Ameriku'.
Also, the US embassy in Prague was surrounding by i) flowers, ii) heartbreakingly sweet drawings by Czech kids and iii) heavily armed Czech paramilitary style police. We passed one Skoda with a guy snoozing in it and on the passenger seat beside him was a pile of guns.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:52 AM
172 comments on the EBS? Good grief, what an interesting crowd.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:52 AM
M/tch -- weird -- I don't think I had realized before just now that you're a lawyer. Had you mentioned that very often in your other comments, and I was just oblivious to it? I was wondering when reading one of your comments just yesterday, what you did for a living.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:52 AM
Instead I had gone to an AA group that meets Tuesday mornings in the US Capitol.
Leo?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:52 AM
until the 10th
Was this after you returned from your time-travel jaunt to the 12th?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:55 AM
181
See, that's me looking at the 9/11 (where the date is written the wrong way round but where I've accepted the convention that that is how that day gets labelled) adding 1 day and getting the 10th.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:59 AM
...or do they number the calendars backwards in Czechoslovakia?
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 9:59 AM
172 reminds me of this classic Poorman post, announcing the formation of the 24-hour Where the White Woman At? news network.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:00 AM
I was at work when the first plane hit, and every news site on the web was completely swamped with traffic, so nobody could get updates. Finally somebody drove home and brought back a little TV and we all sat in a conference room and watched the news for the rest of the day.
I remember realizing how completely useless the internet was in terms of providing accurate, up-to-the -minute info on something like 9/11. I had a small radio in my desk drawer, and after I overheard an officemate mention something about planes hitting the World Trade Center I turned it on to NPR in time to hear Bush's speech announcing the attacks. People from adjoining cubicles and I were gathered around that radio for a good while.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:04 AM
Yes, the Cuban missile crisis and the JFK assassination are among my earliest memories. I should have earlier, but didn't pat much attention. Television and media were less important in the fifties.
But the above two were evening TV events, and we could go play. But they pulled us out of class to watch John Glenn, and that is a stronger memory.
I also remember the 1964 & 1965 World Series.
Posted by bob mcmanus | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:04 AM
Matt, I know you UK types do it differently, but the WTC attacks happened on September 11th, not November 9th.
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:04 AM
187
Yeah, in any sane system 9/11 is the 9th of November, though.
It's only because 9/11 is such an iconic label and it would be churlish or rude to quibble about it every time it comes up that I use 9/11 to mean 11th of September.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:08 AM
71: I'm two years older than you, then. We lived together during the war, which of course actually means I lived alone in a town where I didn't know anyone. Fun times!
Re. Vietnam and Watergate--I have vague memories of them in the background, yes, as things my parents cared about deeply. There's video of them carrying me in an anti-Vietnam demonstration, for instance. But I don't have any "real" memories in the sense of understanding them: what I know I've learned from history. I imagine PK's memory of the current war will be much the same: as a vague sense of a Bad Thing that his parents were upset by, and as the base experience for a belief that War is Bad.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:10 AM
9/11 is such an iconic label
It's much catchier than 24 Fructidor.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:14 AM
A friend of mine was in Prague on 9/11 and was deeply frustrated by her inability to get proper news coverage on any of the stations. She says she feels like she doesn't understand what happened the way that everyone else does.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:15 AM
Oh, I see we've moved on to 9/11.
Mr. B. had stayed home sick, so we slept in. When we got up he turned on the tv and they were talking about closing the border with Canada. I made some joke about "are we at war with Canada now?" and then the news kept talking about local stuff (by now it was mid-afternoon) and things were sounding weirder and weirder. Then they went back to New York and showed the footage of the first plane hitting the tower, and I said to Mr. B. who was in the bathroom, "omg, a plane hit the World Trade Center" and then, of course, found out it was actually two.
It was kind of an odd way to recreate the shock that everyone else had gone through a few hours earlier. Anyway, later all our friends and Mr. B.'s siblings came over to hang out at our place and watch TV and argue about whether or not we should automatically assume it was The Arabs.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:16 AM
186: I remember classes being cycled through to watch John Glenn, which was weird because there was nothing to see after the launch, which I had seen at home, I think. What you saw was one of two graphics: model Mercury capsule in front of slowly turning globe, and back of a pilot's helmet in front of a slowly turning globe.
