With all of the looking back and celebrations yesterday of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission and man landing on the moon, I got to thinking about the "Where were you when..." events in my life and I have come up with seven of them:- Assassination of JFK - I was seven years old living in Bad Godesberg West Germany - I remember a cloudy dark day and everyone being terribly sad.
- Assassination of Martin Luther King - I was 11 years old living in Soest West Germany - I remember lots of talk about racism and how Dr. King's death would set back the civil rights movement. We talked about it in school.
- Assassination of RFK - I was 11 years old living in Soest West Germany - I remember thinking that the US was in trouble and that the next president had been killed - Nixon was the result...
- Man on the Moon - I was 12 years old, and we were renting a cottage on Lake Milo in Yarmouth - we watched the moonlanding on my grandfather's old B&W TV - appropriate as the pictures from teh moon were also B&W. I will always remember Walter Cronkite's calm voice describing this amazing event
- 1972 Canada-Russia Summit Series - I was in Grade 11 at St.Paul's High School in Winnipeg - we shut down classes to watch the game, with the series being won by Paul Henderson's goal in the dying moments of Game 8 - the place went wild...
- 9/11 - I was facilitating a Visual Basic module team time at ITI Halifax when someone said a plne had flown into the World Trade Center - we all thought a small plane had gone off course and crashed - as we tried to get info the Internet literally crashed - eventually we got onto the BBC's site and discovered the magnitude of the event. People wanted to head home to look after their families - some thought a major war was starting...
- The Election of Barack Obama - I was home glued to CNN watching the elections returns with far more intensity than I had ever had for and Canadian campaign. As the evbning progressed i kept in touch with friends and other political junkies through Facebook, Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools. Obama is the 2.0 president.
(Photo from HistoryCentral.com)
2 comments:
I was 7 years older than you, so JFK was grade nine typing class.
I think I am older than all my instructors.
Of those events, I only remember the last two and had virtually identical experiences -- except I was facilitating the Essentials module at ITI. Only difference! I was absolutely glued to the coverage of Obama's election.
Since I wasn't alive for the events in the 60s, I'd put the Challenger explosion on my list of "Where were you when..." events. I was in high school jazz band class and an announcement was made on the PA system and we were all shocked into silence. We took our cue from Mr. C, our instructor. I still remember the look on his face. NASA had seemed invincible before that day (I wasn't alive for the Apollo 1 fire). We made our way to the library where there was a TV set and hundreds of us crowded around to watch the lift-off and subsequent explosion over and over. I also clearly remember the assasination attempt on Reagan. Recess time in 5th grade -- we wondered if the President was going to live as we didn't have many details. I also well remember where I was when I learned of both Lennon's death and Elvis' death. With Michael Jackson's death, I was reminded of both occurrences. I wonder why we're so surprised by celebrity death. (Well, Lennon's I understand...)
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
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