What Were You Doing When You Learned About...

Amy SF · Sep 12, 2006

A trip down memory lane, if you wish. 
(for those of you who are old enough to remember) 
1. The JFK assassination (November 1963) 
2. Malcolm X? (February 1965) 
3. Martin Luther King? (April 1968) 
4. Bobby Kennedy? (June 1968) 
5. The murder of John Lennon? (December 1980) 
6. September 11, 2001? 
As for me, I don't actually remember those events of the 1960's). I was too young to remember the earliest assassinations (I was probably in nursery school having a snack when the JFK assassination occurred), but I also don't remember the ones from 1968, when I was eight. 
As for John Lennon, I had turned on CBS at 9 pm to watch an episode of M*A*S*H (I've always been a hardcore fan!) and there was a newsbreak which announced that Lennon had been murdered. I was so stunned and shocked (and hoping against hope that the news guy was wrong) that my mind immediately went into a fog. I watched that episode of M*A*S*H, but I have absolutely no recollection of which episode it was. All I remember were characters running around on screen yelling dialogue. 
As for 9/11, I was getting dressed for work that morning while watching reruns of - you guessed it - M*A*S*H! - when the episode I was watching was interrupted with footage of the plane hitting the second tower, and then the second tower falling. I just couldn't believe my eyes. I was late to work because I was glued to the TV watching coverage of the events.

Brandon · Sep 12, 2006

<div class="quote-container">Quote:
<div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by Amy SF <a href="/forum/post/0"><img alt="View Post" class="inlineimg" src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" style=""></a> 
A trip through memory lane, if you wish.</div>
</div>
 
(for those of you who are old enough to remember) 
1. The JFK assassination (November 1963) Not alive 
2. Malcolm X? (February 1965) Not alive 
3. Martin Luther King? (April 1968) Not alive 
4. Bobby Kennedy? (June 1968) Not alive 
5. The murder of John Lennon? (December 1980)Alive, but 7 years old and have no clue. I remember my dad being upset and watching a special on TV, but that's about it. 
6. September 11, 2001? I was working at my student job on campus. We all gathered around the tv in the breakroom and watched for an hour or so before we were sent home.

remilard · Sep 12, 2006

<div class="quote-container">Quote:
<div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by Amy SF <a href="/forum/post/0"><img alt="View Post" class="inlineimg" src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" style=""></a> 
A trip down memory lane, if you wish. 
(for those of you who are old enough to remember) 
1. The JFK assassination (November 1963) 
2. Malcolm X? (February 1965) 
3. Martin Luther King? (April 1968) 
4. Bobby Kennedy? (June 1968) 
5. The murder of John Lennon? (December 1980) 
6. September 11, 2001? </div>
</div>
 
1-4 not alive 
5 1 year old and unaware 
6 woken up by a phone call 
Some additional events the younger adult members may remember: 
the challenger explosion 
the fall of the berlin wall 
the fall of the soviet union 
the branch davidian compound standoff

MZCsmpsns · Sep 12, 2006

of those mentioned i was only alive during 9/11... i'd just woken up, i dunno what time, turned on the tv, it was right after the first plane hit and they were still debating the cause etc...so yeah, i watched all the news channels and yeah... was in shock. but yeah, i totally remember being in bed and seeing all that and just like, holy bleep this cannot be happening.

karenlovessnow · Sep 12, 2006

1. The JFK assassination (November 1963) I was 11, in sixth grade I think. We were in school and the prinicipal came in to tell us what happened and let us watch the coverage on TV. 
2. Malcolm X? (February 1965) 
3. Martin Luther King? (April 1968) 
4. Bobby Kennedy? (June 1968) 
I remember all of the above but can't remember what I was doing at the time. 
5. The murder of John Lennon? (December 1980) I was preganant with my third child but again I don't remember exactly what I was doing. 
6. September 11, 2001? It was my day off from work. I was watching Good Morning America when it came on the tv. I remember at first that they were broadcasting that they thought it was a small plane that hit the tower accidentally. I was actually watching as the second plane hit. I have the whole thing on tape, which was kind of crazy. I used to tape everything back then in case I would leave the room and miss something that I wanted to see. I never expected anything like that.

astro · Sep 12, 2006

I only remember 5 & 6. 
When I heard about Lennon, I was in bed, I had the radio set as my alarm and the news had just come on...I remember being half asleep and thinking wtf? 
Sept 11, I remember I was getting ready to go out somewhere and I switched on Fox news just before the second plane went into the tower...freaky.

