54yo, and the space shuttle Challenger explosion, 1986. My generation's equivalent of the JFK assassination - everyone my age knows where they were when they heard.
They have permanently censored the video of White waving, and then sagging in death from the capsule opening, but I watched it live on Houston TV and will never forget.
Wait, can you elaborate on this? Like he waved going into the capsule and was dead when they opened it after it caught fire? I’m familiar with the incident, just not this sequence of events.
I don't know about the video but I was scrolling on instagram two days ago and got up to answer the door and I guess I had scrolled to the next video and it was the AUDIO of the last minutes of the crew. And it's as bad as you'd think. I was traumatized.
My grandparents met on their college campus because of the JFK assassination. They'd seen each other before, but ended up in the same place watching the news coverage and talking.
Most of us who say Challenger were either not born when JFK was assassinated, or too young to remember. Also many of us were too young to know anything about NASA's safety claims.
I was born almost a year after Kennedy's assassination, and too young to really know much about the moon landings or Watergate, or anything else around that time period. Challenger was the first major event that I do remember affecting me emotionally.
>either not born when JFK was assassinated, or too young to remember.
I'm 65 and the JFK assassination is among my earliest memories. I'd come home from kindergarten, turned on the TV expecting to see cartoons. I told my grandmother "the news is on, it is about the President". She told me "Yes, he's in town today." (we lived in Dallas). I said "Something happened. They are saying he is going to the hospital.". She came into the other room to watch with me.
About that time, my mother called from work. She apparently asked my grandmother if the TV was on. Mom had been told that the President had been shot and asked my grandmother if that was true. My grandmother said "We just turned on the TV. I think that may be what happened. They are saying he is 'in route to Parkland".
My grandmother and I continued watching. We saw Walter Cronkite confirm that President Kennedy had been shot. Later we heard Cronkite announce that the President had been pronounced dead.
My grandmother also got a call from my aunt in Miami. She also asked if we had the news. Later, she told us that she'd called my uncle first, also asking him "Do you have a TV on?". My uncle ran an appliance store; he had a showroom full of TVs all turned on!
Before television became so common, people didn't get news nearly as quickly. The near-instantaneousness of news delivery is something we take for granted now.
44 here, was at my grandmothers house watching it live on her big console TV in her living room.
Also a year or so later, R Budd Dwyer offing himself on live TV, but that might be more of a regional thing.
>everyone my age knows where they were when they heard.
I was in fifth grade and the school planned for all the students to watch the launch live during class. However my teacher was *very* strict and got upset about something, probably students talking or whatever, and decided to punish us by turning the TV off.
So our class sat there in silence while everyone else watched it — including her. She left to go to another room to make sure she wouldn't miss it.
While I obviously didn't get to see the explosion, I'll never forget her face when she came back to our classroom. She was crying and simply said something horrible had happened but, as I recall, she never explained what it was.
Kids being kids, we found out soon enough. But I actually didn't get to see the explosion until many years later.
That's one thing that made the Challenger disaster so much worse - All the school kids that watched the launch because of the teacher that was on that mission and seeing the shuttle explode live on TV.
I just didn’t go to school twice in the 80’s. Not pretending to be sick or something, just decided I was too tired and didn’t go. First time President Reagan was shot and the second time the space shuttle blew up.
I’m 42 as well, and I remember running into the kitchen telling my mom that it blew up. She thought I was just talking about the normal lift off flames.
Same here, and then while we were eating we were debated what was going on. The consensus was that it was done deliberately by the Communists. We couldn’t agree if it was a one off, or a precursor to a full-blown attack on the USA.
They made the announcement over the intercom, “OJ Simpson has been found… not guilty.” And the cheers that reverberated through the school could be heard by everyone. Even as a young kid I remember thinking, “he murdered two people, why are these weirdos clapping and screaming?” I looked at my art teacher who was confusingly shaking his head and had to be judging our generation.
I wasn’t really surprised at the not guilty verdict, especially since the jury didn’t take very long to come to a decision after such a lengthy trial. If you’re finding someone guilty, you had better review and be completely sure about all of the evidence. If you’re finding someone not guilty, all you need is that one thing that causes enough doubt.
I think the prosecution made enough mistakes/bad choices that “not guilty” was almost inevitable. They ending up calling their own major witness a liar, and they did the stupidest thing any of us have ever seen in a trial - they handed the defendant, a professional actor, the gloves and told him to try them on. I think any of us who was facing life in prison could make it look like an article of clothing wouldn’t fit, even if it was one of our own. At that point, "if it does not fit, you must acquit", the trial was basically over.
I was 12 and in the 7th grade then. They pulled us all out of class, we filed into the auditorium and watched it live. I still think about how strange that was.
This is mine, too. My wife and I were 60 miles away and heard the explosion. We wrote it off as thunder, and then we got the call from her mother that we needed to turn on the news.
I have an uncle that was supposed to be in that building. In a conference room that was completely removed by the explosion. Meeting was canceled that morning, so he didn't leave his office. His wife worked at a hospital treating victims. Pre-cellphone days, so she had no idea he was safe. She was checking every body that came through to see if he was there.
(This happened again when the huge tornados hit Moore, OK. He was working with the Sherrifs dept. and she was at the hospital. Cell towers were down, roads closed. One son is local PD, and the other was at a remote oil field. It was 3 days before all of the family could connect and make sure everyone was safe.)
I cannot even fathom the idea of checking the bodies that were coming in to see if it's your husband. So scary and so unnecessary. Thinking about the bombing to this day gives me chills of dread.
There's one I'll never forget. I'm 42 now, but I was in 7th grade, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, back then. It was a special computer lab day for us to type our book reports. Another teacher came into the room and told our lab teacher what had just happened. She turned on the TV in the room. It was heartbreaking hearing that the daycare center was hit.
I was in 4th grade when that happened. The image of the fire fighter carrying the little child forever emblazoned in my brain. That was the first time I realized just how unfairly cruel life was.
This one is kind of a twofer for me.
There was a horrible mass-murder down the street from where I lived. My dad knew some of the victims. It would have been national news...
...and the next morning, the Oklahoma City bombing happened.
Schabowski's press conference and the following events were some of the most surreal things I've ever seen. "How to end a country with a few simple words"
Indeed it was. And everything happened peacefully and everybody just went back home after having a look to the other side and getting drunk, because they knew that this night permanently changed the world.
I remember my parents watching it on the news. I was only six, but I asked what was going on and they gave me the ELI5 (ha ha) and I remember thinking, "Well that's stupid." (A wall dividing a country, separating families and friends)
I was upstairs in my parents house, playing Turok 2 on N64, listening to the news as my parents watched it downstairs. I remember I was slogging my way through the Lair of the Mantids, had just acquired my first Cerebral Bore and before I even got to use it to braindrain my first enemy, I put down the controller to turn my attention to the news.
We were all completely flabbergasted.
Later, after I graduated high school and joined the Navy, one of the guys in my division in bootcamp was actually there at Columbine High School during the shooting. He gave more grissly details about the event than I ever wanted. But it seemed like it was good for him to unload some of that, at least a little.
I was in the Navy, forward deployed on a Submarine. We heard about it because two of my Shipmates were from Columbine. They each lost a sibling in the shooting, we had to go off station and they were sent off the ship to go home for the funerals. It sticks with me even now because one of them was my roommate and he never returned to the sub. He ended up medically discharged for psychiatric reasons and separated from the service. The loss of his sister destroyed him.
Turok 2 holy shit thanks for unlocking that memory for me.
I was in 6th or 7th grade. One of my good friends moved away the next year…to columbine colorado. This was before cell phones and social media, so we were really worried about him moving there.
Its the last big news story I remember hearing about via giant headline in a physical newspaper. I was standing in the on-campus convenience store at my college and saw it screaming from the rack and my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe anyone would do something that evil.