Posted by i don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:18 AM
re: 191
The Czech news wasn't great. However, I was able to get British newspapers so real news was available.
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:18 AM
Ah Kitties!
Leo? Nope, neither name nor sign.
One thing that struck me that day as I drove home was how unpanicked DC early on. I live a few miles south of the Pentagon (I love my commute) and drove ove the inner 14th St. bridge (sometime-HOV) and passed the building. I could see plenty of gawkers pulled over in the main line of 395 and the smoke billowing from the building. I felt a sense of some relief when I saw which side got hit. The building's renovation project had just finished in that area and folks were still moving into the offices. It wasn't until about 10-20 minutes after I passed the Pentagon that I heard sonic booms. The Air Force had arrived.
After I got home I watched about 30 minutes of TV before I couldn't take it anymore. I got my bike out and rode around the area. By then the reaction had set in and the roads were jammed.
In the days after, many chains ordered their DC area stores closed. So 2 or 3 days later Starbucks in Georgetown was still closed for security reasons. Yet, locally owned coffee shops were open.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:20 AM
Sorry. West Wing joke.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:21 AM
I was a senior in high school on 9/11, I first heard about it from my choir conductor. Didn't realize that it was a big thing at first--classes kept going for a few hours after, until they sent us home after lunch. Strongest memory is of a good friend of mine; his father used to work in the Pentagon as a civilian lawyer for the army, but he had retired about a month before. We found out later that he had gone in that day to meet with (I think) the person who took over his job, and was among those killed. I was in English class with him half an hour before it all happened, I remember him just talking and laughing like on any other day. Our whole group was at his house pretty much continuously for the next week.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:23 AM
Yeah, all of my co-workers were getting their news from the internet and when I called them from our Wall Street office to tell them I was OK, they didn't believe the stuff I was telling them because it was like nothing they were seeing online at the time. I warned one of my co-workers who lived near me that she'd better find somewhere else to spend the night and we probably weren't going to be able to get back in our apartments for weeks and she dismissively said I was overreacting and we'd be back home that evening. I wanted to be like "Hello? Are you covered in soot? I'm covered in soot. I think I know what the hell I'm telling you."
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:23 AM
M/tch -- weird -- I don't think I had realized before just now that you're a lawyer. Had you mentioned that very often in your other comments, and I was just oblivious to it? I was wondering when reading one of your comments just yesterday, what you did for a living.
I can't find the fairly recent post where I laid out my current life history (probably from January or February; why are the archives so hard to find anything in these days?), but I was a lawyer in NYC for a short time before deciding I really wasn't into it, whereupon I worked in a bakery there for a number of months, and then moved to Belgium for a number of months, and am now back in Texas. I'm currently doing development type work for the Capital Area Food Bank of Texas, and studying for the July Texas Bar (I'm not entirely sure why).
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:25 AM
I was in Italy when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out, but not in Rome, where English language periodicals were easy to come by. My Italian being mostly limited to "where is the bathroom" and "another bottle, please", I couldn't quite figure out exactly what had happened, but it was clear that the US had been caught doing something very bad in their newly liberated playground.
When we got back to the villa that night, I was able to turn on CNN International and the BBC to get the whole story.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:26 AM
Living in St. Louis, I was woken up (I think I'd slept through my Contintental Rationalism class, but I'm not positive) by my father calling to tell me that two plane's had hit the Twin Towers. I said that was strange, but didn't yet understand that it meant a purposeful attack, being still half-asleep. My father got that point across to me. I got into the shower to wake up, and started to wonder if security had been increased on the water supply yet, and if this was be part of a larger series of attacks.
Not being in New York, while I recognized the geo-political importance of the events, it had very little personal effect. I remember talking to my parents a couple of weeks later, where they said everyone was still very down about it around them, while it didn't seem to change people's affect where I was. On the day of I was (I'm not sure if this says good or bad things about me) wondering what kind of uptick in domestic antipathy towards Muslims and people who looked Muslim would occur and whether we'd respond with a missle strike or somethign against whomever we thought was responsible. I paid a lot more attention to over-flying planes for months afterwards.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:28 AM
Ah, West Wing. I have never seen an episode. I don't go out of my way to do it, but I don't watch much TV.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:32 AM
199 -- okay -- I remember that post except for the lawyerin' part. Just me being oblivious I guess.