Qwerks · Sep 12, 2006

<-also not around in the sixties. 
I was three when John Lennon was killed. I remember hearing alot about the Beatles and some guy called John but I didn't know they were related. 
Sept 11 I was at work listening to Howard Stern on my headphones.

Elena99 · Sep 12, 2006

I was not alive for 1-5. 
For number 6, I was in my apartment (in Canada) getting ready to go to work. My husband (boyfriend at the time, who lived in the US) called me and said to turn on the TV, and that the US was under attack. So I turned on the TV, and we stayed on the phone and talked for a while. It felt like we had entered the twilight zone.

berrykat · Sep 12, 2006

The first 4 I was either not born or too little to remember. When John Lennon was shot my sister and I were sitting on the sofa watching little house on the praire the news flashed across the bottom of the t.v. screen. On Sept 11 2001 I had gone back to bed with my 1 year old son when my Stepdad banged on the door and yelled "Come quick something is happening!" He is not an excitable guy at all so I knew something was wrong. He had been watching the news while my Mom went to the store. He and my Mom were visiting us from Seattle for my son's birthday. Sept 11th is my stepdad's birthday. I remember it was a beautiful day which didn't seem right that something that terrible should happen on such a beautiful day.

GhostUser · Sep 12, 2006

I was only alive for September 11, 2001. I was 14 years old. 
I was sitting in biology class, and my teacher got a phone call from her husband. He told her about the first plane. I remember hearing a history/geo whiz in the class mutter something about bin Laden. 
Class was dismissed shortly after that, and I started walking down the hall to the other end of the school for my next class. As I walked by, I looked into each classroom and saw the same television image, room after room. The sounds of the news reports echoed through the halls. I listened to what was happening as I walked down to my next class, confused, worried, and scared. 
I remember being released from school early that day. I cried all day, out of sadness and fear.

Astarte · Sep 12, 2006

I was only alive for Sept 11th. I was 16, just a week before my 17th birthday. I was in English class and one of the other girls had had her mom call her about it. "Yeah, a plane hit the WTC" she said. That was before the 2nd one. 
Crazy day, that was

jeneticallymodified · Sep 12, 2006

i'm only old enough to remember sept 11th. me and my teenage brother were both unemployed layabouts, and were half watching a tv movie at lunchtime at home in the uk when it was interupted with live bbc news footage of the event. we were very much 'WTF????' about it, and for a while couldn't work believe it was real, and weren't 100% sure that it was not part of the movie (cos we weren't payingtoo much attention to the tv, and they'll do fake newscasts in movies and it just seemed so implausable and surreal to us, thousands of miles away) - till we changed through all of the 5 tv channels that you get in the uk and saw that similar newscasts of the story had broken through all of the schedualled programming. after that we kinda sat there openmouthed for a while, the ramifications of it all running through my head, along with fears of esalation and retribution and where it all would end. i'm always afraid some country will get their nukes out and everyone'll join in, and we'll all be horribly poisoned and pretty much dead within a week, when something like this happens. it was one of those moments where everything changed in my head a little, forever, just like when i saw footage of the berlin wall coming down in my teens- it felt like nothing would ever quite be the same again. 
my bf (not at the time) said he was driving along the freeway out of toronto, along lake ontario, at the time, and apparently it was a really clear day and he could see the smoke cloud rising across the lake. he works near toronto airport, and said it was a crazy day for planes landing that day, and deathly silent the next day, as none took off.

