15yo has an interesting question this morning: What's the first major news story you can remember living through as a child?
— Ms. (((Rosenberg))) (@Miz_Rosenberg) July 6, 2016
@Miz_Rosenberg It was cold and all the dinosaurs died
— milo rambaldi (@tjmpb) July 6, 2016
I’m almost that old; my first political memory is the muted glee & mild wonderment as I was allowed to fall asleep on the couch, because my parents were too busy watching the 1960 election-night coverage on the tiny new black & white TV they’d bought for just that reason. That was a week before my fifth birthday — #Dem4Life!
The Spousal Unit is on vacation this week, and while he hasn’t been able to revert entirely to his natural nightowl biorhythms, he’s claiming my attention during those late-evening hours that I usually spend with you guys. And then also: Trump.
.
scav
I think I was lucky. Watching Apollo 8 is probably the first distinct event — not bad for 1968. But then, the probable first political one (defined loosely) accumulated over time is the body counts on the news every night.
amk
where is the kitchen sink?
rikyrah
Good Morning ?, Everyone ?
Splitting Image
Probably the hostage crisis in Iran. Difficult to miss, even at seven years old.
Ultraviolet Thunder
JFK funeral. Mom held me and cried. I’m not sure she ever got over that.
Randy P
I can remember JFK’s funeral but I didn’t really know what was going on. Similarly, I should be old enough to have conscious memories of Mercury launches, but seeing Gemini launches (all of them) is really my first memory of the space program.
So I think that puts my first awareness of the outside world somewhere around 1965-6 when I would have been 7-8.
I know that news stories of 1968-1970 hit me pretty hard.
Barb2
JFK Political signs in Hawaii – and then he was dead. There was a long gap between the two – but my mind links the two.
I like the cartoon.
Schlemazel Khan
The first is a story about a snowstorm that hit, it was proabaly 56 or 57 but the first big story I remember the 1960 election campaign, we even watched the Nixon/Kennedy debate
maryQ
I remember my dad watching the news and always always hearing about the Viet Nam carnage. Not real distinct, though. I also remember seeing the picture of Mary Ann Vecchio at Kent State all over the news paper, but not having a clear sense of what that was about. So I would probably say that the first distinct memory was a cold fall day when this girl Patty Someone walked around the schoolyard at morning recess with a small pad of white paper tallying up votes for N and M. I also remember when she asked me, I knew I was for Mc Govern, as were mom and dad and both sets of grandparents and, so I thought, all decent people, so I was surprised to see all those tallies in the N column.
DivF
JFK assassination, 6th grade. I remember the teacher rolling a b&w tv into the classroom so we could see the coverage.
raven
I was in freshman sociology when the JFK news came. The teacher was Mr Hollister and he collapsed and cried “where do way go from here”???? Being 13 and super cool it just didn’t impact me the way it probably should have. I remember a bunch of us hanging out at a shuttered store that weekend and being pissed that the youth center was closed. For me the King assassination news was more impactful. We were in the field in Korea when the news came and I always remember being shocked that some of the militant brothers were just matter of fact, “what took them so long, Malcolm has been dead for 3 years”.
Napoleon
Space program and Walter Cronkite giving body counts.
raven
@maryQ: That is probably the one that had the most impact on me. I had been home from Vietnam since the previous September and I was deeply involved in the anti-war vets movement. I had flunked out of college and was back living with my parents in Chicago. My new girlfriend was down at school and I really freaked out when the news hit. I called her and told her to stay put, jumped in the car and hauled ass down to Champaign. I was really convinced that the shit was coming down and Jackson State didn’t help.
Baud
This is tough. I didn’t pay that much attention to the news when I was young. Now my actual memories are intermingled with news of historical events I viewed later rather than in real time.
OzarkHillbilly
JFK here too, specifically his funeral carriage.
raven
@Napoleon: Sitting in the barracks watching the 68 convention while we readied to ship out was pretty traumatic.
Wag
Watching MLK’s funeral on the BBC while my family lived in the UK for a year.
And the. The next school year back in Denver I remember seeing photos of Nixon and HHH on the cover of the Scholastic Weekly Reader, and I was completely creeped out by Nixon
Not to be confused with the CREEP of the Watergate era.
raven
Oh, “the first one”. Never mind.
geg6
I was getting dressed for kindergarten. Our school district had two kindergarten classes, morning and afternoon, because there were so many kids my age at the time. I was in the afternoon class, which started at 1:30pm and my mom and I were running late. I was putting my socks on, sitting in front of the tv, when a special report came on saying shots were fired at the president. It was two days before my birthday in 1963. I yelled at my mom that someone had shot at President Kennedy, her hero and the guy whose little girl I was fascinated by. I did not make it to kindergarten that day. I remember it as clear as if it happened five minutes ago.
M. Bouffant
A tee vee set was brought into the classroom for at least one manned space launch, probably John Glenn’s in 1962.
June ’62 escape from Alcatraz, a big deal in the Bay Area.
I remember my parents being agitated about the Vietnam coup in early November ’63 (They were big Goldwater people, so I’m sure whatever was bugging them was wrong.) but something later in November ’63 overshadowed the coup.
Cermet
I wasn’t very lucky – the Cuban missile cries and the threat of nuclear annihilation; caused nightmares for years. I was a bit over three.
Phylllis
Somewhat fuzzily, the MLK and RFK assassinations. As clear as a bell, the moon landing.
@maryQ: For a long time, I though ‘Vietnam’ was a program that came on every afternoon that my parents watched together so they could argue about it.
Felonius Monk
Start of the Korean War – 1950.
ETA: Also, the attempted assassination of Harry Truman in 1950.
Amir Khalid
Where did that comment disappear to? Anyway:
I was in Standard One (first grade) at the time of RFK’s assassination; I should remember that, but somehow I don’t. I do remember the Apollo 11 mission a year later and the moon landing, which happened in the days just after my eighth birthday.
ETA: the biggest and earliest Malaysian event I remember was the post-general election crisis of May 13, 1969, which had race riots and all.
Cermet
Oops, I tried to write crises but …
SixStringFanatic
I was born in 1967 and the first big news story I remember is Nixon’s “Well, I’m not a crook” speech and then his resignation. I didn’t really understand it but it was obviously a big deal and all the adults were disgusted.
Keith G
I don’t know how many of y’all have donated to Hillary’s campaign through her website, but lordy are those folks persistent little buggers…. sending me a couple of emails each day.. I have kicked in a few times now and according to them I’m one of their most valuable contributors and Hillary really wants to meet with me if I kick in again and become eligible for a drawing for a trip to the convention…. although to be fair, I have been informed that no money needs to be exchanged in order for being given a chance to win the drawing.
Thus far, I rather stellar list including Obama, Biden, and Warren have reached out to me “personally”.
Tomorrow is payday. So I guess I will throw my name in the hat for a convention meeting with the future president.
Culture of Truth
I would say Watergate, but not in any sophisticated way. Or the Bicentennial, which I definitely got.
Barbara
If assassinations are political events, I remember Robert Kennedy’s quite clearly, learning of it, watching his funeral. I can’t remember the order, but I also remember Eugene McCarthy canvassers coming to my parents’ door the same year, and my parents, who were McCarthy fans, driving us to the airport to meet his plane in an effort to see if they could meet him (we didn’t).