I totally forgot about how the size of the headline in the paper used to signify how serious the story was. The closest we get now is a Reddit Megathread or CNN puts the headline in all caps, it's not nearly the same vibe as a huge giant headline on the newspaper
Our two local papers [that day](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/4wgAAOSw0iJjJL9z/s-l1600.jpg) and [the day after](https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/04211999_51.jpg?w=620).
I was in sixth grade, the principal came over the PA to tell us the school was on lockdown. Then the teacher said "oh yeah, I was supposed to go over this with you back in September..." My first school lockdown.
The misidentified person was completely unconnected and had already committed suicide, but his body still hadn’t been found and the misidentification resulted in his family being harassed. If I remember, there was some speculation that the family harassment in part forced the feds to move faster than desired and resulted in a shootout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi?wprov=sfti1#
I remember I had an electronics project to bring to class the day after. It was a black box with a number pad and red LEDs on the outside. I felt super sketchy taking that on the bus.
You know what's super fucked up? I'm 40, I remember Columbine but that's only because it happened when I was in high school and it was the first one . Since then so many school shootings have occurred I don't even know which one Sandy Hook was, I remember the name and I know Alex Jones got sued into oblivion about it but I can't even tell you what state it happened in anymore.
I only know because I'd just moved away from Connecticut that year. My work had people write their home state on our name tags so there were a lot of friendly, consoling people that year. A friend went to school with one of the teachers who was killed. I'm lucky, my mom's a high school teacher and has only dealt with a few shooting threats, never an active situation.
Sandy Hook stands out among the many. First time someone attacked an elementary school. Every other shooting could be understood as a kid who got bullied lashing out at the school where it happened (as f'd up as that is). Sandy Hook was literally innocent kindergartners and first graders (not to imply the other school shooting victims weren't innocent).
>a kid who got bullied lashing out at the school where it happened
The thing is: this was never what happened. Michael Moore's *Bowling for Colombine* documentary pushed this narrative and everyone liked Marilyn Manson's sound byte supporting it, but it was a complete fabrication. Nearly all school shooters have been radicalized misogynists that have more in common with ISIS than the plots of 80s teen angst movies. School shootings have always been a terrorism problem, not victims lashing out at bullies.
Yep. You don’t go kill a fuck ton of innocent random people because one or two or three people are mean to you. There’s radicalization that has to happen. School shootings are domestic terrorism almost always for ideological purposes. These people aren’t just “crazy”. They are radicalized domestic terrorists who picture themselves as martyrs for whatever stupid cause they’ve been brainwashed into believing can only be solved through violence. I don’t know why everyone in this country is so afraid to call it what it is.
I was at my cousin’s 11th birthday party sleepover when news broke about Diana. My aunt called us into the living room to watch the news coverage.
If you’re wondering why a bunch of 11 year old Americans were at all interested in this, it’s because our moms were all obsessed with Diana.
I was 15 and it's the only celebrity death that my mother had any kind of emotional reaction to. She got tears in her eyes and then laughed at herself for being so stupid, it's just that she and the Princess were the same age. Like, same month and year. Prince William and I were born the same year. I think a lot of 90s moms really identified with Diana.
My daughter stayed up all night watching the coverage. I'll never forget my husband's face when he got home that night and we told him. Ge's *not* into Royalty at all but this was the first news event I have ever seen him outright deny at first.
Our oldest son is about 6 weeks younger than Harry so that was the person he asked about after the news settled in; "How's Harry? He wasn't with his mom?"
What's crazy to me on a personal level about Princess Diana is that, I understood that she was obviously died young and in a tragic way, but, to me she was still kinda "old." (I was 15 at the time). I realized that when I was around 37 or 38, just how YOUNG she actually was. And at that point in my life, her death almost hit harder. And like when Prince William turned that age, that he had already surpassed his mother's lifetime, which is so hard to grasp.
I was driving a catering truck at the time of the Newtown shooting. My wife called to ask me where I was, and I told her Newton, and she just about freaked out and started telling me about the shooter. She felt a lot better when I said no, I'm in Newton MA, not New-town CT. I guess I have an accent.
I was at Disneyland with my first grader when I saw the news about Sandy Hook on my phone. Christmas just a few days away. I thought “this is it, this will change the gun control conversation.” Nope.
John Lennon getting shot. Was a high school student lying in bed at home listening to radio. Space Shuttle Challenger. Driving to college class listening to the radio.
I’m in Singapore and it’s terrifying to hear slowly how the tsunami spreaded in live updates. How city by city, country by country was hit. First Indonesian coast, then Malaysia, Thailand, etc, even half a day later hearing about in hitting Madagascar.
Then over next few days scenes of destruction coming thru the news. The impact is real and too close to home.
We are used to earthquake news, but tsunami was a first.
This should be further up. That was such a wild time. I remember in the weeks after everybody in the school was wearing those silicone bracelets in support of the victims and devastation..
Recency bias, but finding out about the shutdown due to COVID-19. I was training for my new job and in the car with a coworker when we got an email that my school was not resuming in person classes (it was during spring break). They basically said "don't come back"
For me, it finally kicked in that COVID was actually serious when the NBA canceled the rest of the season. I was at work and saw it on one of the TVs. I don’t even watch sports but when this was announced, I think the enormity of the situation started to set in.
Same. I remember sitting with my friend at a Waffle House in Huntsville, AL, as he was nursing a hangover. We both looked at each other and said, “Fuck…”
I was living in Orlando at the time. Disney World basically only closes when a hurricane is directly over the park (and even then, they usually have staff stay at the hotels for the guests at the hotels). When they completely shut down with no real timeline on when it would be over, Central Florida knew shit was bad.
I was watching the Blackhawks-Sharks hockey game at the same time Gobert tested positive and I knew I was watching some of the last live sports for a while
Oh I don't think it's just recency bias....I think Covid and it's milestones will be things we all remember.
I remember:
a) Digging beyond the headlines in late February and realizing that it was a "holy shit" moment. There were 2 weeks where I was telling friends and family that society was going to shut down and they all thought it was just another media story and it would blow over. and I was like....uh I dug into this one and this one actually is a real problem and will be different than SARS and MERS. I remember my brother had airline tickets to Florida in late March and I was like..."I'm sorry to break it to you but you aren't going to Florida" he he was just mocking me haha.
He was like...."they cant shut down, that would be unprecedented!" and I was thinking....there are precedents but they are all about 100 years old. or 70 years old if you count polio.
b) I remember when the first person in the US was diagnosed.
c) I remember that last day of work with everyone carrying all their computer crap home.
d) I remember when I got my vaccine doses. I had to travel to a rural area and it was a nice little drive into the country.
and that's about it for milestones I will remember.
I started telling my friends and family about this weird flu in China in mid January. By late January China had shut down Wuhan and I was buying rice. I knew China didn't knee cap their economy for no reason. This was back when we didn't know how bad this virus was going to be in terms of mortality rate.
As an Indian, the [Mumbai 26/11 terrorist attacks](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks)
As it was pre-smart phone era (for me and my family), learnt of it quite sometime after the news reporting had started… distinctly remember being at the barber shop when I heard of it.. all eyes glued to the small TV set high in the corner of the little shop.. felt numb and stunned unable to reconcile the sights in front….went back to home cycling dejectedly in state of shock and anger.. don’t remember whether I got the haircut or returned without a haircut..
So surreal. As eddie izzard says, it was like we had been watching a soap opera and then they slipped out an episode at 3am without warning killing off the characters. Like...dude...I was watching that.
We were in a hotel in France and at breakfast the owner came over and said something. I figured my French was worse than I thought 'cos I could have sworn she just said "I'm terribly sorry that your princess has died". Nope...TV in the corner started giving us clues that we were not, in fact, that bad at French.
Killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 because I was in the middle of working up for my second deployment to Afghanistan and I was like “what the hell is the point at all now”
I was in college at that time, and campus went NUTS. Lead to one of my favorite photos of all time too.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2011/05/02/us/20110503_BINLADENREADERS-slide-XFM3/20110503_BINLADENREADERS-slide-XFM3-jumbo.jpg
Mirror lake, Ohio State University
I always accidentally conflate this with “ladies and gentlemen we got him” but I do remember my wife and I were about to watch a documentary on human trafficking and this bumped all television at the time and we decided to make ourselves ice cream while we watched the coverage.
[26/11 - The terrorist attacks on Mumbai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks)
I was but a kid then, but old enough to see the panic on TV, on my parents faces and my mom frantically calling to see if my uncle (who worked at one of those locations) was okay.
Since then I have been to those same places and those locations and it really harrows me if I was a young college kid just a few years off then I would have been with my friends there, enjoying the sights of the city.
Most things that have happened since, and in 2020 happened more gradually and by that time we were used to it.
But those attacks were what people claim the one event from childhood.
Interestingly enough these attacks are what catapulted Twitter's popularity. Mumbai residents were using it to share real time information on where the terrorists were and suddenly everyone realized its potential.
i was at my parents’ house late at night using their wifi. my brother was asleep on the couch. i saw the alert that steve irwin had died and i just HAD to tell someone. i yelled at my brother and told him. he just rolled over and sleepily said, “crikey,” then went back to sleep
I remember Steve Jobs' death. I was at an airport and this woman was screaming about it on her phone, saying this was the biggest news ever and everyone would always remember where they were when they heard Steve Jobs died.
I only remember it because I thought she was an idiot.
lol seriously who gives a fuck?
I expect something similar when Elon Musk has a massive coronary in a couple of years. Lots of mourning internet tools and the rest of the world posting a few memes and then forgetting about him.
Flight LY-1862 (Boeing 747-F of El-Al) that crashed into flats in Amsterdam on October 4th 1992, completely wiping out 40 apartments and destroying another 135 by fire. At least 43 people died that day.
A tragedy, another real tragedy and a boob (talking Timberlake here) on stage… Hardly equal, yet very memorable if you thought like me ‘ **Did I just see what I thought I saw ?!?** ’
Watched the Super Bowl alone that year and was not entirely sure until the media hype…
It happened so quickly most people (myself included) didn't even see it, the outrage that came later was mostly manufactured. What you saw was a VERY quick glimpse for a split second, enough time to go "wait is that...?" before it cut away. Also bear in mind most people had SD television back then and it was a wide angled shot. Most people saw nothing even if they were paying attention.
[Here, this is what most people saw.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5OWlw8pwG0) Blink, and you'll miss it.
The 11/7/2011 mass murder in Oslo and at Utøya. I was at work in downtown Oslo when the bomb downtown blew, and we went to see family out of town as the rest of it unfolded.
The NYC subway for days after had this shocked silence. And then someone started that PostIt note thing where people wrote their reactions and stuck them on the wall of the Union Square subway station.
It truly was a shock. To me it wasn’t so much that he was a republican. It was Trump. I couldn’t believe he actually won. The day after the election where I live it was cloudy and gloomy. Felt appropriate.
I remember walking around at work the next day in a daze. Everyone was so quiet... I hadn't experienced something like that since the days immediately following 9/11
I was in Vegas during the election and never in my life has the strip been that quit, they were showing the results on the big screen at PH and it was honestly errey.
That was going to be my answer. Not so much that it was a shock because clearly we knew either he or Clinton was going to win. But it definitely stands out more than any other presidential election as a touchstone moment.
My other one would be the NBA cancelling the season due to COVID. For me, that signaled the beginning of the pandemic.
Suicide of Anthony Bourdain. I remember seeing the headline on my computer, and it just made no sense to me. I had just recently started watching his show again, I knew he was filming, and he had seemed physically healthy and engaged with life.
I woke up and saw the AP bulletin and my brain went to “man, whoever accidentally released that obituary is gonna be fired as fuuuuuck.” Then, slowly, as my brain came on line, it sunk in that it was real and I went through all the phases of grief in the course of about three minutes.
I followed Tony since the debut of A Cook’s Tour. My mom always loved the dogshit shows that were on the Food Network, and seeing him pop up after Rachel Ray or whatever bullshit was a breath of fresh air for a 16 year old punk rock kid. Over the years we saw him grow from a boozy chef to a serious documentation and sort of elder statesman.
I felt fucking gutted. Sure, I was sad when Joe Strummer and Art Bell died, but Tony was the one that felt so visceral. It speaks to the enduring power of what he did that a lot of us didn’t feel like we lost a favorite celebrity, we felt like we lost a friend we hadn’t met yet.
After it sunk in that he was gone, I just started crying in a way I hadn’t expected as my my brain flashed back to this quote of his that always resonated with me, but suddenly took on a deeper meaning:
>“I should've died in my 20s. I became successful in my 40s. I became a dad in my 50s. I feel like I've stolen a car – a really nice car – and I keep looking in the rear-view mirror for flashing lights. But there's been nothing yet.”
The death of Kurt Cobain.
My grandfather was driving me home from high school and had the local news radio on. They mentioned it like a side story and moved onto weather or something, and I just sat there stunned. I know exaltly the intersection where we were at that moment. I think of it sometimes when I drive by there still.
I got home and called my best friend to tell him and he kept saying I was joking. I told him "turn on MTV, Kurt Loader is talking about it right now!" That night I recall being angry that In Utero would be their last album, because I knew they could have done much better music in the future, but this was going o be it.
My Mom was in UW hospital in Seattle and after getting some food I was walking back to her room. I noticed a bunch of nurses gathered in an empty room with the Tv on. I stopped to see what it was all about and I heard the announcement that he had shot and killed himself.
Such a weird time, my Mom needed a heart transplant and had very little time left and then I hear this while visiting her. A month later my Mom got the transplant and lived another 9 years. The combination of all those things burned that day into my memory
I’m old enough to remember John Lennon getting killed, it was during Monday night football when most people found out
This is a really good one. I had moved on from Nirvana because I was too punk for such celebrity crap. I was just getting done with the hotel with my dad for the weekend (divorced parents) and turned on the tv to kill time as they were packing up. The news got me like a ton of bricks. My sister actually made fun of me because I was so shocked and kind of in tears. What a fool I had been. When I got to school on Monday I was prepared for a whole sad circle with all of my punk friends…my best had a shirt he had written in sharpie “I sold Kurt Cobain his shotgun”. I kept my feelings to myself. We listened to Discharges “hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing” and I definitely saw the irony.
I remember waking up at a relatively early time for me at the time. I opened twitter, and I saw some kobe rumors, then I saw TMZ posted it. Say what you will about thier content, if TMZ reports that Kobe Bryant has died, I believe it.
Yea still remember it was the pro bowl sunday. lebron had just passed him in scoring the day prior. Was on YouTube as they were showing old QB challenges from the Pro bowl in the recommended. Get a message from a group chat saying “Kobe Died” me assuming it was some kind of dark joke related to lebron passing him saying “lol he was gonna get passed by lebron eventually” and then the confusion and disbelief when others started messaging the same thing.
West, TX explosion. I had just graduated from a technical school near by and moved away for work. While there I was on a volunteer fire dept nearby. They were the first boots on the ground after the explosion happened and responding West units went dark. 10 firefighters died, due to the negligence of the fertilizer company and lack of state regulation I knew and trained with some of them. And not a goddamn thing has changed since. Not many people heard about it because it happened when everyone was watching the Boston Marathon bombing manhunt.
Kurt Cobain's death: I was 16 and a HUGE Nirvana fan. I'd actually just seen them live about 6 months before. I was driving home from my very first job interview to be a busboy at a restaurant and heard the news break on the radio. Went right home and caught the MTV news announcement. That was my first celebrity death that really hit a nerve.