Tesseract · Sep 12, 2006

Challenger explosion (January 28, 1986): I was in 8th grade French class. The teacher was called outside, and when she came back in, she was crying, and she told us the shuttle had blown up and all the astronauts had died. I think it hit her especially hard because a very close friend of hers had narrowly missed being the "first teacher in space" and would have been sitting where Christa McAuliffe was sitting but for that. None of us kids really knew what to make of it; we were just like, "Wow, really? Gosh." 9/11: I was at work at a law firm in a downtown Houston skyscraper. My coworker rushed in and yelled, "Hey you guys, a plane just hit the World Trade Center!" The weird thing was that she seemed kind of excited in a happy way about it. She was bright-eyed and almost grinning. None of us realized what was going on-- we all thought it was like a small plane hitting it by accident. We were all glued to the radio and the internet watching it unfold and it hit us pretty quickly that what was happening was very, very serious. Then we heard that all the planes had been grounded. We were scared. I was convinced that this was the beginning of WWIII, and that any moment we would hear the news that nuclear warheads had been launched. We stood around looking out the windows, knowing that if we saw a plane of any kind, it could only mean bad things, and wondering how many cities were under attack. It wasn't too long after that our boss told us we could go home if we felt safer there. I think it took us 30 seconds to get out of the building.

GhostUser · Sep 12, 2006

9/11- 
i was at work (Monmouth Mall)I sent a sales associate to the bank and she came back, freaking out about what she heard on the radio . It was really frustrating because the mall and most of the stores have Musak and we kept getting conflicting reports- at one point we really did think that we were being attacked by fighter planes. a few minutes later everyone in the mall was running, and on cell phones. two women came into my store and were just shopping, and we told them what happened, and they were like, oh yeah, we heard. maybe they were in shock. i closed the store then. i wanted to go home. 
I live on the shore in NJ, and my apt at the time had not only a perfect clear veiw of the towers and skyline but shared a parking lot with the Seastreak ferry to Manhattan. I closed the store early, called my boyfriend and made him come home- we had to park a mile away as the ferry was bringing injured people to waiting ambulances. there were people wandering off the ferry, covered in soot, not even knowing where they were.... our complex was 24 units and we all had people in or apts, cleaning up, giving them water, letting them use the phone... i emptyed out my fridge and opened every bottle of liquor in the house. we must have had 200 people in our complex. 
we all stood on the decks and watched the smoke. we cried a lot too. 
a week later, the tow trucks came for the cars of the people who took the ferry that morning and didn't make it home. <img alt="" class="inlineimg" src="/images/smilies/sad.gif" style="border:0px solid;" title="

">

honeyfugle · Sep 12, 2006

9/11 is the only one i was alive for. 
i was in a geography lesson and my teacher (mrs. kahn - was wearing grey tracksuit bottoms and a white tshirt...!) got a phone call from one of her close friends telling her that her friend was watching the news and saw what had happened in NY. she then halted the lesson to tell us the news. i remember her being very shaken and having a suprisingly pale complexion. she looked on the verge of tears when she gave us the news. 
i remember going home thinking she said the World Train Centre and having no idea where it was. i wasn't a very politically learned preteen.

IamJen · Sep 12, 2006

<div class="quote-container">Quote:
<div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by remilard <a href="/forum/post/0"><img alt="View Post" class="inlineimg" src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" style=""></a> 
the challenger explosion 
the fall of the berlin wall 
the fall of the soviet union 
the branch davidian compound standoff</div>
</div>
 <img alt="" class="inlineimg" src="/images/smilies/yes.gif" style="border:0px solid;" title=":yes:"> 
Some other "I remember when I heard the news" moments: 
Pres. Reagan is shot 
Columbine shootings 
OKC Bombings 
SF quake in '89 
7/7 London Bombings 
Elian Gonzalez in the closet 
Al Gore concedes the Presidency (the last time <img alt="" class="inlineimg" src="/images/smilies/smiley.gif" style="border:0px solid;" title="