Some Dude
My first memory was of the Moon Landing. Politically, it was Nixon/Watergate. The space program helped to make me interested in science, and eventually a forecaster. Nixon and Watergate eventually made me a black sheep, since the rest of my family were staunch Republicans. Only have one sibling who is still an (R), but I’m pretty sure it’s for tradition, and not any real support for the mob which runs under that brand.
sherparick
JFK’s inauguration day. We had just moved back to DC and there was a snowstorm the day before and no school. My parents (Dad an Irish catholic was enjoying a tribal high, my Mom, an agnostic Protestant FDR Democrat from Oklahoma was just happy the Democrats were back in office although she came to love JFK) went to the inauguration. My bother and I missed the speech sledding in the snow, but watched the parade and I remember scenes from the inaugural balls, it seem liked the whole country was happy and partying. Next event I remember was Alan Shepard’s Mercury sub-orbital launch. Yes, I am older than dirt.
bystander
I remember going with my father to see JFK’s limo going through KC on his way to Harry Truman’s house, during his presidential campaign in the summer of 1960. My father was so excited to have a Dem in the WH again, the first Catholic and to see RMN tossed permanently on the trash heap of history.
Amir Khalid
@Keith G:
If you do make it to that meeting with Hillz, please bring back a selfie and a field report.
Elmo
My mind thinks it has memories of watching the moon landing, but I was only 19 months old so those are probably false – added later somehow.
I have a very clear memory of my Dad (career Navy) leaving for yet another 9-month Westpac cruise, and that was probably 1969. I was in a crib.
When the war finally ended, I remember asking my Dad, “Who are we at war with now?” and being more than a little confused at the concept that there was no war at all.
Elizabelle
John Glenn orbit and JFK assassination, both witnessed while my family was living in Hawaii.
We were fascinated with the Kennedys. My younger sister had a hot pink plastic bath whale named Caroline.
Villago Delenda Est
JFK. I was all of six years old.
But in a larger sense, the space program. I can remember bits of Mercury and Gemini, but was 12 when man walked on the moon. I saw the launch of Apollo 11 live from my grandparents’ front yard in Orlando.
PowerMAD
I have a memory of watching the Senate vote to bring in Hawaii as the 50th state. There’s not much in my memory banks – a fuzzy black-and-white picture of men talking and a chart (I guess it showed vote totals – I knew my numbers but couldn’t read words yet). It seems to me it happened in the evening, and my parents actually wanted me to stay up with them, instead of putting me to bed, because they said it was historic. I don’t know if it was live or on the news.
Keith G
@Amir Khalid: Oh it gets better. A few weeks ago I threw in a donation which qualifies me for a drawing to attend a performance of Hamilton with the future president. I am planning to do a Periscope with her while the orchestra is warming up.
OzarkHillbilly
@Keith G: I get the same from Koster, our soon to be Dem candidate for Gov. When I finally do send Hillz some money I expect the same from her. ‘Tis the world we live in.
msb
JFK assassination, 3rd grade. The school principal came in and announced it, and our teacher cried.
And when John Lennon was killed in 1980, I was a school teacher. We teachers cried in the halls while the students said, “Who’s John Lennon?” They know now.
?BillinGlendaleCA
I remember watching the Watts riots on our old B/W TV. I have a vague memory of seeing President Kennedy giving a speech on TV.
bemused
My first vivid memory of a major news story was JFK assassination when I was in grade school. Before that I remember parents telling the kids to not eat the snow, radioactive fallout but I don’t remember our school having duck and cover under desk drills. Maybe we did but I’m not one of those people who can remember almost everything that far back.
evap
Wow, lots of people my age here :) I remember coming home from school (1st grade) and telling my mother that the president had been shot. It was the first she heard about it. And I can remember watching JFK’s funeral on tv and wondering why it was being broadcast on all stations instead of my Saturday morning cartoons.
In junior high I had a history teacher who made us watch Watergate hearings during class for a week. He told us that this would be one of the more historic events of our lives and we should watch history being made instead of discussing history!
Luther M. Siler
The Challenger explosion. I, uh, appear to be younger than many of you. :-)
p.a.
Easy: NASA, Vietnam; the chiaroscuro of 1960’s America. I was 3 when Kennedy killed, so I don’t know if my memories of it are from then or memories from tape replays.
Baud
@evap:
Easier on him. I would do the same.
Mary
@Luther M. Siler: Me too. Reading above, it’s interesting how many people’s first news memories involve space. Makes sense, since it’s something kids are often very interested in.
Ken Pidcock
Also the 1960 election, aged six, learning from my mother that Nixon was a bum.
Old Dan and Little Anne
I remember when Reagan thought he was not on live tv and saying something about nuking Russia. And then he went off the air. 1984. I was 9 and it scared the living shit out of me.
Peej01
JFK assasination. We were sent home early from school for that. I also remember the nuclear drills we had in school…as if going out into the hallway and facing the concrete wall was going to do any good.
Boudica
I was eight the summer of 1972 when the Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics. I remember crying and asking my dad why people would do that to other people.
Then probably Watergate when I was ten.
dmsilev
@Luther M. Siler: Challenger for me as well. I was in elementary school at the time, and remember one of the teachers telling us about it.
Randy P
@Mary: Not just kids. I was able to watch the Gemini launches because the elementary school would hold an assembly to watch them whenever they happened during the school day.
The movie Apollo 13 depicted that launches were no longer a big deal to the public. I don’t remember that, but nor can I remember if I watched the launches of any of the post-Apollo 11 missions.
OzarkHillbilly
The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has kicked it’s irrelevancy drive into high gear:
I first read this yester morn but it still makes me laugh.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: That’s hilarious.
Richard Mayhew
@Luther M. Siler: 1984 LA Olympic opening ceremony I remember the covered wagons. And then Challenger and then Iran Contra hearings
Baud
@Richard Mayhew:
The pianos!
JPL
The most intense political memory was the Cuban missile crisis. My parents were avid readers of the daily newspaper so I was always aware of current events, but there was a real concern about the showdown with Khrushchev and whether or not it would lead to another war.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
I was glued to the TV for the moon landing. And anything else NASA related.
Explicitly political would have to be Nixon’s trip to China. I fell in love with the bright costumes in the welcoming pageant.
Fourth grade social studies teacher required us to watch the evening news about Watergate and write a report. I did mine in ballad stanzas. Beyond that, I remember that my mother was pissed at the hearings pre-empting her soaps.
I remember how angry my sixth grade teacher was with the play/movie 1776, which we saw on a school trip. I think of him every time I encounter “Christian nation” revisionism.
The Ray Blanton scandal was probably the first political event I understood from the beginning. I was finally paying as much attention to the world around me as I was to the books I was reading.
Central Planning
I have a memory of watching a rocket launch. My guess is it was one of the last Apollo missions in 1974-1975. I remember the old black and white TV we had.
Another memory I have is watching Star Trek, and then going upstairs and puking on my Oscar the Grouch slippers. Again, probably the same timeframe.
I remember the Challenger explosion because I was 16 and home because of a snow day. I watched the event live.
ETA – I guess the closest the yoots will come to having to wait for tube TVs to warm up is the OS booting on the new LCD TVs.
satby
I was in second grade for JFK’s assassination, which I remember clearly, because we immediately got on our knees to say a decade of the rosary for him before the news came that he had died.
But my earliest memory that is clear was the Kennedy-Nixon debate, because Nixon really did look terrible on the black and white TVs everyone had. And the anti-Catholic rhetoric about whether the Pope would run the country if a Catholic ever got elected.