198 -- I wanted to be like -- cool. I was wondering recently how one would say this, I thought it would probably just be "I was like" but apparently not.
Posted by Clownæsthesiologist | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:33 AM
whether we should automatically assume it was The Arabs.
True story: I hapenned to be wearing a shirt that day that said "I
We were like, "we should go home."
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:34 AM
I was born in 1982 but I have a crapload of references to older stuff that virtually none of my peers are familiar with, because my constant reading material was the "Bloom County" and "Doonesbury" and "Washingtoon" books my parents had lying around, as well as "Pogo" (although a lot of "Pogo" strips are just insanely boring when nobody can explain the context to you, especially the 30-40% of them that were parodies of the McCarthy hearings) and the books of P.G. Wodehouse and E. Nesbit.
I still have very strong opinions about James Watt, Caspar Weinberger and Jeane Kirkpatrick based on reading Bloom County at around 10 years old.
I suppose this happens everywhere - nearly everybody until they reach late teens/early twenties knows/understands practically nothing about government/politics/international relations etc.
I don't think I ever had a history class get past World War II. At least half of them ended in either the Gilded Age or just before the Depression. (final class: "And then there was a depression, because banks weren't insured. And then there was a war, which made everything better."
Return To Oz was the first movie that really freaked me out, but I have no idea how long it had been out when I saw it.
Oh man, those Wheelers were SO scary.
I don't think I actually saw a horror movie until I was in college. I saw no need to scare myself.
I remember Gulf War I and being very upset by it. At that age (junior high) I really didn't think war was possible in my lifetime. It seemed anachronistic -- something that societies did before they knew better and this was The Future.
I don't remember much about the actual politics but remember all of the yellow ribbons and listening to that Lee Greenwood song (with the messages from the troops overdubbed) over and over on the school bus.
Same thing for me, except that I was 7 or 8. I remember some student's mom had been over there and she gave a big speech to the whole school and it was the biggest event I'd ever experienced.
During the 1992 election I was in 5th grade. My "gifted" class went around and did a survey of who the kids wanted to be president. Bush got about 85% of the votes, presumably because of name recognition.
I vaguely remember one of the smarter kids warning us about Perot because Perot wanted to do away with summer vacation.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:36 AM
Coming late to the party, only on comment 40.
I started watching the nightly news when I was three, and read the newspaper every day from the time I could make out most of the words. My parents bought me a dictionary and a globe so I could find the words I didn't understand, and see where in the world all these things were taking place. By the age of 8 I was arguing with my dad about politics and whether Reagan should be re-elected.
I'm 28 and I remember Reagan being shot, I remember being afraid of Gorbechev, and then being impressed with him not much later. I remember the Soviets in Afganistan and I remember how exciting it was when Reagan and Gorbechev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces arms limitation treaty.
I remember Bruce McCandless II and his Manned Maneuvering Unit, the first un-tethered space walk (that was The! Coolest! Thing! EVAR!!!). I was the reason my whole second grade class watched the Challenger explode—because I wanted to be an astronaut. I remember answering my parent's friend's questions of, "So, do you still want to be an astronaut?" with, "Yes, sometimes things blow up. I still want to go."
In fact all of my early memories are of politics or major world events. In my head I can still see the grainy video of the MMU outside the shuttle, but I can't remember what any of my teachers looked like, or their names. I can't remember any of my friends names from before about 6th grade. Except for the pictures, I can't remember what the house I lived in looked like or my first dog's name. All my early memories are of other people, other things, in far off places.
I can't figure out if that should make me sad.
Posted by I Can't Put Esquire After My Name | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:36 AM
I hapenned to be wearing a shirt that day that said "I
That's certainly concise.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:37 AM
I was in Pittsburgh when 9/11 occurred...as you may remember, the news stories were about two planes striking in NYC, one in Washington, and one in Pittsburgh. (it was actually in a rural area over an hour away, but you know how small the amounts of data are that actually get transmitted to people by news stories.) There were certainly plenty of calls from people to make sure I was all right...and I just kept saying "I don't think Pittsburgh was hit by a plane. All the stores are closed, though. Are they hiding the facts?" A day later everyone knew where the other plane had crashed, though.
