Has anyone here ever witnessed a historical moment or majorly newsworthy event in person?

I have.

I was six years old.

Because my mom was 8 months pregnant with my little sister in summer 1985, we couldn't take our normal August summer vacation to Florida that year.

As such, my parents decided to take us to Florida in January 1986 instead. They were able to get us excused from school and everything.

It was quite the exciting trip. But one thing we knew that was going to occur near the end of our trip was a space shuttle launch, and that there was a big buzz about this launch because the first teacher was going to go up in space during this launch. As we had never seen a shuttle launch in person, this was an especially exciting thing for all of us.

The night before the launch, it was a cold night for Florida, below freezing I believe. It was a full moon that evening, and we saw it rising over the horizon. It looked huge and blood red. I don't think I ever remembered seeing a moon that red either before or after that day.

The next day, we were anticipating the launch. It was our last day in Florida and we were heading north to go home that day. We had just passed into Volusia County over Lake Monroe on Interstate 4 when I was the first in the family to notice a very distinct contrail rising above the horizon with a bright ball of fire at its head. I knew this had to be the launch and told my parents to pull over.

We all pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car. My dad pulled out his camera and started snapping pictures. We were all plenty excited to see what was going on. We then noticed that the single contrail had split into two trails like a "Y". However, as we had never seen a shuttle launch before, we didn't think much of it and thought it to be normal. After my dad had shot a few more pictures, we all got back in the car and drove off.

And then my mom turned on the radio and heard the news. The space shuttle Challenger had just exploded. My mom gasped at hearing the announcement and realizing what we had just unknowningly seen.

It was lunch time, so we turned into a McDonalds to have a bite to eat. The restaraunt was full but in total stunned silence. The only previous experience I had with explosions was watching cartoons, where Wily E. Coyote would explode in a blast, and then you would seem him all dusty, and then he would shake it all off and be on his way again. I now knew that this was real life, though, and that it was different.

By the time we had passed through Jacksonville, my dad said he could still see the Y shaped contrail on the horizon, over 100 miles north of Cape Canaveral. He said it was one of the most haunting things he had ever seen in his life.

That night when we stopped at a hotel, I remember thinking to myself and pretending that those astronauts had not died. That somehow they had survived the explosion and had been rescued. I remember thinking that and wanting it so much to be true, but knowing that it was not the case and the astronauts had in fact died in the explosion. It was quite possibly the first sobering experience of my young life.

Has anyone ever witnessed a historical moment or a major newsworthy moment in person like this? It doesn't have to be sad like my story, but it is something where you were there in the flesh and you saw the events unfold with your own eyes.

The riots were the most dramatic over time, though the Northridge quake in '94 was really something.

In person I saw gangs trying to break into a major electronics store while all around us on a beautiful sunny day were plumes of smoke rising to the sky from burning stores. Lots of helicopters, no police to be seen anywhere. The whole city seemed deserted, almost no one driving, except all the local residents were watching the gang trying to break in. Some residents were taking pictures. I left, and later heard that security guards on the roof fired warning shots, and the gang took off. All the local gas stations had burned; the Radio Shack and my local camera store had been plundered.

Northridge quake threw me out of bed, and later that day I tried to head to the freeway, only to see it had fallen down.

The DMV in Long Beach where I got my license was burned to the ground.

I was living in Northridge when the quake hit -- I lived right across the street from the University. I lived on the first floor of a three story building and thought I was a dead man. The shaking was so strong that I couldn't even stand up. I was ready to move out of California after that, but some friends convinced me to stay.

Almost didn't get married that day.

for the Democratic nomination for the Senate in CT, I was there at State House Square in Hartford, CT.

Other than that, nothing huge.

Tornado outbreak...I'm in the middle of Oklahoma for it :scared:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_Tornado_Outbreak

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kissimmee_Tornado_Outbreak

Thankfully, I was not in one of the seven tornados that night. I do remember there was an ominious feel that night and the wind was swirling. A bunch of us were outside our dorm when the wind began to pick up. One of us said they felt their ears pop and worried it might be a drop in pressure from a potential tornado, so we all ran to the dorm bathroom and huddled in there for a good 10 minutes.

That night, I remember having the TV on and every 15 minutes an alert would come on about a spotted tornado. As I fell asleep, I heard about the first reported death from the tornados. When I woke up, I was shocked to learn that 41 other people had died as well.

it's a scary thing when they just start popping out all over the place. We had the most destructive tornado ever recorded that day, plus 65 others. It was like a meat grinder, I got to see a couple of them.

I worked 5 miles from the power station at fault. It was traffic hell getting home.

my main breaker blew out. I just sat there with candles, books and beer. Didnt even notice. I now run a power plant and caused a few mini blackouts myself! Be nice, or I will shut yer lights off!! haha- more like an ooopsie...