Matt McIrvin
@Mary: Mine was one of the later Apollo missions, probably Apollo 15 or 16. My father explained to me that the rocket was built in stages that fell off into the ocean as it ascended, and I became very concerned about the people riding in the lower stages. He said there weren’t any, but I pointed to some marking on the rocket and insisted it was a window.
I also have a dim memory of what must have been a basketball game at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
The third one? Watergate. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I was certain the President had to be a good guy because he was the President, and it was very disturbing that people were saying he had done something bad.
Just One More Canuck
@OzarkHillbilly: That will really draw the folks back to the church
Mustang Bobby
I remember the election of 1956 very vaguely. Sputnik was a big deal to the neighbors, but of course the big one was the news flash from Dallas on November 22, 1963. I was in Grade 6.
OzarkHillbilly
Heh:
Micheline
My earliest memory was the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
Quinerly
Vietnam War. Small B&W second tv in the house that sat on the end of the kitchen table. My parents and I watched the news at night during dinner. Seemed like LBJ was talking to us every night behind his desk at the end of the kitchen table. Very vivid.
Matt McIrvin
@Central Planning: That might have been the Apollo launch from the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, when US and Soviet astronauts met up in space for the very first time (it seemed like a weird one-off stunt at the time but was a really a harbinger of things to come). I remember reading about that in the “My Weekly Reader” handouts we got in school.
Greg in PDX
The Cuban Missile crisis….I was only 2 or 3 or whatever but i remember crying in my room because I thought that they were going to bomb my house. I was in Southern CA FFS. No bomb from Havana could have reached us.
TOP123
For whatever reason, a cartoon cover of Time magazine in the pediatrician’s office depicting Carter and Reagan during the election sticks with me. I would have been five or six. I was born just in time for Tricky Dick’s resignation, but had to leave the feelings of relief to my parents.
The Challenger, as mentioned by some above, would be a big one for me. It was the same day I got news that our cat Amos had died. I’d tried to hold him together on the car ride to the vet a day or two before after he was hit by a car. I remember a teacher coming to the door of my homeroom and talking to my teacher, and I was close enough to hear thst they were talkng about what they would tell us. Later, we were brought into a room with a tv. Still later, likely a day or so, we had an assembly that sticks with me; one of the teachers who spoke was one of those who had been considered for Christa McAuliffe’s position on the shuttle. I remember how struck I was when he said he would still volunteer for the spot in a second.
Betty Cracker
I remember being pissed off when the Watergate hearings pre-empted Scooby Doo. Now that I think about it, I can totally imagine Richard Nixon saying, “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids”!
Elizabelle
@Baud: Smooth, Baud, smooth. The man of mystery deal.
I iz calling foul. Think you was a preternaturally interested child too.
Not your fault if it was pre-TV. (I kid, I kid.)
Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill
Vietnam body counts, the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and MLK, the 1968 election and Apollo 8.
SFAW
Outside of my brother’s birth (what? That’s not news? Oh, for the general public), I remember jumping up and down with my friend when JFK beat Nixon. I was five. Unlike AL, I did not watch the debates. But, on the plus side, my father really hated Nixon.
Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill
Wife was there at Clark AB to greet the returning POWs in 73 (her dad was stationed there) – her mom bundled her up and said it would help them to see young American kids as they left the plane.
OzarkHillbilly
Space was huge for me growing up, I was a big John Glenn fan. After reading “The Right Stuff”, I now know why. I don’t have any specific Mercury memories but do have some of Gemini. And of course watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon on our old “portable” black and white.
Elizabelle
@Greg in PDX: Same here. Cuban missile crisis.
Doing the duck and cover drills. In Hawaii. Imagining our Colonel Sanders-crispy little charred limbs if the bomb fell, because not enough vegetation to shelter under.
In Hawaii. Not next door to Cuba, although I assumed it was. Of course, Hawaii well remembered Pearl Harbor quite freshly. 22(?) years previous. They can be forgiven.
TOP123
@Micheline: oh yeah! I can still remember where I was when I heard about that (elementary school art room) and I still remember weird details about the incident.
Quinerly
Meanwhile, Ann Coulter has a headline at Breitbart saying that Donald Trump is about to make his FIRST mistake of the campaign. She’s still drinking, it seems.
SiubhanDuinne
@evap:
One possible reason: JFK’s funeral took place on Monday.
(ETA: Although there was wall-to-wall coverage all weekend long.)
Elizabelle
@OzarkHillbilly: Also, the shock of Apollo One fire on the launch pad. I remember how awful that was. Dinner time news.
And an LBJ Navy Secretary nominee, his wife and son were killed in a plane crash. Found the guy, buried at Arlington. My parents did not dwell on that one cuz we were flying later in the week. John McNaughton. Piedmont Airlines, 1967.
raven
@Elmo: I was in Australia on R&R!
TOP123
@Elizabelle: since a fair amount of us here seem old enough to have childhood memories of the Cold War (I’d put myself at the more recent end of the, uh, “wisdom curve” covering that era), I’d be curious to know how many here have dreams they remember about it. I still can vividly picture a dream I had of standing with my family looking out the back window at a violet sky, watching silvery missiles trace across it and imagining the end of the world.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Hey, today is Richard Starkey’s 76th.
Taylor
Apollo 11 moon landing. I was up in the early morning (in Ireland) with my Dad to watch Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface. I remember my Dad groaning when Nixon came on to congratulate him.
Earliest political memories were TV images of the B-Specials clubbing civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland. Then the fiasco of Bloody Sunday and the image of the British Embassy in Dublin burning.
Elizabelle
@TOP123: Interesting idea. I don’t remember mine, if they occurred.
Not a big sci fi fan then; could that make a difference? I do remember being afraid of “the Bomb” during my waking hours.
Chyron HR
@Botsplainer, Neoliberal Corporatist Shill:
Go away, Billy Joel, that song is awful.
Joel
Challenger.
OzarkHillbilly
@Elizabelle:
Oh Dog, I was depressed for a month after that. Thought it was the end of the US space program. The Challenger blew up 3 days after my first wedding, a severe downer for me. Little did I know it was symbolic of the next 5 years of my life.
seejanerun
Ed Gein. I don’t remember any other news from that era, but we lived about 10 miles away so it was a very big deal. The Kennedy assassination is the first national news story that I have real memories of.
Shawn in Showme
@Betty Cracker:
I desperately wanted to be a part of the Scooba Doo gang. No parents around, a psychedelic set of wheels and cross country adventures. All on their parents’ dime.
Punchy
Woke up to what certainly could have been a microburst. Good lord such insane winds…
Elizabelle
@OzarkHillbilly: Mordant wit at this hour.
RE Challenger: my dad and I had talked about the impending launch the night before; that it was such a routine deal that people barely noticed them any more. (We’d just realized there was going to be a launch; maybe evening news.) Much like the dialogue from Apollo 13 movie. Aware of the teacher in space big deal, but not the actual schedule.
And then, in a store to buy an Orangina at morning break, and the owner told me what had just happened. The absolute shock.
Morley Bolero
Cuban Missile Crisis. Or maybe Johnny Horton’s death.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
a good question
satby
@Punchy: That’s what dropped the tree on my house two weeks ago. I’ve been through several tornadoes over the years, and the microbursts really do feel just like a tornado.
hovercraft
Good morning,
Mika and Squint say that vibtage Drump is back, there is no other republican who can connect with an audience like him. He was looking revitalized and his is a campaign where he is having the time of his life, while Hillary is slogging through a rough patch. Halpern and Joe say that the voters are seeing something that the media does not understand, the speeches the last two nights have shown a candidate who knows what it takes to win. Apparently we who saw a train wreck should not believe our lyin’ eyes and ears, Drump is back.