Of course, walking through the campus, I heard that R.E.M. song playing through at least four different windows. Smartasses.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:45 AM
I was DJing a 2am-6am shift at UNC's student radio station when a stranger called out of the blue to tell me that Gorbachev had been overthrown in a coup. For some reason, I was kinda shaken by the news.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 10:50 AM
IDP, do you remember the Nixon-Kennedy debates? I am also waiting for Gary to show up and tell us that his earliest memory (political-type) memory is the appointment of one of Eisenhower's Assistant Attorneys General from when he (Gary) was still in the womb. I kid because your memory appears to be prodigious.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:04 AM
207: Maybe it's ascii art of the smoke coming out of the South Tower?
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:05 AM
Instead I had gone to an AA group that meets Tuesday mornings in the US Capitol.
Leo?
I see that this was a joke, but with all the anonymity around here I often wonder as I hit the "Post" button whether the bit of personal info I'm about to divulge will prompt someone to ask a similar question of me.
I also sometimes imagine a scenario wherein I'm hanging out with some old friends from college, and one of them will say something which will prompt me to do a double-take and say, "Holy shit! Standpipe??!!"
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:14 AM
My memory and tendency to replay my life, looking for turning points and roads not taken, has given me no end of grief on B's threads the last couple of days; I need some serious letting-go.
I do remember the Kennedy/Nixon debates, but not following the issues. I'm sure it was gibberish to me. My brother has one of the first names of the candidates, I have the other, so my dad assigned us who to root for. My dad was pretty far left, he must have thought there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between them.
Gary, on the other hand, although 18 mos old at the time, may well have been trying to explain Quemoy and Matsui, as well as the missile gap. But did we listen?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:18 AM
There's no need to explain Matsui. He's just a great ballplayer.
Not only do we have the ChiComs, the Japanese are resurgent.
Posted by md 20/400 | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:28 AM
I once had a summer job watching, on fast forward, pretty much every Universal (I believe it was them, small chance of a different company) newsreel made between the early 50s and the early 60s. The company I was working for had bought the rights to all of them, but the previous cataloging was inaccurate and they didn't know what was where on the tape, and I had to find out. Otherwise I would never have heard of Quemoy and Matsui. One of the other things I remember first (and until very recently only) learning about from those was when the small group of Puerto Rican nationalists started shooting in the Capitol building.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:29 AM
212: "hanging out with some old friends from college" s/b "turning tricks at the bus station"
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:30 AM
216: It should? I've been doing it all wrong.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:32 AM
I have no memory of the Cold War.
Or the Gulf War. I vaguely remember the '92 presidential election, though.
Posted by L. | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:36 AM
one of them will say something which will prompt me to do a double-take and say, "Holy shit! Standpipe??!!"
Very clever, MAE, trying to suggest that you yourself are not Standpipe.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:38 AM
I was startled to hear a group of college students in the mid-90s split down the middle, in defining the first major news story of their memory, between the Challenger disaster and Magic Johnson's announcement that he had HIV.
This was a group of mostly white, middle- and upper-middle class kids. Maybe it's the difference between being a basketball fan and not, or being particularly plugged in to celebrity stories as opposed to world events. I was amazed, though -- I would have thought of two or three dozen other events before I would ever have named that one.
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:38 AM
I'm 28 and I remember Reagan being shot,
Really? You would have been about two and a half.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:40 AM
Gorbachev had been overthrown in a coup.
That was the summer after I graduated from high school. My mom woke me up (at around noon, natch) to tell me about it. I remember very clearly thinking we were going to get involved in a military intervention in a Russian civil war, and being pissed that all my college plans had just got sent out the window.
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:45 AM
Very clever, MAE, trying to suggest that you yourself are not Standpipe.
Goo goo ga joob.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:49 AM
I remember the '92 election pretty well, but just because my parents were really enthusiastic about it. They even got me a t-shirt with a picture of Clinton wearing sunglasses and playing the saxophone. My mom also had a friend of hers who worked at the Capitol give my Cub Scout pack a tour of the place just before innaguration, and we got to go up to the platform where Clinton was sworn in a few days later. The construction workers were still installing the belletproof glass panels when we were there. I was very excited watching the ceremony on tv, I kept yelling "I was standing right there!" I'd say it was because I was in third grade, but an equivalent situation would probably get a similar reaction from me even now.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:58 AM
I worked 3rd shift in 2001, and my shift ended at 9am EDT. I remember a co-worker cracking a joke about a drunk pilot (the news services were reporting it was a light plane) and then wondering why all the news sites had gone down simultaneously. I was stuck for a while working on an issue, and was there long enough for us to figure out that there was a lot more going on than one drunk pilot. When I got in my car to go home that morning, the BBC was talking about the leader of the Northern Alliance being assassinated and I remember thinking, Who the fuck are they? Ah, ignorance. I couldn't sleep that day because I was freaked out by the news, so a roommate whose office's cable was out called me and I relayed events, sitting at home alone and watching CNN with his cat. He was telling me that a friend of his from college worked in one of the towers when they started collapsing.
