56 years ago today ....

[Thumper]

... I was in the 6th grade. The school system here had just started experimenting with lessons being given in the classroom via television. My teacher rolled the tv out and tuned into the Spanish lesson for the day .... "Conversational Spanish with Senorita Rosita". (No clue how I remember that) Shorty after we started watching that "class" ... the program was interrupted with news coverage stating President Kennedy had just been shot in Dallas. I remember a lot of the girls started crying and the rest of us just stared (myself included), not really sure what to think or how to act.

That's one of the instances in my life that has always been etched into my mind. Another was the live coverage I was watching with my dad when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald just a couple days later as we sat on the sofa in our "den" watching the continuing Kennedy coverage. I remember my dad and I looking at each other wide-eyed and wondering if we'd BOTH really seen what we thought we saw!

Another memory is sitting in my grandmother's living room late one evening while watching Neil Armstrong step out onto the moon. Granny swore it was "trick photography" and went to her grave still thinking it was "fake news". ;)

Then there was 9/11. I'd taken the day off because I'd just arrived back home from Canada a few hours earlier from a Walleye fishing trip with a small group of Good Hunting deplorables, hosted by Johnboy and TW. I was watching tv as the Trade Center coverage came on.

There are others of course, but those really stand out in the "exactly where I was and what I was doing" category.

[Bwana]

For me it was 9/11 for certain and also the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. For some reason the accident that killed Lady Di is another one.

[Big Muddy]

For me, it was the assassination of JFK.....I was in the 9th grade, and was waiting to catch the school bus, home that afternoon.....my buddy, Stevie, and I were tossing horse shoes beside the bus stop area, when Mrs. Collins, the lunch room lady, came running outside, screaming that the president was dead.

[Thumper]

Good memory jog Bwana. Yep, Columbia was the biggie for me. I was actually standing out on my pool deck waiting for the shuttle to pass over my house on it's way to the Space Center. I never saw it, but what was really weird, I never heard that distinctive double sonic boom. WTF? I came back into the house to check the news and that's when I found out what was going on.

For Diana, I was at my buddy's place up in Georgia to help him work on some deer blinds for the upcoming season. Lynn went up with me (first and only time she tagged along) and we heard about it on the radio.

[jb]

I was in boot camp on Parris Island. We were at the rifle range and staying in different barracks than our usual one (new brick barracks, ours were original WWII wood barracks)
Anyway, whenever the DI would enter the barracks, someone would yell attention and you fell into attention in front of your bunk.
He walked in and said "any of you maggots from Texas take one step forward" (we had 3 from Texas) He then went on to say, "someone from your state just shot and killed the President" turned and walked out, leaving those three kids standing at attention in the middle of the room and the rest of us sort of looking at each other trying to comprehend what he just said.
A few minutes later he came back in pushing a TV and turned it on, this was unheard of in boot camp, because back then the only news you got from the outside came in letters. No TV, radio, newspapers or magazines were allowed.
We all gathered around the set and not one word was said, sort of like everyone was in shock.
About a 1/2 later he came back in and said we were under full alert and to go pack our sea bags and prepare for unknown deployment.
That lasted till the next morning (not many of us slept that night) and we were taken off alert and would resume normal activities.
We graduated about 2 weeks later, then headed down to Camp LeJeune for the next three months. Hard to forget those two days.

[Thumper]

Man! You're older than dirt! ;)

[DeputyDog]

Can’t contribute to the discussion on Kennedy because it happened just over five years before I was born.

My first “where were you” was the Challenger explosion just like with Bwana. I was a junior in high school and was in the cafeteria at lunch when a friend of mine came in and said the space shuttle had just blown up. A lot of us followed the space program. I guess we were just the right age to have vague memories of the end of Apollo and then of Skylab, and then the shuttle program. I remember TV’s being brought into the classrooms for the first several shuttle launches and landings.

Of course 9/11. I was a detective at the time and on my department’s SWAT team and I had taken the morning off of work to go goose hunting with a couple buddies. Since it was still in the days of non-texting cell phones we got our messages from a messaging pager. We were out in the middle of a lake and didn’t have cell reception but I got a page placing the team on standby due to the situations in NYC and DC. Of course I wondered what the hell anything happening in those places had to do with us. We finished hunting and had the radio on in the truck and heard the news. We got back to one of the guys houses and turned on the TV in time to see the towers fall. It was such a shock that I went home and sat in front of the TV the rest of the day and never went into work for the afternoon.

To this day, when I’m at a fire scene and the motion alarms on the firefighters go off if they have been immobile for a period of time it reminds me of the scenes from 9/11.