These people are insane.
OzarkHillbilly
@hovercraft: They loved Saddam and were seriously depressed when… Wait a minute….
Elizabelle
@hovercraft: Hope they are insane.
We can outnumber them, and outwork them. Were it not so aggravating, would be fun to collect a montage of the wrongheaded articles appearing now. (The NYTimes and WaPost outdid themselves over the email SCANDAL ending with a whimper — it’s BIG TROUBLE FOR HILLARY.)
To the NY TImes: A few words: Jayson Blair. Judith Miller. Wen Ho Lee. WaPost: your disgraceful editorial page of Villagers and Bush 43 alumni, never mind Janet Cooke (which is ancient news, and was more based in reality than a lot of your VillagerTakes).
WaPost has some truly good writers and stories, but they are hidden behind too many clickbait items from political hacks.
ETA: W was 43; GHWB was 41. Will remember them for being prime numbers, if not prime examples of good presidenting. (GHWB was the best of recent GOP presidents, you must admit. Except: Clarence Effing Thomas.)
BC in Illinois
Sputnik (October ’57). We were told in the Washington Post where and when to go out to look for it.
And I do remember Elvis Presley on the Steve Allen Show, with actual Hound Dog (July, ’56). The Ed Sullivan appearance, not so much.
Yeah, I’m old. Born during the Truman administration. My favorite adult memory is that I can remember reading in the Post about the Watergate break-in. Not the conspiracy–the report that there had been a break-in. Should have saved the paper.
Jeff
Eisenhower’s heart attack is my earliest political memory.
Joe Falco
I can vaguely remember a presidential debate between Bush the Elder and Clinton when I was about 8.
Percysowner
@Keith G: I have a separate email for politics. Whenever I donate to anyone, I give that address. Then once a day I see who has sent me messages and decide if I care enough to open them. Nine times out of ten I just delete everything. I’m still getting requests from Democrats I gave money to through Act Blue from the last Presidential campaign.
First real political memory is of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My Dad was really afraid that things were going to go bad and we would end up in a nuclear war. I have a vague memory of my Mom voting for Kennedy, not because of Kennedy, but because she voted. She had MS and the precinct was down a few steps and it was one of her bad days so she tried, but knew she couldn’t make it down the steps. In those days you had to know ahead of time that you wouldn’t be able to vote in order to get an absentee ballot. If you were in voting area you were darned well supposed to get yourself to the polls. A really nice poll worker came out to the car with the ballot and closed her eyes while my Mom voted. So the actual politics escaped me, but the idea that you vote no matter what really hit home. In almost 45 years I have missed a couple of primaries, because there were no issues and I didn’t know enough about the candidates, and one election when I had a temperature of 102 and I was throwing up. The guy I wanted for mayor lost and I knew it was a sign from above that it was ALL MY FAULT for not dragging myself to the polls. Thank The Spaghetti Monster for early voting and absentee voting without having to prove you have “good” reasons.
Punchy
Cant link, but another dead black motorist shot by a white cop, ostensibly b/c he was black man with a concealed carry permit and thus was actually not allowed to carry a concealed weapon. Minnesota of all places.
ETA: oddly, it does not appear that the deceased is either Kirby Puckett or Prince.
Gin & Tonic
Funny about false or implanted memories. I have met at least three people in my life who clearly remember climbing up into the Statue of Liberty’s arm.
They were all born well after 1916, the year the arm was permanently closed.
j_h_r
The Iranian hostage crisis (I was 6 or 7). My most prominent memory is getting home from school, picking up the Bergen Record off the front steps, and seeing a huge photo across the top half of the front page of twisted, burned helicopter wreckage after the failed rescue attempt.
Suffice to say, that + the subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan does at lot in my mind to explain teh relentless belligerent jingoism of the Regan years
debbie
@Elizabelle:
I remember writing to Mrs. Kennedy after her miscarriage (Patrick?) and then receiving an autographed picture of the family leaving church.
My very earliest memory is dim, but it’s of the 1960 campaign. Like most little kids, I parroted my parents and so wanted Nixon to win. I must have changed sides very quickly because I also remember watching the Inauguration by myself on the basement tv.
hovercraft
Morning crew thinks that not only is the rambling diatribe working, but Hillary is a liar and everyone now knows this. She and her staff should be barred from ever going anywhere near classified information. The intelligence community should refuse to do the briefings. This new drump is very effective and now has a chance to win this election because she is not trusted and her approval numbers are going to go down. His energy is connecting with the voters are going to his numbers ahead, coming off the last few days.
MomSense
My first real political memory was watching Nixon resign. Watching the completely opposite reactions of my grandmas to the same event made a big impression. One was saying good riddance to bad rubbish and the other thought we were losing a great man.
maurinsky
One of my earliest memories is of my father yelling at Tricky Dick on TV. At the time I didn’t know who Tricky Dick was, or why my father was yelling, but I thought Tricky Dick was a very funny name.
I was born at the tail end of 1969, so I remember seeing and hearing a lot of coverage of Vietnam, by the time everyone was angry about Vietnam. The Bicentennial, of course, was also a huge story I remember well.
D58826
My oldest memories of a news event(s) were of a-bomb tests in the Nevada desert, combat footage that at the time I thought was of WWII but was actually Korea and Harry Truman and his morning walks around Washington with just a couple of reporters in tow (try that today). But they are all jumbled up as to which was first.
leeleeFL
My Mom getting the Newsday out of the newspaper box(remember them?) and saying “Sh–!”, because Eisenhower won! Guess I was always a Democrat!
debbie
@evap:
I was at my first job typing up organic chemistry exams and a teaching assistant set up a little tv on my desk and asking me to keep him posted on the Watergate hearings. I remember Alexander Butterfield testifying on a Friday and confirming that, yes, Nixon had taped every conversation that took place in the Oval Office.
hovercraft
Mika says that going forward anyone at the table can now call Hillary a liar and no one at the table can deny it. Harold Ford the supposed democrat mumbles and basically doesn’t disagree. He doesn’t ask why they don’t sit around calling drump a liar. This is no way to start the day, I may snap at someone over the stupidity on display here. How is it that these people are paid millions to publicly display their shit for brains?
raven
@hovercraft: And Bob Corker is just fucking in love.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@hovercraft: I clicked on MSNBC to see if there were any urgent headlines and was treated to the Bill Kristol looking for all the world like his own bobblehead doll. I should be well passed the point of being surprised that he’s taken seriously, and that even the lethal absurdity of his career doesn’t make Villagers understand why unwashed fly-overs like me won’t take them seriously
cmorenc
Watching the first man-made satellite (the Russian Sputnik) passing overhead in the deep twilight sky with my Uncle in New Jersey; From a contemporary perspective, it’s hard to appreciate the mix of wonderment and sheer dread the intelligent adults like my uncle (Phd Chemistry) had, and conveyed to me as an 8 year old child, over this visible sign that the Russians were seemingly significantly ahead of the US in missile and space technology (and by implication, the ability to deliver nuclear weapons via ICBMs rather than much slower bomber airplanes).
Baud
@hovercraft: Good. The biggest risk for us is that Trump is dumped at the convention. If the media props him up, that’s less likely to happen.
Oldgold
Moms is the worst. Period. What a cypher.
etc.