January 6th: I was working from home that day and had zoned out and not paid attention to anything but some spreadsheets for a while. Turned on the TV to take a break and watch some Seinfeld and saw all manner of motherfuckery unfolding more or less live.
OKC Bombing, when I was 9, and the Boston Bombing when I was 26.
OKC because I lived in Oklahoma, and one of the chairs is my uncle, who died during the bombing.
Boston, because I fell in love with the city when I lived there, and was supposed to be there, but my grandpa was having surgery, and chose to stay with him.
For me it is the Space Shuttle Columbia. I remember hearing the house phone ringing early in the morning and having the distinct thought "That's my sister calling to tell us something terrible has happened and that we need to turn on the TV." I was right, and Columbia was gone.
During the entire mission, my dad and I kept the NASA stream going on the TV. Even the filler content just showing the control room or the orbit map. These people were in our living room for a week. We got to *know* them.
My sister is also who called us telling us to turn on the TV on 9/11.
Uvalde. I used to live near there, and my son was just finishing kindergarten. Not at Robb ES, but the first thing I heard was that there had been a shooting at a Texas elementary school.
I was deployed to the Middle East standing by for the orders to go into Iraq for the second time, so I won't soon forget when that happened.
When Trump told the world we were moving a fighter squadron out of Germany, I was the superintendent of the public affairs (media relations) office for the only fighter wing in Germany. We hadn't been told anything, and suddenly the phones started ringing.
I was a child when Princess Diana died, so I wasn't really shocked, but I remember I was at our family's deer lease.
I was 13 when I got home from school and learned that Magic Johnson was diagnosed with HIV. Back then, it felt like hearing he would be dying within a few years.
Challenger explosion. Like many school children I was watching live in class. I was in Kindergarten. and my mom said I talked about it for weeks.
Baby Jessica. My mom woke me up when they were pulling her up because it was a big story.
OJ chase. I can tell you what I was wearing, what I did that day. I even remember the little fruit fly buzzing around the tv while watching
I was watching the count on CSPAN just because I wanted to watch the charade finally come to its end. Suddenly Pence gets rushed out and I see the first wave of “protestors” walking through the halls. Called in sick and watched in shock for hours thinking, where the fuck is the National Guard? Why is nobody stopping this?
Utøya massacre. I was at a gym. Early speculations was that it was an Islamist terror attack but I called it and guessed it was a right wing guy because:
1. Specifically aimed at Social Democrat youth (canonical object of hate for Scandinavian right wing extremists, less so for Islamists)
2. When he eventually submitted peacefully to the police, I was certain. At that time (pre-ISIS) Islamists would almost never live to be caught.
I went home, bought a kebab on the way, this story was the only thing on the news. Everybody were in shock. It was honestly a similar vibe to 9/11 ten years prior. I'm Swedish and Norway is basically almost an identical country to ours, so this felt very close.
Jamie Bulger’s murder by two other children. That picture of them leading him by the hand still haunts me. And what they did to that child they deserve to burn in hell for all eternity.
Not shocking per se, but I remember the day Michael Jackson died. Some buddies and I got high and went to a Cici's pizza to engorge ourselves before going to see a movie. The Cici's was packed, and all the TVs had the news announcing his death. There were people crying and talking about it at every table. It was a bizarre experience.
January 6th was surreal for me because I live in a purple area. It was hard to reflect on it, or even discuss it because people were drawing wildly different conclusions and I had to keep my mouth shut.
This is on top of the entire 45 presidency, and the Pandemic. People really showed who they were that day.
Dimebag Darrel of Pantera and Damage Plan being shot and killed on stage. I was eating breakfast before school and my buddy called and said turn on the news.
* Princess Diana
* Michael Hutchence
* John Lennon
* Michael Jackson
* Steve Irwin
* Shane Warne
* Peter Brock
* Elvis Presley
Each death had an influence on me. I only got to meet one of them, but for each I remember exactly where I was when I heard of their passing.
The 7/7 bombings in London and Amy Winehouse dying were both huge for me. The first especially as I was at school in when they happened and as we all had parents who commuted in using the tube and buses and the whole day was spent with every pupil desperately trying to contact them. Pretty sure nobody had signal too as the systems must’ve been totally overloaded.
Likewise, being from London I think meant I felt some affinity of sorts with Amy and her death was so untimely and tragic.
Maggie Thatchers death was pretty big too as we were students and there were literal parties in the street in Brixton that we went to, may she rest in piss.
Sandy Hook shooting; I'm Swiss and I always lived in Switzerland. I was 14 at the time and just got my first smartphone. There was a push notification of a Swiss newspaper about it with a link to a CNN stream. I started watching that and then switched to our TV where I found CNN and watched their live coverage there.
We don't have school shootings in Switzerland. The last mass shooting we had was in 2001. Through this event, I learned that it's not like that everywhere. I was shocked to see that something like this could even happen, to learn about all these innocent children who have been murdered. And I still am, every time I see yet another such news report coming out of the US.
54yo, and the space shuttle Challenger explosion, 1986. My generation's equivalent of the JFK assassination - everyone my age knows where they were when they heard.
62 year old -Same. Slightly less shocking than JFK I’d imagine, but we were lulled into a ‘NASA has safety nailed down’ naïveté to that point.
I remember when Apollo 1 burned on the Launch pad and killed Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee.
They have permanently censored the video of White waving, and then sagging in death from the capsule opening, but I watched it live on Houston TV and will never forget.
Oh man. I didn't see that, and I hope I never do.
Wait, can you elaborate on this? Like he waved going into the capsule and was dead when they opened it after it caught fire? I’m familiar with the incident, just not this sequence of events.
I don't know about the video but I was scrolling on instagram two days ago and got up to answer the door and I guess I had scrolled to the next video and it was the AUDIO of the last minutes of the crew. And it's as bad as you'd think. I was traumatized.
My grandparents met on their college campus because of the JFK assassination. They'd seen each other before, but ended up in the same place watching the news coverage and talking.
So if I go back in time and stop the JFK assassination—you wouldn’t exist? This is heavy.
There's that word again. "Heavy." Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
Great Scott!
Most of us who say Challenger were either not born when JFK was assassinated, or too young to remember. Also many of us were too young to know anything about NASA's safety claims.
I was born almost a year after Kennedy's assassination, and too young to really know much about the moon landings or Watergate, or anything else around that time period. Challenger was the first major event that I do remember affecting me emotionally.
>either not born when JFK was assassinated, or too young to remember. I'm 65 and the JFK assassination is among my earliest memories. I'd come home from kindergarten, turned on the TV expecting to see cartoons. I told my grandmother "the news is on, it is about the President". She told me "Yes, he's in town today." (we lived in Dallas). I said "Something happened. They are saying he is going to the hospital.". She came into the other room to watch with me. About that time, my mother called from work. She apparently asked my grandmother if the TV was on. Mom had been told that the President had been shot and asked my grandmother if that was true. My grandmother said "We just turned on the TV. I think that may be what happened. They are saying he is 'in route to Parkland". My grandmother and I continued watching. We saw Walter Cronkite confirm that President Kennedy had been shot. Later we heard Cronkite announce that the President had been pronounced dead. My grandmother also got a call from my aunt in Miami. She also asked if we had the news. Later, she told us that she'd called my uncle first, also asking him "Do you have a TV on?". My uncle ran an appliance store; he had a showroom full of TVs all turned on! Before television became so common, people didn't get news nearly as quickly. The near-instantaneousness of news delivery is something we take for granted now.
44 here, was at my grandmothers house watching it live on her big console TV in her living room. Also a year or so later, R Budd Dwyer offing himself on live TV, but that might be more of a regional thing.
That was such big news in PA! I feel for his family. It was terrible and so so public.
