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.

You know, I probably don't really have memories of a lot of this stuff because I probably didn't hear about it in the media. Dad watched the CBS evening news and McNeil Leher, but I'll bet when these things happened, I was informed by my parents in a low key way sometime well after the fact.

Hell, I just had to google when all this stuff was. I honestly don't know, except what decade.

DH ws away at a conference when 9/11 happened. With a bunch of policeofficers and emergency personnel from - MTA, NYC, Arlington, Va.- etc. They couldn't get home, they couldn't do thier jobs. bad bad time.

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

I'll probably never forget the shock of hearing about the Plainfield tornado of the same year, first on the radio, and then seeing the helicopter footage when I got home. Watching the path of the tornado as it passed over I-55, and saying to my sister, "Oh, my God--that's the Lily Cache subdivision, and there's the mall..." and seeing her run for the phone and try and get a hold of her college buddy whose parents lived in Lily Cache was really scary. When we drove down there a few weeks later, and saw all the trees that used to line 59 just chopped in half or gone altogether really shocked us, and then driving past our aunt and uncle's church where several people were killed was just devastating.

Garfield's assassination is pretty fuzzy, though.

Jim got fed up and dropped him the river with lasagna shoes.