@scav: My earliest memories of political events is the body count on the evening news. Having just mastered the concept that a higher score meant that our team was winning, and that was a good thing, I saw the body count as my father watched the nightly news. I opined that the score showed we were winning. My father replied with, “Well, you would THINK so!” this blew my tiny mind.
rikyrah
Say his name.
His name is Philando Castile.
And, he was murdered by the Falcon Heights, Minnesota police during a ‘routine’ traffic stop.
evap
@SiubhanDuinne: Isn’t it funny how your memories turn out to be false :) Maybe it was wall-to-wall coverage on Saturday that blocked my cartoons.
hovercraft
@Elizabelle:
Last night on msnbc at the end of segments they showed clips of voters being asked about the e-mail scandal. And it was pretty even, those who support her said it had been beaten to death already and to move on, interestingly they folded e-mail gate into Benghazi and said it had already been investigated 7 or 8 times, her detractors of course deemed it the most significant scandal since Obama’s birth. While the political media are treating Comey’s rant as the most significant political event soon to be memory in our lives, most voters are not.
cmorenc
@hovercraft:
I agree – Mika and Joe (and their sidekick Mark Halperin) were back in full Trump cheerleader mode this morning, waxing admiringly about how Trump was joyfully connecting with his audience at his rallies in Raleigh and Cincinnati this week and knew what he was doing with his rambling talks (no shit Joe, but that’s a GOP primary bunch he’s connecting with, not the general electorate) , predicting Clinton’s favorables would be in the 20s after this week, how anyone else would be forever disqualified from receiving classified information.
In short, Joe is back being an uber-partisan hack, having seemingly forgotten all the unforgivably disqualifying crap he was slamming Trump about only a week or two ago.
OzarkHillbilly
@hovercraft: Ford should have asked each and every person at that table if they had ever lied. Looking specifically from Joe to Mika to Joe to Mika to Joe….
Quinerly
@hovercraft:
Has anyone mentioned the mosquito? Won’t anyone think of the poor mosquito? Can’t watch the morning crap. NPR has been somewhat brutal on Trump this morning…in a polite sorta way.
Cat48
@hovercraft:
The president decides who gets Intel Briefings, not the small little man who happens to be Speaker right now. Spoiler Alert: She already knows the US’s deepest, darkest Secrets. If Intel doesn’t brief her, the president will.
debbie
@rikyrah:
At what point will someone step up and establish training nationwide to stop these @#$! from overreacting and abuse of power?
Emma
My family arrived in the US in 1970. My very earliest memories are mirror images of some of yours, but they would make no sense to most of you. My first really terrible memory was the Munich Olympics, sitting next to my Dad in one of the small sofas that did double duty as beds for my sister and I, and listening to Jim McKay, a nice sports anchor, try to cope with the ongoing horror show. That man grew intellectually and morally on camera. Strangely enough I don’t remember many actual images of it. Just Jim McKay’s voice.
hovercraft
@Baud:
My only concern on that front is that the people who have to face actual voters this fall are not insane enough to buy into this good new for Drump drivel and throw him over. Me good news for John McCain was in the room last night and says that those not there don’t get the energy that was in that room last night.
I’m a black woman and there are many energy filled rooms full of angry white people Im have no desire to be in. Nuff said.
Diana
Yep, you guys are old. My earliest political memory is playing under the dining room table while the TV news droned on for months about something called Watergate. We were all supposed to be very disappointed although I remember wondering why. I think it might have made an impression because that was the phrase my parents used when they were upset with me.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Elizabelle: It was so routine by then. I happened to be doing some research in a library (office) where there were people watching, so I saw it happen. I never would have sought out a place to watch; it was entirely coincidental.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
This is horrific. There is no routine traffic stop if you are a black person. There’s no walking off the sidewalk, going to a pool party, asking for help after a traffic accident, walking home from a convenience store with snacks.
OzarkHillbilly
@Diana:
I’m still wondering why. He wasn’t called Tricky Dick for nothing.
Shawn in Showme
ronl
rachel
@Randy P: for me, Apollo 13 was my first clear memory of a news event. They kept interrupting the programs I wanted to watch to report on the situation. My parents would drop everything to listen. They were really worried, and it went on for days.
GregB
Watergate.
I even drew a picture of Nixon. I was 8.
Poopyman
Sputnik! Definitely a political event. And then warm summer evenings on the patio watching Echo I go over – big enough to assure every American that yes, we too were in space.
I was really young then being only born in ’54. I do vaguely remember the ’60 campaign.
Tripod
@Gin & Tonic:
The age skew here may be on account of 3 channels and network breaking news cutting into regular programing. Cable TV, and now internet kill the where were you narrative.
idk, I was fucking around on my PDA..
Elizabelle
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Thank you.
@MomSense: Is true. I have family members who don’t want to see that (they’re with the “All Lives Matter” bunch, especially Blue Lives), and it grieves me. I think they are just young.
Is a different world for people of color. Why is it so hard to acknowledge that?
maurinsky
@Elizabelle:
Irish Catholic family here – we have pictures of the Kennedys in our family photo albums. My parents have a painted portrait of JFK. The Kennedys were so present in our household that we called JFK Uncle Jack.
rikyrah
Asked for his information, Philando Castile volunteered to his murderer that he had a weapon, because he had a permit.
And yet, somehow, even after offering that piece of information.
Mr. Castile is Dead.
Dead.
Dead.
Funny how all these conceal /carry laws don’t seem to apply to Black people.
Spike
Apollo 1. It happened barely a month after my father died in a fire at his workplace. Some scars never heal…
rikyrah
Mr. Castile was killed in front of his child.
rikyrah
Since Mr. Castile had no criminal record, there is no mug shot to plaster over the airwaves. What will they use to make him seem menacing?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
If White Privilege exists, then my life, however difficult it may really be, is easier than someone else’s for reason’s that had nothing to do with me, with my intelligence, hard work or morality. Also the tribalist gut-level instinct of so many people, encouraged by politicians for generations, that politics on every level is somehow a zero-sum contest between the races. Acknowledging that cops treat African-Americans differently will take something, they don’ know how, they don’t know what, but it will take something away from them.
MomSense
@Elizabelle:
I don’t know why it is so hard to acknowledge. Part of it is because it goes against the mythology we have created about our country. I think our society and every one of us are a lot more racist than we want want to admit-even those of us who are trying not to be. There is probably an aspect of many of us living much more precarious lives than we want to acknowledge so we keep trying to make excuses for structural problems. We like to slut shame, poor shame, victim blame, and on and on. It’s like saying that the victim must have done something wrong makes us feel more secure about our own situations. I don’t know. There are also just a whole lot of people who are mean and greedy.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@rikyrah: I just cannot even. I have no words at all.
hovercraft
@rikyrah:
It feels that this will never end, like no one values us. This is why Black Lives Matter and we need to change these bullshit laws that allow the police to kill us when the ‘feel’ their lives are in danger. We feel our lives are in danger ever time we encounter the police, and our fear is valid, why does that count for nothing? They keep passing these open and concealed carry laws and yet every time we are seen carrying someone calls in that a black person has a gun and we end up dead. Why don’t they just go ahead a write it into the laws, these gun laws are for white people not for you.
FlyingToaster
Mercury launches and memorizing body counts from Walter Cronkite during Kindergarten (66-67). The big TWA strike in ’66.
Cleos
I’d have to say the 1960 election; I was ten years old at the time. That was followed by two equally memorable events:
(1) the Cuban missile crisis. Left for school not sure if I and my family would be alive at the end of the day or not, and years later everyone knew they’d had good reason to think that.