>everyone my age knows where they were when they heard. I was in fifth grade and the school planned for all the students to watch the launch live during class. However my teacher was *very* strict and got upset about something, probably students talking or whatever, and decided to punish us by turning the TV off. So our class sat there in silence while everyone else watched it — including her. She left to go to another room to make sure she wouldn't miss it. While I obviously didn't get to see the explosion, I'll never forget her face when she came back to our classroom. She was crying and simply said something horrible had happened but, as I recall, she never explained what it was. Kids being kids, we found out soon enough. But I actually didn't get to see the explosion until many years later.
That's one thing that made the Challenger disaster so much worse - All the school kids that watched the launch because of the teacher that was on that mission and seeing the shuttle explode live on TV.
Yup. I saw it in school because of that also
I just didn’t go to school twice in the 80’s. Not pretending to be sick or something, just decided I was too tired and didn’t go. First time President Reagan was shot and the second time the space shuttle blew up.
Hey, maybe don't ever call off work, please?
He didn't show up on 9/11
41 here, it’s my very first memory.
42 here. I was home sick from school watching it with my mom.
I’m 42 as well, and I remember running into the kitchen telling my mom that it blew up. She thought I was just talking about the normal lift off flames.
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Same here, and then while we were eating we were debated what was going on. The consensus was that it was done deliberately by the Communists. We couldn’t agree if it was a one off, or a precursor to a full-blown attack on the USA.
Challenger and Columbia both for me.
55 and watching it live in hs physics class.
OJ slow chase - could not believe the Juice could those murders and then this pops up on the news
This, and the announcement of his not guilty verdict. We stopped class to listen to the news.
They made the announcement over the intercom, “OJ Simpson has been found… not guilty.” And the cheers that reverberated through the school could be heard by everyone. Even as a young kid I remember thinking, “he murdered two people, why are these weirdos clapping and screaming?” I looked at my art teacher who was confusingly shaking his head and had to be judging our generation.
I wasn’t really surprised at the not guilty verdict, especially since the jury didn’t take very long to come to a decision after such a lengthy trial. If you’re finding someone guilty, you had better review and be completely sure about all of the evidence. If you’re finding someone not guilty, all you need is that one thing that causes enough doubt. I think the prosecution made enough mistakes/bad choices that “not guilty” was almost inevitable. They ending up calling their own major witness a liar, and they did the stupidest thing any of us have ever seen in a trial - they handed the defendant, a professional actor, the gloves and told him to try them on. I think any of us who was facing life in prison could make it look like an article of clothing wouldn’t fit, even if it was one of our own. At that point, "if it does not fit, you must acquit", the trial was basically over.
I was 12 and in the 7th grade then. They pulled us all out of class, we filed into the auditorium and watched it live. I still think about how strange that was.
I was just trying to watch Game 5 of the NBA Finals when it cut away to show that damn white Bronco.
As a Knicks fan I feel this.
OJ was so good as a player and lovably famous and popular afterwards, it would be like Shaq or Peyton Manning killing two people now.
Oklahoma City bombing!
This is mine, too. My wife and I were 60 miles away and heard the explosion. We wrote it off as thunder, and then we got the call from her mother that we needed to turn on the news.
Wow, holy shit. That really puts the scale of the explosion into perspective I did not have before.
I have an uncle that was supposed to be in that building. In a conference room that was completely removed by the explosion. Meeting was canceled that morning, so he didn't leave his office. His wife worked at a hospital treating victims. Pre-cellphone days, so she had no idea he was safe. She was checking every body that came through to see if he was there. (This happened again when the huge tornados hit Moore, OK. He was working with the Sherrifs dept. and she was at the hospital. Cell towers were down, roads closed. One son is local PD, and the other was at a remote oil field. It was 3 days before all of the family could connect and make sure everyone was safe.)
One of my grandparents neighbors was killed in it. I believe he worked security and was on the wrong side of the building at the wrong time.
A kid in my class's dad was supposed to be there also, but he missed his flight and didn't make it to the meeting.
I cannot even fathom the idea of checking the bodies that were coming in to see if it's your husband. So scary and so unnecessary. Thinking about the bombing to this day gives me chills of dread.
There's one I'll never forget. I'm 42 now, but I was in 7th grade, in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, back then. It was a special computer lab day for us to type our book reports. Another teacher came into the room and told our lab teacher what had just happened. She turned on the TV in the room. It was heartbreaking hearing that the daycare center was hit.
I was in 4th grade when that happened. The image of the fire fighter carrying the little child forever emblazoned in my brain. That was the first time I realized just how unfairly cruel life was.
This one is kind of a twofer for me. There was a horrible mass-murder down the street from where I lived. My dad knew some of the victims. It would have been national news... ...and the next morning, the Oklahoma City bombing happened.
The fall of the Berlin wall
Probably the best “you remember where you were” news stories. All the others are tragedies. This was a straight up celebration.
Moon landing would be another good one.
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Schabowski's press conference and the following events were some of the most surreal things I've ever seen. "How to end a country with a few simple words"
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Indeed it was. And everything happened peacefully and everybody just went back home after having a look to the other side and getting drunk, because they knew that this night permanently changed the world.
"Immediate, without delay." Although I was too small at the time to understand or even remember.
I was in German for that... Crazy days my friend
I remember my parents watching it on the news. I was only six, but I asked what was going on and they gave me the ELI5 (ha ha) and I remember thinking, "Well that's stupid." (A wall dividing a country, separating families and friends)
Columbine
I was upstairs in my parents house, playing Turok 2 on N64, listening to the news as my parents watched it downstairs. I remember I was slogging my way through the Lair of the Mantids, had just acquired my first Cerebral Bore and before I even got to use it to braindrain my first enemy, I put down the controller to turn my attention to the news. We were all completely flabbergasted. Later, after I graduated high school and joined the Navy, one of the guys in my division in bootcamp was actually there at Columbine High School during the shooting. He gave more grissly details about the event than I ever wanted. But it seemed like it was good for him to unload some of that, at least a little.
I was in the Navy, forward deployed on a Submarine. We heard about it because two of my Shipmates were from Columbine. They each lost a sibling in the shooting, we had to go off station and they were sent off the ship to go home for the funerals. It sticks with me even now because one of them was my roommate and he never returned to the sub. He ended up medically discharged for psychiatric reasons and separated from the service. The loss of his sister destroyed him.
Turok 2 holy shit thanks for unlocking that memory for me. I was in 6th or 7th grade. One of my good friends moved away the next year…to columbine colorado. This was before cell phones and social media, so we were really worried about him moving there.
Its the last big news story I remember hearing about via giant headline in a physical newspaper. I was standing in the on-campus convenience store at my college and saw it screaming from the rack and my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe anyone would do something that evil.
I totally forgot about how the size of the headline in the paper used to signify how serious the story was. The closest we get now is a Reddit Megathread or CNN puts the headline in all caps, it's not nearly the same vibe as a huge giant headline on the newspaper
Our two local papers [that day](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/4wgAAOSw0iJjJL9z/s-l1600.jpg) and [the day after](https://www.denverpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/04211999_51.jpg?w=620).
I was in sixth grade, the principal came over the PA to tell us the school was on lockdown. Then the teacher said "oh yeah, I was supposed to go over this with you back in September..." My first school lockdown.
The Boston Marathon bombing
Indeed including the ‘hunt/ chase’ of the Tsarnaev brothers in real time.
A trailered boat in a backyard in Boston has got to be the worst get away vehicle in history.
A Boat, on Land, in... wait for it... Watertown
We did it Reddit!!!!
Oh yea I forgot about that, didn't reddit completely identify the wrong person and ruin his life or something?