Of course, I was safely in Baton Rouge- which saw relatively little of the storm (just some strong winds and rain). But over the next few days, when Baton Rouge doubled in population, news and video reports were coming in, and military helicopters were all over the place- it began to be clear just how bad things were just 75 miles away. Then, I had to go back to work just outside of New Orleans (near the airport) and got to see firsthand.

...when it passed through Florida as a Catagory 1. The storm was so small at that point that in Palm Beach County where I live it was your typical afternoon thunderstorm. Down in Miami there was some minor flooding and wind damage, and the wind actually knocked down an overpass on the expressway. But I wouldn't have guessed that it would pick up so much steam over the Gulf and cause that type of damage.

In Biloxi.

Not witnessing it of course (thank god) but close enough. I was in contact (as much as I could be with the downed cell towers) with people that were there just until the levees collapsed, though.

I did volunteer work at some of the shelters here after the storm. The human misery of the people was immense. They suffered so much, so needlessly. I will never forget listening to the radio after the storm, hearing people call in and putting in requests for loved ones to call them to make sure they were okay.

I don't talk about it because I can't without completely losing my head at the inevitable deniers and conspiracy nuts.

Suffice it to say I can definitively state that they're full of crap. :grr:

I lived just down the street (less than a block) from it.

His first day of shooting was about 10 miles from where I was working at the time and I remember our boss coming into the lab and telling us not to leave the building for lunch because someone was going around shooting people.
Then the shooting that happened in Manassas..the one Muhammed got the death sentence for, was about 5 miles from my younger sister's house..freaked me out....
That was a scary 6 weeks here.:scared:

Everyone was looking for a white van, which turned out to be a red herring, because the shooters were actually driving a brown sedan. But people were very antsy at gas stations and other public places.

I remember flying back to Florida during the night and looking down over the DC metro area from the air and realizing that the shooters were down there somewhere but neither myself nor anyone else had no idea where, and feeling totally helpless in the situation. It was one of the most odd and surreal feelings I've ever had. Then, when I got home, I turned on the news and there was another shooting at a Home Depot in Virginia, just where I had flown over.

I was living in Columbia, MD and everyday riding home from DC with my roommate I used to record the plates of every single white van I saw. It was scary when someone would get shot blocks from where I was or places I'd been recently. We were waiting for it to spread up our way into Howard Co.

I went out and bought a bottle of good tequila the night they got caught and got hammered...it was the first time I'd gone anywhere but home and work in weeks.

which entailed measuring convenience store and gas station parking lots and then drawing them with AutoCad. Needless to say,I was a bit nervous. I quickly convinced my company to have my crew and myself move on up to the top of Long Island and later work our way down to the Maryland/DC area.

Where the FBI employee was shot: She had left about 3 minutes earlier and had not yet turned onto Route 50 when the shooting happened and the police cars started arriving. The snipers must have watched her leave.

I was at a different Home Depot (in Fairfax) that same night. I had moved into my condo that day, and the last words I said to my mother before she headed home to WV were "I'm probably going to Home Depot and then come back and unpack." I hadn't watched TV that night at all and got a frantic call at 11:30 pm after my mom had seen something on CNN. The tag line was "Sniper shooting at Home Depot in Fairfax, VA."

And the place where the snipers were caught was about a mile from my coworkers' home.

We just missed the postal guy at the McDonald's by the Mexican border years ago. Also a guy in Paramount or Cerritos killed some coworkers right around the corner from my machinist's school. Used to ride my bicycle by the place every night. Nothing crazy like that happens in my neck of the woods any more, thank goodness.

But Montgomery County has 900,000 residents, so I thought my odds were pretty good.

It was tough on the local schools, with all the lockdowns every time something happened.

I was a block away at TeenMidlo's acting class.

Came out and the place was crawling with police. It was really frightening. I had all three kids with me. Couldn't get home fast enough.

When I was young, our family lived off of Randolph Rd, and I remember hearing that two of the first shootings were 2-3 miles from our old home in the Viers Mill area.

I'm so glad they caught that guy. I remember our friend from Barnesville saying how semi trucks would block out gas stations, and they would put out tarps.

Really scary stuff.

The firm we worked at took cash donations and set up a trust for her children.

Three months later, another of my co-workers dropped dead of a stroke at a Super Bowl party. She too had small children. Her death was just as tragic as his -- just less popular. Yes, that's the word. Popular. The god-damned firm didn't give a shit about Denise; they wanted the press that came with their support.

The children of the stroke victim got shit.

But I'm not bitter.

shut down the city of Charlotte NC for days (in some cases weeks), an completely destroyed the restaurant where i worked--5 trees fell on the building!