(2) Yuri Gagarin being the first man in space to return safely. The adults were bummed out that the Russians beat us to it; all I could think was (a) “somebody finally did it!” and (b) “DAMN, that guy is cute.”
I remember other events before that, but those were filed under Boring Stuff Grownups Keep Talking About.
danielx
Can remember a Mercury landing, maybe John Glenn’s. I do remember the Cuban missile crisis, not only on television but because at school they had us practicing going into hallways and crouching down for protection. All ready to be cooked like little chicken mcnuggets in the event of a nuclear attack.
way2blue
Again. The JFK assassination. It was such a shock to the nation that a president could even be shot. My school teacher cried. We, his students, were stunned by that alone.
rikyrah
We only know about Mr. Castile from the word go because his girlfriend was alert enough to video it on Facebook. Before the murderers get their chance, with their cohorts in the media, to try and spin why Mr. Castile’s MURDER was justified.
gogol's wife
@hovercraft:
I’m white and I don’t want to be there either. The energy in that room is what is terrifying me right now. There was a lot of energy on the square in Nuremberg.
O. Felix Culpa
I remember the Krushchev shoe incident at the United Nations, my parents watching the Huntley-Brinkley Report every evening, and my mother mocking Eisenhower for (allegedly) spending more time golfing than presidenting. I don’t have direct recall of the Kennedy-Nixon debates, but JFK’s assassination is as clear as yesterday (clearer, actually): the principal’s voice over the intercom announcing that the president had been shot. We second-graders sat in stunned silence for a time, my boyfriend Peter started crying, and eventually we were sent home to watch the Dallas footage over and over again.
I distinctly remember my sons watching the World Trade Towers in the same way when they came home from school on September 11.
Mr. Mack
First vivid political news story? Probably watching JFK funeral with my parents. The one that affected me the most? Kent State, it still does. The idea of us turning our weapons on our kids….Also, for some odd reason, Jayne Mansfields horrible death. Yes, I can have three.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Poopyman
@danielx: The school gave us dogtags so they could tell which cooked nugget was which, although I wondered at the time who was going to be around to sort the nuggets out.
Never did wear them. They were annoying.
raven
@Poopyman: Should have tied one in your shoelaces.
https://c2.staticflickr.com/4/3336/3573975243_4747eb4384_b.jpg
Vheidi
MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign. Went with Mom, our Montessori teacher, little brother, and sis in the stroller. We watched from Capitol Hill, I remember thinking I didn’t know there were that many people in the world.
rikyrah
@hovercraft:
Say it over and over and over.
OzarkHillbilly
@Elizabelle:
Because to acknowledge that is to admit that they had breaks go their way that others who were not so fortunate did not. White people are invested in the idea that they “earned everything” they have (most do) and got “no special privelages” (all do).
hovercraft
@gogol’s wife:
The ‘energy’ is what has fueled his entire campaign, while the media is occasionally forced to acknowledge his racism when he says something so overt that eave the deaf can hear the racism, otherwise they pretend that his entire campaign is racism couched in economic nationalism. The one good thing we have going for us that there (I hope and pray) are a lot of white people like you and most of the white people here who are disgusted by that. Yes the nation and the world are changing the economy has not been kind to most of us, but blaming and turning on one another is not the answer. While we all turn on each other as we fight over the scraps that fall off the table the rich just go on raking it in for themselves.
Poopyman
@raven: Well that would have worked.
I have no recollection of anyone at school or at home attaching any importance to having them on or how to wear them, so in retrospect I suspect it was the weird idea of someone on the school board and everyone just went along with it.
D58826
@hovercraft: Why are Comey’s comments being treated as gospel? He has a twenty year ax to grind with the Clintons, he would like to run for gov. of NJ so has to keep the GOOPers happy. He has every incentive to ’embellish’ the facts. They keep talking about the one e-mail chain with ‘classified’ information in it but it seems the ‘classified’ information was an article in the Times about the drone program. Now at that pointy maybe the CIA still thought it was a secret but even the moon rocks had heard about it. How do you spell kangaroo court? Why don’t they just wear their Trump[ for president buttons and be done with it. Bush slept thru the summer of 2001 while the alarm bells were going off and was never treated this way. He and Chaney lied their way into the Iraq war and then sanctioned torture (a war crime) and they were treated as heroes and were re-elected. Trump is right the system is rigged but its rigged in favor of the GOP
lihtox
The Challenger is pretty close for me, but Hurricane Gloria was a few months before and that really worried 10-year-old me; we lived in Pennsylvania and ultimately all we got was rain, but it was scary to watch the news about it. I also remember being freaked out about AIDS around the same time, although that doesn’t really count as an “event”.
Matt McIrvin
@Emma: Oddly, although I saw a bit of the Munich Olympics, I remember absolutely nothing of the terrorist standoff. Similarly, I have memories of Watergate and the last Moon missions but had absolutely no clue that anything like the Vietnam War had happened until years later.
OzarkHillbilly
@lihtox:
It was an event if you knew somebody who died from it (i only knew friends of friends who had a friend…)
Miss Bianca
Probably 1968 – the Tigers winning the World Series! And then one of the Apollo landings – probably Apollo 10. I remember being allowed to watch it on TV in our kindergarten class, which blew my mind – TV in school!
boatboy_srq
My early years were spent in a TV-free home, so: first “news” item I remember was an IRA bombing in Belfast, and first TV news item was Nixon’s resignation.
@lihtox: I was at uni when Challenger blew up. My flatmates were pranksters, so when they told me about it I thought they were pulling my leg. It took sitting me in front of their (tiny, B&W) TV and watching the footage to make me believe them.
Glidwrith
Earliest political memory? Making mud pies outside my front door and hearing on the radio that Nixon had resigned. Toddled in and asked my mom what the word meant.
schrodinger's cat
You guys are no spring chickens!
D58826
From a times article. So just like all thing bad started on Jan. 20th 2009, then all security issues started the day Hillary became SOS. Nothing bad every happened under the Bush watch. Condi and Collin ran tight ships and never used private e-mails for state dept business. The Bushes never leaked misleading top secret information to Judy Miller about Saddam’s WMD program. The Bush WH never lost 4-5 million e-mails on a GOP server. And no one in the Bush administration leaked the name of a CIA operative. It all started on Jan 20th 2009.
There may well be valid criticisms of the state dept. security culture but why make it sound like Hillary invented it.
MomSense
@D58826:
Cheney outed a CIA agent thus ending her ability to gather intelligence on actual WMD and I don’t even want to think about what happened to all of her contacts in the countries where she worked.
Barb2
@Elizabelle:
Re Cuban missile crisis – Hawaii, Eva Beach – the Air Force Base on the other side of Pearl Harbor (Hickam Field). Middle of the night and the B52s taking off, fully loaded with bombs. Planes flying low over our heads, looking up and seeing the belly of the bombers. Everyone was outside, looking up, knowing that the planes flying was serious. No talking, planes were too loud.
I’m a military brat and that night we knew this was very serious. Dad’s had set jaws, they all looked very grim. Cold warriors all. Those planes were loud, our dad’s flew patrol planes. Navy Air, so they knew a bit more about the cold war.
Looks like we were in Hawaii about the same time.
Original Lee
Spiro Agnew’s resignation from his Vice President’s post. I remember being in the back seat of the car as we drove back through the night from my grandmother’s house, and sleepily listening to my parents discuss the advantages and disadvantages of having Gerald Ford as Veep.