"> ) 
and quite stupidly, I must admit... 
watching (on TV with coworkers) OJ's Bronco cruising down the freeway

IamJen · Sep 12, 2006

<div class="quote-container">Quote:
<div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by veggiejanie <a href="/forum/post/0"><img alt="View Post" class="inlineimg" src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" style=""></a> 
I was only alive for September 11, 2001. I was 14 years old.</div>
</div>
 
You were alive in 1980, you were just very small. <img alt="" class="inlineimg" src="/images/smilies/smiley.gif" style="border:0px solid;" title="

">

Iria · Sep 12, 2006

The only one I was around for was September 11th. I was in middle school and having a really good day (I just keep remembering how happy I was that morning). The teachers made some sort of decision not to tell the students, but a citizenship class was in session when the first tower was hit, and they saw it on the news. Some friends from that class told me at lunch, but it didn't seem like a big deal. I was picturing like a car bomb at the Pentagon, and maybe an accidental crash into a tower. By the last period, the school had given up and we watched the news, and it hit me that this was big. A lot of kids were being taken home by their parents (which I thought was stupid, just about as stupid as the decision to keep the attacks a secret). I live by an airport and an Air Force Base and our schoolbuses were used to transport grounded passengers to hotels. One of the planes that landed here was en route to Hawaii. The poor people were dressed for island weather and ended up in autumn Ohio! It was very strange to see empty skies for the next three days.

eggplant · Sep 12, 2006

<div class="quote-container">Quote:
<div class="quote-block">Originally Posted by Amy SF <a href="/forum/post/0"><img alt="View Post" class="inlineimg" src="/img/forum/go_quote.gif" style=""></a> 
A trip down memory lane, if you wish. 
(for those of you who are old enough to remember) 
1. The JFK assassination (November 1963) 
2. Malcolm X? (February 1965) 
3. Martin Luther King? (April 1968) 
4. Bobby Kennedy? (June 1968) 
5. The murder of John Lennon? (December 1980) 
6. September 11, 2001? </div>
</div>
 
I wasn't alive for the first 4, but the day John Lennon was killed I was 11 years old. I went into my brother's room in the morning and he had the radio on. He told me the news and we both just sat there really sad and freaked out because we were huge Beatles fans. 
On 9/11 I woke up and heard on NPR that a plane had crashed into the WTC. I turned on the TV and watched the second plane crash. I was dumbfounded and immediatly tried to call my brother who lived in Manhattan at the time (I lived in New Mexico then), but the phone had that weird busy signal like something was wrong with the phone. I tried calling my parents who live in a suburb of NYC, but got the same signal. I started to freak out a little, but the more I watched the news coverage I told myself that there was no reason my brother, or my parents, would be near the WTC, and that the phones were probably just tied up because so many people were calling in or out of NY. 
The only thing I could do was go about my daily business, so I went to a podiatrist appointment I had that morning. Of course in the office they were all talking about the attacks, and that's when I found out that my podiatrist was a fascist psycho. All she kept saying was how we should "bomb their country off the map." Keep in mind that this was right after the attacks when no one knew yet who was responsible, so I'm not sure whose country she was referring to. She's probably one of those people who still thinks Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. 
Anyway, after that I went to work (community college teacher). Most of the students in my first class had no clue what was happening (which tells you something of how aware they are of the news), so we just spent the class watching news reports on TV and talking about it. The rest of the day was a blur of talking about it, watching the news, and eventually getting in touch with my family. My brother decided he didn't want to live in NYC anymore, and now he doesn't.

IamJen · Sep 12, 2006

9//11 for me..I was interviewing for a job at the YMCA. I watched the second plane crash as well (on the TV at the Y). I went downstairs, and tried to work through the interview, but both my future boss and I were distracted. I watched a few minutes on TV afterward, learning of the other two plane crashes. When I went into the parking lot, there was a woman there, crying, too upset to get the key into the lock of her car door. It was the most bizarre thing, but I just hugged her. To my knowledge, I never saw her again, but I'll always remember her.

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