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.
The Orca-Whale thing was cool! and scary. Orcas rock.
A perfect pink set of kitchenwares for msbelle. Also in different colors!
My parents got married in '68. They refer to it as the year of disasters: My Lai, MLK, RFK, Prague Spring crushed, Nixon elected, they got married..... ( their joke, still happily married!)
Somehow I missed the entire Challenger thing. It happened just as we were changing classes. Each of my teachers told their other class and I never heard. Until I got home and saw the afternoon paper with a giant picture of the smoke. I was pretty shocked.
We were living in Brazil for 9/11. Every Brazilian I talked to that week was so supportive - even the waitresses and newspaper guys. Of course, everyone at the consulate was very upset by the State/car bomb story. It was very scary being out of the country, but I'm sure it was just as scary being in the country.
On 9/11, I heard and felt it when the planes hit. I was riding a subway when the buildings collapsed.
I burst into tears when we finally heard from you. God that was a hell of a day.