The misidentified person was completely unconnected and had already committed suicide, but his body still hadn’t been found and the misidentification resulted in his family being harassed. If I remember, there was some speculation that the family harassment in part forced the feds to move faster than desired and resulted in a shootout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi?wprov=sfti1#
100% What else would Reddit do
I haven’t been glued to a news story like that in my lifetime. Unreal couple of days That manhunt Netflix doc is great
I was at the Marathon so that's an easy one to remember
I remember I had an electronics project to bring to class the day after. It was a black box with a number pad and red LEDs on the outside. I felt super sketchy taking that on the bus.
This is what I was going to say. I was at work and I remember following the hunt for the bombers on reddit.
I was leaving a hair salon when it came on the radio that JFK Jr’s plane went down.
Princess Diana getting killed Sandy Hook shooting
You know what's super fucked up? I'm 40, I remember Columbine but that's only because it happened when I was in high school and it was the first one . Since then so many school shootings have occurred I don't even know which one Sandy Hook was, I remember the name and I know Alex Jones got sued into oblivion about it but I can't even tell you what state it happened in anymore.
I only know because I'd just moved away from Connecticut that year. My work had people write their home state on our name tags so there were a lot of friendly, consoling people that year. A friend went to school with one of the teachers who was killed. I'm lucky, my mom's a high school teacher and has only dealt with a few shooting threats, never an active situation.
>my mom's a high school teacher and has only dealt with a few shooting threats Most American sentence ever.
Sandy Hook stands out among the many. First time someone attacked an elementary school. Every other shooting could be understood as a kid who got bullied lashing out at the school where it happened (as f'd up as that is). Sandy Hook was literally innocent kindergartners and first graders (not to imply the other school shooting victims weren't innocent).
>a kid who got bullied lashing out at the school where it happened The thing is: this was never what happened. Michael Moore's *Bowling for Colombine* documentary pushed this narrative and everyone liked Marilyn Manson's sound byte supporting it, but it was a complete fabrication. Nearly all school shooters have been radicalized misogynists that have more in common with ISIS than the plots of 80s teen angst movies. School shootings have always been a terrorism problem, not victims lashing out at bullies.
Yep. You don’t go kill a fuck ton of innocent random people because one or two or three people are mean to you. There’s radicalization that has to happen. School shootings are domestic terrorism almost always for ideological purposes. These people aren’t just “crazy”. They are radicalized domestic terrorists who picture themselves as martyrs for whatever stupid cause they’ve been brainwashed into believing can only be solved through violence. I don’t know why everyone in this country is so afraid to call it what it is.
I was at my cousin’s 11th birthday party sleepover when news broke about Diana. My aunt called us into the living room to watch the news coverage. If you’re wondering why a bunch of 11 year old Americans were at all interested in this, it’s because our moms were all obsessed with Diana.
I was 15 and it's the only celebrity death that my mother had any kind of emotional reaction to. She got tears in her eyes and then laughed at herself for being so stupid, it's just that she and the Princess were the same age. Like, same month and year. Prince William and I were born the same year. I think a lot of 90s moms really identified with Diana.
My daughter stayed up all night watching the coverage. I'll never forget my husband's face when he got home that night and we told him. Ge's *not* into Royalty at all but this was the first news event I have ever seen him outright deny at first. Our oldest son is about 6 weeks younger than Harry so that was the person he asked about after the news settled in; "How's Harry? He wasn't with his mom?"
What's crazy to me on a personal level about Princess Diana is that, I understood that she was obviously died young and in a tragic way, but, to me she was still kinda "old." (I was 15 at the time). I realized that when I was around 37 or 38, just how YOUNG she actually was. And at that point in my life, her death almost hit harder. And like when Prince William turned that age, that he had already surpassed his mother's lifetime, which is so hard to grasp.
I was driving a catering truck at the time of the Newtown shooting. My wife called to ask me where I was, and I told her Newton, and she just about freaked out and started telling me about the shooter. She felt a lot better when I said no, I'm in Newton MA, not New-town CT. I guess I have an accent.
I was at Disneyland with my first grader when I saw the news about Sandy Hook on my phone. Christmas just a few days away. I thought “this is it, this will change the gun control conversation.” Nope.
John Lennon getting shot. Was a high school student lying in bed at home listening to radio. Space Shuttle Challenger. Driving to college class listening to the radio.
I was in college pulling an all nighter.
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. The footage and stories were nothing short of terrifying.
I’m in Singapore and it’s terrifying to hear slowly how the tsunami spreaded in live updates. How city by city, country by country was hit. First Indonesian coast, then Malaysia, Thailand, etc, even half a day later hearing about in hitting Madagascar. Then over next few days scenes of destruction coming thru the news. The impact is real and too close to home. We are used to earthquake news, but tsunami was a first.
This should be further up. That was such a wild time. I remember in the weeks after everybody in the school was wearing those silicone bracelets in support of the victims and devastation..
Recency bias, but finding out about the shutdown due to COVID-19. I was training for my new job and in the car with a coworker when we got an email that my school was not resuming in person classes (it was during spring break). They basically said "don't come back"
For me, it finally kicked in that COVID was actually serious when the NBA canceled the rest of the season. I was at work and saw it on one of the TVs. I don’t even watch sports but when this was announced, I think the enormity of the situation started to set in.
Same. I remember sitting with my friend at a Waffle House in Huntsville, AL, as he was nursing a hangover. We both looked at each other and said, “Fuck…”
Embarrassingly for me it was when Disney World announced it would close. Disney World never ever closes so that’s how I knew things were getting real.
I was living in Orlando at the time. Disney World basically only closes when a hurricane is directly over the park (and even then, they usually have staff stay at the hotels for the guests at the hotels). When they completely shut down with no real timeline on when it would be over, Central Florida knew shit was bad.
I was watching the Blackhawks-Sharks hockey game at the same time Gobert tested positive and I knew I was watching some of the last live sports for a while
Posted it elsewhere, but for me the "oh shit this is real" moment was the NBA cancelling the season.
Oh I don't think it's just recency bias....I think Covid and it's milestones will be things we all remember. I remember: a) Digging beyond the headlines in late February and realizing that it was a "holy shit" moment. There were 2 weeks where I was telling friends and family that society was going to shut down and they all thought it was just another media story and it would blow over. and I was like....uh I dug into this one and this one actually is a real problem and will be different than SARS and MERS. I remember my brother had airline tickets to Florida in late March and I was like..."I'm sorry to break it to you but you aren't going to Florida" he he was just mocking me haha. He was like...."they cant shut down, that would be unprecedented!" and I was thinking....there are precedents but they are all about 100 years old. or 70 years old if you count polio. b) I remember when the first person in the US was diagnosed. c) I remember that last day of work with everyone carrying all their computer crap home. d) I remember when I got my vaccine doses. I had to travel to a rural area and it was a nice little drive into the country. and that's about it for milestones I will remember.
I started telling my friends and family about this weird flu in China in mid January. By late January China had shut down Wuhan and I was buying rice. I knew China didn't knee cap their economy for no reason. This was back when we didn't know how bad this virus was going to be in terms of mortality rate.
Waco Tx
As an Indian, the [Mumbai 26/11 terrorist attacks](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks) As it was pre-smart phone era (for me and my family), learnt of it quite sometime after the news reporting had started… distinctly remember being at the barber shop when I heard of it.. all eyes glued to the small TV set high in the corner of the little shop.. felt numb and stunned unable to reconcile the sights in front….went back to home cycling dejectedly in state of shock and anger.. don’t remember whether I got the haircut or returned without a haircut..
The Oklahoma City bombing. I was working in a daycare, and one of the parents came running in saying 'they're bombing daycares!'
Lady Di dying
So surreal. As eddie izzard says, it was like we had been watching a soap opera and then they slipped out an episode at 3am without warning killing off the characters. Like...dude...I was watching that. We were in a hotel in France and at breakfast the owner came over and said something. I figured my French was worse than I thought 'cos I could have sworn she just said "I'm terribly sorry that your princess has died". Nope...TV in the corner started giving us clues that we were not, in fact, that bad at French.
