9/11 was also different in that it was multiple announcements over a period of hours. Plus a few false alarms ("Bomb went off at the State Department", etc) leaving one with the sense of, OMG, what next? We can't seem to stop them....

Plus trying to follow the events on the internets added a new dimension.

Oh, and when my cat got hit by a car when I was nine, or course. Somehow I don't think anyone else shares that one.

I remember. Sorry about that - I was distracted and didn't see it.

(I hope this isn't in too bad of taste....)

I don't really view it as one trumping another, but I'm looking at it from counting them as "do you remember when" moment that marks your history and your place in it (see, cat does first, not second) and you are just not going to forget for whatever reason.

I was in volleyball practice after school when the gym teacher announced that Reagan was shot.

I was walking around campus and I overheard someone mention that the space shuttle blew up, but didn't take it seriously until I saw it on TV later.

On 9/11, I heard and felt it when the planes hit. I was riding a subway when the buildings collapsed.

The only assassination attempt that I remember hearing about was JPII's, and that was because I was in my Catholic high school when they made the announcement over the intercom and the teacher (I believe it was Sr. Irene, but I couldn't swear to it) had us all say a prayer, of course. I remember watching the footage of Reagan's on the news that night, but that's it.

Bay Area people like to talk about where they were when the '89 earthquake happened.

My earliest memory of a public event was Nixon leaving the White House. We were visiting my family in Texas and watching tv at my great-aunt's house. I wasn't quite 6. There may have been some cheering.

The old man waving a gun around in his front yard on my route to work the morning of 9/11 made that one have rather more personal impact on me than most big world events.

I remember seeing the Challenger disaster on the big TV in my high school library, but I can't recall if I was seeing it live or if we were called out of class to watch after it had happened.

Bay Area people like to talk about where they were when the '89 earthquake happened.

Hah! My mom's friend who was living in the Marina at that time said she was on the toilet. In, like, her Christmas letter that year.

I was working in a corporate communications department and we had someone who got the AP wire. He yelled at us and we all ran out of our cubicles to watch it on TV. We had a building-wide closed-circuit TV setup and we turned it to CNN, so every conference room was full of people watching the news.

I remember where I was for the JFK, Bobby Kennedy and M.L. King assassinations; the first moon landing; the fall of Saigon, Nixon's resignation (I was a newspaper intern and had to do a man-on-the-street story.); Chernobyl and the Oklahoma City bombing. Garfield's assassination is pretty fuzzy, though.

I think JFK's death was the only one that felt emotionally comparable to 9/11.