We lived out in the country but under a flight path at the time (everything here is under a flight path) and when I finally went to bed around 2pm that day I couldn't go to sleep for all the silence.
The big 'I remember where I was' thing for me was definitely the Challenger explosion. I was in 6th grade, it was a teacher work day, I was watching the launch on TV. I knew immediately that it was destroyed, and picked up the phone to call my best friend (also a space nerd) to tell him to turn on the TV. I got a busy signal, hung up, got a call from him a few minutes later; we'd been trying to call each other at the same time. I cried so hard over it that it broke me of any stupid 'boys don't cry' bullshit I might have acquired by that point.
I do, however, remember the Reagan shooting, and have very vague memories of seeing Carter on TV. I also remember being given a yellow ribbon to wear when I was in kindergarten and the Iranian hostage thing was going. I remember having very vivid dreams about it, but remember nothing about the events themselves.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 11:58 AM
Very clever, MAE, trying to suggest that you yourself are not Standpipe.
I'm now convinced that all cases of mistaken identity are in fact washerdreyer.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:00 PM
Crap. 204 was supposed to be
I was wearing a shirt that said "I [heart] you, Saudi Arabia" (complete with picture of dude on a camel), and my best friend was wearing a shirt that said "Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society". That's when we figured we should go home.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:06 PM
226: Foiled again. If only it weren't for those pesky commenters. Or, alternatively: Nah, it's only my repeatedly stated gender which long-time commenters are confused about.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:06 PM
w/d, I know you are a 47-year old balding man, just like me.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:07 PM
On election night in '92, everyone in my dorm was glued to the TVs in the TV lounges. I was on an elevator, that opened facing one of those lounges, and when it stopped on a lower floor to let on some drunk fratboy I heard them calling it for Clinton and the fratboy yelled, "THAT'S MY MAN, WOOOOOOO!" and I remember thinking, What on earth made this guy like Clinton?, which just goes to show that I have a total tin ear.
I was 14 in '88, but looked older, and the woman at the registration table at my parents' polling site tried to give me ballots because she thought I was a voter. She didn't realize I was there because my parents made us go with them every time they voted in hopes we'd realize how important it was.
Posted by Robust McManlyPants | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:08 PM
My memory of the Challenger is about the same as JM's, I think. Maybe we even went to the same school (unlikely). Although it's a vague enough memory that I wonder if I was actually at home.
I remember Bush's inauguration in 1988 specifically enough to remember watching it on tv, and not caring.
At the start of the first Gulf War my junior high organized an antiwar protest. The administration threatened to suspend anyone who walked out of afternoon classes, but no one was punished. My thought process was that I guess I'm against the war, but I haven't really given a lot of thought to it, and, oh, I'm 12 and no one really cares if I protest. The students organizing things were convinced they'd get the walkout on tv and have some kind of an impact. I didn't walk out and to this day I'm completely indifferent on whether or not I should have walked out. I remember my parents asking me what it would take for me to join in a protest and thinking, why don't you ask me again if I'm ever in a position to do something that matters.
I slept in on September 11th, waking up at about 11 am pacific time after everything was over. I remember wondering, quite earnestly I suppose, if I really should be going to grad school instead of doing something like working in foreign affairs. I began classes two weeks later. I would say that those attacks, plus the current war in Iraq are what finally convinced me that I'd better start paying attention to politics specificaly rather than just current events generally. The first major election I ever voted in was the California recall in 2003. I've been registered since 1997, but only because I marked the voter registration box on my driver's license application; had I gotten my license before I was 18 I may never have registered at all.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:09 PM
229: I'm glad that's settled.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:12 PM
227: I suppose it didn't occur to you to just go topless the rest of the day?