Betty Cracker
@D58826: And instead of standing pat on the winning hand they were dealt, the House GOP will hold hearings, undermining the work Comey did for them and giving the Democrats an opportunity to point out what you just said. Geniuses!
Elizabelle
@Barb2: We were. My dad worked at Hickam AFB, and we collected our last sister at Tripler.
Was a great place to be a little kid. Have not been back since.
trollhattan
@Keith G:
What, didn’t win the Hamilton date with her?
Yeah, they’re persistent.
rikyrah
You go to bed and it’s #AltonSterling
You wake up and it’s #PhilandoCastile
White America’s hate of our black skin is too much.
— Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) July 7, 2016
chopper
lennon’s death.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Moon landings (although I was a touch too young to really understand what was happening). Dim recollections of reports from Vietnam.
The first clear political memories I have are the Watergate hearings, mostly because they pre-empted my afternoon cartoons.
rikyrah
On a serious tip..
The reason why all you DRONES DRONES DRONES…
NSA SPYING ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE….
CIVIL LIBERTIES….BLAH BLAH BLAH….
Can miss me is because, in terms of my life as a Black person…
I told you before… I don’t give two shyts about drones or NSA Spying..
the biggest threat to my PERSONAL security is an encounter with law enforcement..
RIGHT HERE EVERYDAY IN AMERICA.
msb
@ rikyrah
You’re right. Why doesn’t Congress hold hearings – or, better yet, pass an actual law – to protect people against their putative protectors?
Carl W
I “watched” the first moon landing, but I was about 3 months old, so I don’t remember :)
Then I remember the bicentennial (mostly because they sold red-white-and-blue ice cream near the 4th).
The first story of “you’ll always remember where you were when you heard…” was the Challenger explosion.
(My parents aren’t very political, and neither was I. Reading through other comments, most of the events others remember made no impression on me; I’m pretty sure I did notice the Reagan assassination attempt, but I had to look it up to figure out it was before Challenger.)
NotMax
Probably pictures (and power outage) from Hurricane Hazel. Definitely the reporting on Sputnik.
PAM Dirac
Like a lot of commenters, my first clear news memory is the 1960 election of JFK. My dad set up a blackboard in the basement so he could track all the state results. It was a very big deal for a Catholic family. Related to another oft mentioned event, I was in high school in DC in ’72. A friend of mine and I were at a party in Georgetown that summer. He was trying to get the attention of a particular young woman and failing miserably, which made him miserable, so he wanted to leave early. As we drove back across town, we passed CREEP on Penn Ave. He yelled “Nixon is a Dick!” out the window. We figured out later it was the night of the Watergate break in. So we all have my friend to thank for starting Nixon’s downfall.
trollhattan
@Tripod:
Got an early example of that at the movies with the spouse’s company when most of them simultaneously reached for their pagers (remember those?) during the show, and that’s how I learned of TWA 800. Probably the first big news item not gleaned from traditional media or word of mouth.
When I did college radio the teletype feed gave that pre-Internet feeling of being the first to learn about important events. Like now, more than 99% of copy was uninteresting.
Xecky Gilchrist
Though I was alive for the moon landing, the first thing that I can remember specifically was Nixon’s resignation.
A few early dim impressions of pictures of jeeps driving through mud in Vietnam.
FlipYrWhig
My parents told me that when I learned to talk I talked about Watergate. I don’t remember that, though. I had a dim memory of having been sick one night and wandering into the living room to watch TV with my parents and seeing on the screen a US map with states in different colors. It occurred to me much later that that must have been election coverage from 1976.
gvg
I knew Vietnam body counts every night on TV, but not a specific event until the moon landing which I watched in a bar in Ireland and also watched non American’s watching “our” accomplishment. My dad worked for NASA so I always cared about that. My parents grew up poor and near poor with no travel and as soon as they were able they traveled. My early years money was tight and they had to save and look for cheap ways to go. We were in Europe for 6 weeks and 13 countries and we camped a lot of it. When the moon landing happened we were in Ireland and went to the pub to watch. I think it made even more of an impression because I realized they were watching all over the world. It was just before I turned 6.
The next event I remember was the Watergate hearings which lasted for weeks and all the adults I knew were watching it every day.
I hardly watch TV, don’t watch the news, I read it online and I wonder if we are short changing the 8 year old. News isn’t at a certain time and so much of it is not in my experience accurate so how do I teach him it’s important? He likes to watch stuff. I prefer to read it. Don’t know why but I really don’t like my facts in TV format except once in awhile when I want to see an actual even. Its the talking about it and inane analysis that I hate.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Certainly did not climb up the arm, but was allowed to go inside a short way (two or three kids at a time) on some sort of special V.I.P. tour.
misterpuff
JFK assassination, but before that, bits and pieces of the Mercury missions, especially Glenn during my preschool days.
Then Beatles and Ed Sullivan and entry to popular and mass culture.
patroclus
I was on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza in Dallas not far from the Texas School Book Depository in late November in 1963 and I was playing with some marbles with my brother but I then heard what sounded like firecrackers and I looked behind the fence there and it was Ted Cruz’s Dad (aka “Badgeman”) standing next to E. Howard Hunt and they were both holding what looked to me like curtain rods with smoke coming out of the front ends. Then, everyone started pointing up towards the 6th Floor of the Depository for some reason and I got distracted. I can remember it like it was yesterday and I’ll never forget those faces as long as I live.
EBT
Berlin wall coming down is the first political thing I remember.
NotMax
With so many Noo Yawkahs and ex-Noo Yawkahs here, kind of surprising no one has mentioned the newspaper strike (over 100 days) of the early 60s or the Big Blackout a few years after that.
J R in WV
Showing my age. My Dad was professionally Republican in an odd way. Here in WV, newspapers can align with a political party, and if a county has two such aligned newspapers, both of them get to run all the legal ads, which was a real sum of money to a small weekly. So the newspaper my Dad edited was Republican.
I remember holding an “I Like Ike” matchbook, for the 1956 election, when Dad was pulling for Eisenhower. Of course Ike was reelected. I would have been 5, nearly 6, for that election. I remember Dad explaining that Ike had won a war, whatever that was…
I remember seeing bits of the 1960 elections on TV when I was 9, and very clearly the Cuban missile crisis and the JFK murder. So I’m OLD, already. I’m just learning that I can’t help the neighbors with construction projects any more. Or do my own, much. There should be a pill for that!
Betty Cracker
@shomi: So let’s all go lie down in our personal isolation tanks for the duration. You first — we’ll be right behind you, I promise!
Origuy
JFK assassination. I was in first grade. They sent us home from school.
Matt McIrvin
@gvg: My parents tell me I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the moon, but I was too young to remember it–the bits and pieces that I do remember are from the last moon landings, and, as I said, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.
I was a huge space fan, living near Washington DC, and the National Air and Space Museum opened there in 1976 along with the massive Bicentennial reworking of the National Mall area. The “Space Hall” there is still to some degree a monument to the little-remembered 1970s Apollo Applications Program: they’ve got the backup copy of Skylab set up there so you can walk through it, and Apollo and Soyuz capsules linked together like they did in 1975 (on loan from H. Ross Perot). The last time I was there, a couple of years ago, I was leading my daughter through the interior of Skylab pointing out stuff, and somebody behind me asked “Excuse me, sir? What are we in?” I said “Skylab” and she’d never heard of the name. Had to explain that the United States had a functioning space station in the early 1970s. I think Skylab was more famous for eventually falling down than for actually being used.