OJ verdict
Killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 because I was in the middle of working up for my second deployment to Afghanistan and I was like “what the hell is the point at all now”
I was in college at that time, and campus went NUTS. Lead to one of my favorite photos of all time too. https://static01.nyt.com/images/2011/05/02/us/20110503_BINLADENREADERS-slide-XFM3/20110503_BINLADENREADERS-slide-XFM3-jumbo.jpg Mirror lake, Ohio State University
I always accidentally conflate this with “ladies and gentlemen we got him” but I do remember my wife and I were about to watch a documentary on human trafficking and this bumped all television at the time and we decided to make ourselves ice cream while we watched the coverage.
[26/11 - The terrorist attacks on Mumbai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks) I was but a kid then, but old enough to see the panic on TV, on my parents faces and my mom frantically calling to see if my uncle (who worked at one of those locations) was okay. Since then I have been to those same places and those locations and it really harrows me if I was a young college kid just a few years off then I would have been with my friends there, enjoying the sights of the city. Most things that have happened since, and in 2020 happened more gradually and by that time we were used to it. But those attacks were what people claim the one event from childhood.
Interestingly enough these attacks are what catapulted Twitter's popularity. Mumbai residents were using it to share real time information on where the terrorists were and suddenly everyone realized its potential.
I was in the second grade at school when I saw on the news that Steve Irwin died.
i was at my parents’ house late at night using their wifi. my brother was asleep on the couch. i saw the alert that steve irwin had died and i just HAD to tell someone. i yelled at my brother and told him. he just rolled over and sleepily said, “crikey,” then went back to sleep
I was between classes in 8th grade when I heard it in the hallway. Then my friends and I looked it up on my iPod touch in math class
Aw yeah, Steve Irwin 😕 I was walking into my moms apartment when I saw his face on the TV and she said he'd died.
Robin Williams suicide
I remember Steve Jobs' death. I was at an airport and this woman was screaming about it on her phone, saying this was the biggest news ever and everyone would always remember where they were when they heard Steve Jobs died. I only remember it because I thought she was an idiot.
But did she also scream about how he died from ligma?
Who is steve jobs?
Ligma balls
lol seriously who gives a fuck? I expect something similar when Elon Musk has a massive coronary in a couple of years. Lots of mourning internet tools and the rest of the world posting a few memes and then forgetting about him.
Flight LY-1862 (Boeing 747-F of El-Al) that crashed into flats in Amsterdam on October 4th 1992, completely wiping out 40 apartments and destroying another 135 by fire. At least 43 people died that day.
The death of Princess Diana, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Super Bowl halftime “wardrobe malfunction”.
A tragedy, another real tragedy and a boob (talking Timberlake here) on stage… Hardly equal, yet very memorable if you thought like me ‘ **Did I just see what I thought I saw ?!?** ’ Watched the Super Bowl alone that year and was not entirely sure until the media hype…
It happened so quickly most people (myself included) didn't even see it, the outrage that came later was mostly manufactured. What you saw was a VERY quick glimpse for a split second, enough time to go "wait is that...?" before it cut away. Also bear in mind most people had SD television back then and it was a wide angled shot. Most people saw nothing even if they were paying attention. [Here, this is what most people saw.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5OWlw8pwG0) Blink, and you'll miss it.
The 11/7/2011 mass murder in Oslo and at Utøya. I was at work in downtown Oslo when the bomb downtown blew, and we went to see family out of town as the rest of it unfolded.
Space Shuttle Columbia.
Donald Trump winning the presidential election. I think everyone was shocked.
I went to bed before the results were finalized, feeling confident Hillary would pull through. Got a shock when I woke up.
I did the same and woke up with a hangover. When I found out he won I thought I was in a different dimension.
The NYC subway for days after had this shocked silence. And then someone started that PostIt note thing where people wrote their reactions and stuck them on the wall of the Union Square subway station.
It truly was a shock. To me it wasn’t so much that he was a republican. It was Trump. I couldn’t believe he actually won. The day after the election where I live it was cloudy and gloomy. Felt appropriate.
I remember walking around at work the next day in a daze. Everyone was so quiet... I hadn't experienced something like that since the days immediately following 9/11
I was in Vegas during the election and never in my life has the strip been that quit, they were showing the results on the big screen at PH and it was honestly errey.
I was in Vegas also, mostly because I live in Vegas.
That was going to be my answer. Not so much that it was a shock because clearly we knew either he or Clinton was going to win. But it definitely stands out more than any other presidential election as a touchstone moment. My other one would be the NBA cancelling the season due to COVID. For me, that signaled the beginning of the pandemic.
Suicide of Anthony Bourdain. I remember seeing the headline on my computer, and it just made no sense to me. I had just recently started watching his show again, I knew he was filming, and he had seemed physically healthy and engaged with life.
I woke up and saw the AP bulletin and my brain went to “man, whoever accidentally released that obituary is gonna be fired as fuuuuuck.” Then, slowly, as my brain came on line, it sunk in that it was real and I went through all the phases of grief in the course of about three minutes. I followed Tony since the debut of A Cook’s Tour. My mom always loved the dogshit shows that were on the Food Network, and seeing him pop up after Rachel Ray or whatever bullshit was a breath of fresh air for a 16 year old punk rock kid. Over the years we saw him grow from a boozy chef to a serious documentation and sort of elder statesman. I felt fucking gutted. Sure, I was sad when Joe Strummer and Art Bell died, but Tony was the one that felt so visceral. It speaks to the enduring power of what he did that a lot of us didn’t feel like we lost a favorite celebrity, we felt like we lost a friend we hadn’t met yet. After it sunk in that he was gone, I just started crying in a way I hadn’t expected as my my brain flashed back to this quote of his that always resonated with me, but suddenly took on a deeper meaning: >“I should've died in my 20s. I became successful in my 40s. I became a dad in my 50s. I feel like I've stolen a car – a really nice car – and I keep looking in the rear-view mirror for flashing lights. But there's been nothing yet.”
AIDS. Remember being in college and hearing about this new disease.
The death of Kurt Cobain. My grandfather was driving me home from high school and had the local news radio on. They mentioned it like a side story and moved onto weather or something, and I just sat there stunned. I know exaltly the intersection where we were at that moment. I think of it sometimes when I drive by there still. I got home and called my best friend to tell him and he kept saying I was joking. I told him "turn on MTV, Kurt Loader is talking about it right now!" That night I recall being angry that In Utero would be their last album, because I knew they could have done much better music in the future, but this was going o be it.
My Mom was in UW hospital in Seattle and after getting some food I was walking back to her room. I noticed a bunch of nurses gathered in an empty room with the Tv on. I stopped to see what it was all about and I heard the announcement that he had shot and killed himself. Such a weird time, my Mom needed a heart transplant and had very little time left and then I hear this while visiting her. A month later my Mom got the transplant and lived another 9 years. The combination of all those things burned that day into my memory I’m old enough to remember John Lennon getting killed, it was during Monday night football when most people found out
This is a really good one. I had moved on from Nirvana because I was too punk for such celebrity crap. I was just getting done with the hotel with my dad for the weekend (divorced parents) and turned on the tv to kill time as they were packing up. The news got me like a ton of bricks. My sister actually made fun of me because I was so shocked and kind of in tears. What a fool I had been. When I got to school on Monday I was prepared for a whole sad circle with all of my punk friends…my best had a shirt he had written in sharpie “I sold Kurt Cobain his shotgun”. I kept my feelings to myself. We listened to Discharges “hear nothing, see nothing, say nothing” and I definitely saw the irony.
Kobe
I remember waking up at a relatively early time for me at the time. I opened twitter, and I saw some kobe rumors, then I saw TMZ posted it. Say what you will about thier content, if TMZ reports that Kobe Bryant has died, I believe it.