On preview, though, 229 makes this suggestion both more plausible and more disturbing.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:13 PM
On 9/11, Magik Johnson called to wake us up, because he was walking down the street in NY and had just seen a plane hit the WTC.
"Hey, what's up?"
"Something big."
That was about right. I showered and went to work, and I remember saying to the ex as I left, "God, I hope it's not Muslims."
As for the other Magic Johnson's announcement, yeah, it seems strange, but I also remember exactly where I was when I heard the news.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:19 PM
Huh. Now I'm thinking it's quite possible that eb and I went to the same elementary school and the same middle school.
Verifying question: did your elementary school have a school song whose last note kids liked to howl? And what were its first two lines?
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:20 PM
God, I hope it's not Muslims.
That's exactly what I said to a couple friends that day. And later on in the evening, sitting with my roomates on the back porch, I said that if it turned out to be Muslim fundamentalists, that this country was going to go to hell in a handbasket and that world politics was about to get seriously, seriously fucked up.
Looks like I was right.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:24 PM
As for the other Magic Johnson's announcement, yeah, it seems strange, but I also remember exactly where I was when I heard the news.
Same. And it troubled me much more than the shuttle explosion.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:25 PM
I don't remember an elementary school song, but the school's name sounded like a hurried weather phenomenon. I don't think very many people went to that (private) elementary school and my (public) middle school in a neighboring town, but that may have only applied to people in my grade.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:26 PM
I don't remember the Magic Johnson announcement, but I do remember when he went on Nick News (w/ Linda Ellerbe) and talked to a bunch of kids who were HIV-positive. I have a surprisingly clear memory of that whole episode, come to think of it.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:28 PM
A respected co-worker and superior came up to me, with tears in his eyes, and said "Magic Johnson has aids." I'm sure I responded appropriately, but I was amazed at the significance it had for him.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:29 PM
I was born in '71 and I remember the hostage crisis. When it first started I was at my Polish grandparents' house and I remember I kept getting shushed because everyone (aunts, uncles, parents) were intently focused on the news. For a long while I assumed that the crisis was taking place in Poland since that side of the family was so interested.
I used to work in the World Financial Center, but quit my job and moved to St. Louis about two weeks before 9/11. That day we were supposed to fly from St. Louis to Denver at 10am. We drove instead.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:34 PM
Y'all are dredging up some memories. The event that most upset me when I was a kid was when Samantha Smith died in a plane crash. She was just about my age, and similarly politically obsessed, and cute, and I had a big crush on her, and had seen her on the Tonight Show and suddenly...dead. It was on the news for a day or two, not really a big deal, but I was stunned for weeks.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:35 PM
Something I've been wondering, since I don't really have a good sense of the timeline...was Magic Johnson around the time when AIDS stopped being seen as an exclusively homosexual disease?
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:38 PM
was Magic Johnson around the time when AIDS stopped being seen as an exclusively homosexual disease?
On the cusp, and part of the reason that it stopped being seen as an exclusively homosexual disease.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:39 PM
I was very aware of Ted Kennedy's run in 1980. I think my dad knew someone working on the campaign. I probably became aware of the Chapaquidick problem at that time.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:41 PM
Chappaquiddick, I mean.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:42 PM
I remember very clearly the hysteria when Rock Hudson died.
Posted by dagger aleph | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:45 PM
I remember Chappaquiddick, and how it took place during the moon landing in '69. I remember the Martha's Vinyard sheriff, one of those temporary national figures who ends up getting a little paragraph obit — don't know that he's dead yet. Dominic Arena.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:47 PM
As for the other Magic Johnson's announcement, yeah, it seems strange, but I also remember exactly where I was when I heard the news.
Same. And it troubled me much more than the shuttle explosion.
For some bizarre reason, my mind substituted "Wilt Chamberlain" for "Magic Johnson" when I read this comment.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:50 PM
So MAE, you're saying all those people look alike to you?
Posted by M/tch M/lls | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:54 PM
He of the 15,000 different sexual partners?
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:56 PM
I can't think of what elementary school you might have gone to--certainly not mine, at any rate. We might have been at the same middle school, though. Had it been closed for a couple of years and reopened as a magnet school, only shortly to run almost entirely out of money?
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 06-28-06 12:58 PM
Jeez, you two, get a (chat)room!
Posted by M/tch M/lls |