Scotian
I was born in ’67 and with severe ADHD, so I don’t remember much of my childhood, especially from before the age of 8 when they started me on ritalin (and yes, I was one of those it WAS a miracle drug for, unlike so many who did not have the true ADD/ADHD for whom it really messed up years later) and I started getting a true sense of self to remember from, but I do distinctly recall the WaterGate hearings because they interrupted my ability to watch Sesame Street when I got home from school.
TOP123:
Interesting question. I was born, raised, and still live in what was a known first strike target throughout the Cold war. I was also from very early on a serious Science and SF junkie too, so unfortunately I became well aware of what that meant at an earlier age than most, and yes, I used to have some pretty ugly post apocalyptic nightmares, including but not limited to watching my home city burn. Even these days every so often something will trigger one of the old dreams for reasons I can’t figure out and I get a reprise, but at least these days I no longer worry about the human race nuking the planet into a cinder, no, these days I worry about some idiots with more brains then sense creating a bioweapon that does humanity in instead. Compared to modern bioweapons potentials, a nuclear explosion is just a large bubble-gum pop by comparison in my books. Nasty to its immediate surrounds but not so much at a distance, bioweapons, that’s a whole other story.
This is one of the legacies of growing up in the Cold War for me, I became very interested in the real capacities of what are termed weapons of mass destruction, although I personally only call nukes that, the others are more weapons of mass death in my books, they kill in extreme numbers, but not so much on the physical damage/destruction. For me it was the way of facing the fears of them growing up, the better you understand something the better you can face it, even things as ugly and horrific as such weapons.
Gemina13
Two stand out, although I was only 4 & 5 at the times–Nixon’s resignation, and footage of desperate people trying to get on the last helicopter leaving Saigon.
PAM Dirac
@Matt McIrvin: My father-in-law was one of the original curators for space at the Air & Space Museum and I think he was one of the main people working on getting Skylab into the museum. One of my wife’s first memories is her dad coming home from work and being sad because he had to blow up a monkey. He was range safety officer for some of the early launches and had to give the destruct command when one of the launches with a monkey in the capsule went astray. The Air & Space museum and the annex out near Dulles are about the only museums that completely turn me into a little kid.
LesBonnesFemmes
My mother helping me donate money to McGovern while we were watching the Dem convention. I was four. #Dem4life
Uncle Cosmo
@Mary: Bingo. For me it was Sputnik as I was about to turn 8. Excited the heck out of me–& I didn’t give a shit that it was the Bad Old Rooskies who’d launched it: We, the human race, were in space!
(The year before a diagnosis of severe myopia had already force me to abandon my chosen career [rocket pilot–the terms astronaut & cosmonaut were yet to be coined] in favor of astronomy. I got within a few years of grad school of managing it [but Plan C didn’t work out too badly in the end].)
Politically, the 1960 election–I remember a kid from up the street coming through our basement door on election day & waving a Nixon poster in my face. I should’ve slugged the little bastard–might’ve knocked some sense into him.
J R in WV
@trollhattan:
We went to work late after a party to watch the teletypes reporting the Nixon “Saturday Night Massacre” when Nixon fired the Attorney General, the Deputy AG, until he finally got the Solicitor General, who was willing to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor for Watergate. What was his name?
Oh year, Bork, Robert Bork, who fired Archibald Cox, and got a Supreme Court appointment as his reward. Only his legal beliefs were so strange the Democrats were able to reject that appointment. Thanks FSM!!!
Back then the printers were loud, typing automatically, and big stories they would ring bells, the more DINGs, the better and bigger the story was. We had The AP, UPI, the NYTimes wire, and they were all dinging away. It was amazing, seeing the collapse of an administration reported in almost real time. We watched for a long time, into the wee hours of Sunday.
Uncle Cosmo
@Just One More Canuck: No problem, JOMC. USAn Catholics have been lying to their confessors (assuming they even have them) about things like birth control for two generations now, a couple more whoppers won’t matter. They know it, the priests know it, the Archbishop knows it, Pope Frankie knows it, & everyone knows that everyone else knows it. (As Gregory Corso put it in his immortal poem “Marriage”, Everybody knowing!) And they won’t do a damn thing about it…so long as the USA branch of the sogennante One Holy Catholic & Apostolic Church is its #1 cash cow. Like everything else with the RC’s, you gotta follow the money to understand what’s going on. (NB RFC here: Recovering From Catholocism lo these >50 yr.)
gogol's wife
@hovercraft:
I agree with you 100%.
Matt McIrvin
@PAM Dirac: The house where I grew up was actually only a few miles from the eventual location of the Udvar-Hazy Center (the big Air and Space Museum annex). I remember when they flew the test shuttle Enterprise into Dulles Airport, for eventual installation at the museum–I saw it on the carrier 747 from my school bus! And later saw it just sitting out on the tarmac at the airport. Now Enterprise is on the USS Intrepid in New York; they swapped it out for Discovery, one of the shuttles that actually flew in space.
I went there a couple of times when my parents were still living there, but now that they’ve moved, I haven’t been back. I’ve been meaning to take my daughter because she’d probably love the place–I might get the chance this summer.
Luthe
I seem to be a whippersnapper around here. The first news event I remember is the Berlin Wall falling, because I confused the Brandenburg Gate with the Parthenon and couldn’t figure out why the newscasters were talking about Berlin when the pictures were clearly from Greece. I was five-ish?
(note: I didn’t know the name of the building, just that all the pictures of it I’d ever seen said “Greece” and not Berlin)
eclare
We were allowed to watch the Camp David accords on tv at school in the fifth grade. Although I’m sure none of us really “got” it.
JGabriel
Anne Laurie @ Top:
Well, I’m decidedly late to the party, but here goes:
My first memories all date back to when I was two, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is when I was taught to read, so maybe there’s some connection between early teaching and early memory formation. Anyway, none of those memories are political, only one or two are connected to books, and I have no idea which of those memories comes first.
My earliest political memory is the first manned landing on the moon. We were regular Star Trek watchers at the time via reruns on WPIX, channel 11, and, being four, I thought that meant we were already regularly going to the moon and exploring space. So I was unimpressed by the moon landing and wanted to know why we couldn’t watch cartoons instead.
I don’t know if that counts as a political memory or not, but since it was a gov’t program that put us on the moon, I’m counting it as such.
If it doesn’t count though, then my next political memory is the build-up of Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon over my seventh and eighth years of existence.
So my first political memories are the culmination of a Democratic program that put the first people on the moon, and the resignation of a Republican president in disgrace. I suppose that might be a factor in the formation of my current political inclinations.
NotMax
@JGabriel
Any non-NBC reruns of Star Trek would have come after the first Moon landing. Trek’s last first-run episode aired in June of ’69 (pushed back from its original intended airdate by Ike’s death), about a month before the Apollo 11 landing and the final season’s reruns ran though that summer on its home network.
Dice
Sputnik. I was 4.
central texas
The fall of Dien Bien Phu and the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu. The former because the nightly (radio) news played recordings of radio transmissions from the French and the latter because my father was in the military and ended up on Guam as a result.
contract3d
“Sputnik” I was five years old when Russia launched the first satellite. I remember standing out in the front yard in El Paso, Texas trying to see it pass overhead.
Cleos
@shomi:
if those are your earliest news item memories, you must be about — what? Three years old? Please explain.