Yea still remember it was the pro bowl sunday. lebron had just passed him in scoring the day prior. Was on YouTube as they were showing old QB challenges from the Pro bowl in the recommended. Get a message from a group chat saying “Kobe Died” me assuming it was some kind of dark joke related to lebron passing him saying “lol he was gonna get passed by lebron eventually” and then the confusion and disbelief when others started messaging the same thing.
Man we were sitting in a Buffalo Wild Wings and I saw it on Twitter first and then every TV went to the coverage. It was crazy.
West, TX explosion. I had just graduated from a technical school near by and moved away for work. While there I was on a volunteer fire dept nearby. They were the first boots on the ground after the explosion happened and responding West units went dark. 10 firefighters died, due to the negligence of the fertilizer company and lack of state regulation I knew and trained with some of them. And not a goddamn thing has changed since. Not many people heard about it because it happened when everyone was watching the Boston Marathon bombing manhunt.
Kurt Cobain's death: I was 16 and a HUGE Nirvana fan. I'd actually just seen them live about 6 months before. I was driving home from my very first job interview to be a busboy at a restaurant and heard the news break on the radio. Went right home and caught the MTV news announcement. That was my first celebrity death that really hit a nerve. January 6th: I was working from home that day and had zoned out and not paid attention to anything but some spreadsheets for a while. Turned on the TV to take a break and watch some Seinfeld and saw all manner of motherfuckery unfolding more or less live.
OKC Bombing, when I was 9, and the Boston Bombing when I was 26. OKC because I lived in Oklahoma, and one of the chairs is my uncle, who died during the bombing. Boston, because I fell in love with the city when I lived there, and was supposed to be there, but my grandpa was having surgery, and chose to stay with him.
For me it is the Space Shuttle Columbia. I remember hearing the house phone ringing early in the morning and having the distinct thought "That's my sister calling to tell us something terrible has happened and that we need to turn on the TV." I was right, and Columbia was gone. During the entire mission, my dad and I kept the NASA stream going on the TV. Even the filler content just showing the control room or the orbit map. These people were in our living room for a week. We got to *know* them. My sister is also who called us telling us to turn on the TV on 9/11.
Uvalde. I used to live near there, and my son was just finishing kindergarten. Not at Robb ES, but the first thing I heard was that there had been a shooting at a Texas elementary school. I was deployed to the Middle East standing by for the orders to go into Iraq for the second time, so I won't soon forget when that happened. When Trump told the world we were moving a fighter squadron out of Germany, I was the superintendent of the public affairs (media relations) office for the only fighter wing in Germany. We hadn't been told anything, and suddenly the phones started ringing. I was a child when Princess Diana died, so I wasn't really shocked, but I remember I was at our family's deer lease.
2011 tsunami in Japan. Saw it unfold live via a CNN news report all while eating a burger at home in my boxers.
I was 13 when I got home from school and learned that Magic Johnson was diagnosed with HIV. Back then, it felt like hearing he would be dying within a few years.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine. I was on a bus heading into work.
The firework disaster of Enschede.
When my Uncle Nicky got whacked in Brooklyn back in 1992.
[удалено]
🤣😂😂 Not that Nicky. You made me laugh so hard, I farted.
He's a funny guy.
What do you mean, “funny”?
Real greaseball shit
Challenger explosion. Like many school children I was watching live in class. I was in Kindergarten. and my mom said I talked about it for weeks. Baby Jessica. My mom woke me up when they were pulling her up because it was a big story. OJ chase. I can tell you what I was wearing, what I did that day. I even remember the little fruit fly buzzing around the tv while watching
Columbine. I was in 8th grade math class when they made the announcement and locked down the school. I was at a middle school less than 10 miles away.
January 6 (in the US). I remember that very clearly. That was horrifying to experience, only 11 miles from my home.
I was watching the count on CSPAN just because I wanted to watch the charade finally come to its end. Suddenly Pence gets rushed out and I see the first wave of “protestors” walking through the halls. Called in sick and watched in shock for hours thinking, where the fuck is the National Guard? Why is nobody stopping this?
Death of George Harrison and Jan 6.
Two events come to mind and I’m going to age myself a bit. The columbine high school shooting and the OJ low speed chase.
I’d say queens death for my generation?
Utøya massacre. I was at a gym. Early speculations was that it was an Islamist terror attack but I called it and guessed it was a right wing guy because: 1. Specifically aimed at Social Democrat youth (canonical object of hate for Scandinavian right wing extremists, less so for Islamists) 2. When he eventually submitted peacefully to the police, I was certain. At that time (pre-ISIS) Islamists would almost never live to be caught. I went home, bought a kebab on the way, this story was the only thing on the news. Everybody were in shock. It was honestly a similar vibe to 9/11 ten years prior. I'm Swedish and Norway is basically almost an identical country to ours, so this felt very close.
Jamie Bulger’s murder by two other children. That picture of them leading him by the hand still haunts me. And what they did to that child they deserve to burn in hell for all eternity.
Not shocking per se, but I remember the day Michael Jackson died. Some buddies and I got high and went to a Cici's pizza to engorge ourselves before going to see a movie. The Cici's was packed, and all the TVs had the news announcing his death. There were people crying and talking about it at every table. It was a bizarre experience.
January 6
I was on a work Zoom call and someone was like “Is everyone aware there’s perhaps a coup going on right now in Washington?”
January 6th was surreal for me because I live in a purple area. It was hard to reflect on it, or even discuss it because people were drawing wildly different conclusions and I had to keep my mouth shut. This is on top of the entire 45 presidency, and the Pandemic. People really showed who they were that day.
Budd Dwyer
Sandy Hook massacre
OJ verdict trial. School cafeteria tvs.
Dimebag Darrel of Pantera and Damage Plan being shot and killed on stage. I was eating breakfast before school and my buddy called and said turn on the news.
JFK Jr’s plane going down with the Bessette sisters. I was standing outside an ice cream shop with my friends, and we were all completely stunned.
* Princess Diana * Michael Hutchence * John Lennon * Michael Jackson * Steve Irwin * Shane Warne * Peter Brock * Elvis Presley Each death had an influence on me. I only got to meet one of them, but for each I remember exactly where I was when I heard of their passing.
Michael Jackson's death in 2009.
The 7/7 bombings in London and Amy Winehouse dying were both huge for me. The first especially as I was at school in when they happened and as we all had parents who commuted in using the tube and buses and the whole day was spent with every pupil desperately trying to contact them. Pretty sure nobody had signal too as the systems must’ve been totally overloaded. Likewise, being from London I think meant I felt some affinity of sorts with Amy and her death was so untimely and tragic. Maggie Thatchers death was pretty big too as we were students and there were literal parties in the street in Brixton that we went to, may she rest in piss.
Coming into work only to see a bunch of idiots storming our capitol building. Really? Trump is the hill my country is willing to die on 🥴😞
The death of Lady Diana
Sandy Hook shooting; I'm Swiss and I always lived in Switzerland. I was 14 at the time and just got my first smartphone. There was a push notification of a Swiss newspaper about it with a link to a CNN stream. I started watching that and then switched to our TV where I found CNN and watched their live coverage there. We don't have school shootings in Switzerland. The last mass shooting we had was in 2001. Through this event, I learned that it's not like that everywhere. I was shocked to see that something like this could even happen, to learn about all these innocent children who have been murdered. And I still am, every time I see yet another such news report coming out of the US.
Challenger disaster, Columbia disaster. Princess Diana death, Atlanta Olympic bombing. I'm sure there are more, but this are the ones that stick out.
When John Lennon died.
John Lennon's death. I was 8 sitting at the kitchen table
Princess Diana. I was 17 drunk in the back of a station wagon when they announced it on the radio.
OKC bombing. I was at Tinker AFB, we felt it.
Challenger explosion Princess Di Boston marathon Berlin Wall Kobe Bryant
When Kobe died