No one expected it to be bad that far inland, but it was a category-2 storm when it arrived in my hometown, with sustained winds of almost 100mph. In a city full of trees, after having a particularly wet September, it was utterly terrifying.

As i was waiting for the city bus (i didn't live far from the store, but i had my 8-month-old daughter with me), the wind started to blow a bit, and it was misty. There were a couple of girls coming out of the store behind me, and upon feeling the wet spray on the breeze one of them turned to the other one and mockingly said, "Oh NO!!! The hurricane's HERE!!!"

I wonder how much of an ass she felt like the next morning, when most of the metro area was without power? *L*

Dumbass.

It was Hurricane Floyd. I was working in Piscataway, NJ at the time, we had a call center there, and we were working 24/7 to backup a call center in the Orlando, FL area where Floyd was expected to produce a lot of damage.

Needless to say, Floyd decided to spare Florida and head up the coast, by the time it hit NJ it was degraded, but still producing plenty of winds and rain which devastated Bound Brook, NJ, Manville, NJ, and surrounding areas. Driving I-287 was surreal, with everything surrounded by water.

And smelled the jet fuel in the air when I left work at 1 pm that day.

It was surreal, wasn't it. The whole day. I wasn't going to mention it by name because the LIHOP/MIHOP crew (more so the conspiracy wonks who refuse that someone's first-hand experience trumps their second-hand evidence) comes out of the woodwork with their theories and I lose it on them...but it's nice to know I'm not the only one here.

Edit: Redirection of criticism to appropriate parties.

Do they say the Pentagon didn't burn?

that the damage was clearly bomb damage...that the plane never hit...no wreckage...citing various incorrect assessments of the the scene as proof of an inside job...I've heard some (not here) go so far as to posit that the entire scene from the existence of the passengers and the takeoff of the plane was faked.

I don't think that our government did what it could/should have...I won't even discount that perhaps they allowed it to happen or worse, but the conspiracy theories drive me up a wall because when you tell them that you first-hand can dismiss their theory or the spurious evidence they've based it on...then you're a troll, a plant, a loonie, or a freeper.

I guess that's more a criticism of the conspiracy theorists rather than the MIHOP/LIHOPs. I'll edit to clarify that.

My uncle who lives on Capitol Hill was walking on the Mall that morning and saw the damn plane go overhead..Thats why I get furious with the MIHOP'ers who insist it was not a plane....

UCLA venue....Eight Gate Seven-Bravo:)


Tikki

It was down to the last event. The fellow from the U.S performed some kind of special trick on the rings, and our team won the gold.Quite a moment..

all the Angelenos left the city on vacation. Traffic was never easier.

I was working the 11pm to 7am shift
security next to the bicycle venue.
My round trip was about 50 miles each way...
and there was very little traffic going my directions.

The only night of the run I took off just happened to be
the night some J***A** in a car plowed through a crowd in
Westwood. :(



My Stars In Motion
Tikki

One of many things that drove weekend business down to the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

And had my picture taken with the torch in Arcadia California. Long time ago and many hairstyles ago!

The Conrad Hilton was a place that many delegates used as second home away from where the convention was being held (Chicago Ampetheater)

..Anyway, I attended a press conference of Senator George Mc Govern, and met him for a moment or two.
..Also, across the street from the Hilton Hotel.., in Grant Park, in the afternoon, there was a peaceful rally, which I attended. (not at all part of the violent ones that are always shown on TV)

..Someone was edgy, and a national guardsman set off a tear gas bomb...It was such a minor thing that it wasn't reported that day. But at least I saw some of minor events of the 68 Convention...

I was just a toddler though.

Vietnam :patriot:

I watched the Challenger disaster on TV from St. John's Hospital, overlooking the front Gate of NASA's Texas HQ. My ex wife was in for surgery. Within hours there were mountains of flowers delivered to the gate by mourning people. :cry:

Hope you're well. Missed you. :hug:

at the launch of Apollo 14.

I saw the first women walk through the gates of the Merchant Marine Academy, making them the first ones to attend any federal service academy.

Not really big stuff, but newsworthy.

Watched the first women walk through the gates of the US Air Force Academy in May 1976. I was a member of that class.

to being an indoctrination assistant. This was the summer of '74, and the first class including women was '78. Let's just say that their plebe year wasn't exactly easy. I never sailed with any from that class, but I've worked with a handful from later classes. Most were pretty good mates and engineers. One was the sister of my roommate from my third class year.

which would have been 1997 and on the last morning we were in Atlanta, we could see the original Braves stadium being imploded from our hotel balcony.

Coincidentally, I had seen the Braves play their very first game in Atlanta (after moving from Milwaukee) in 1967 at that very same stadium. I was only 6 years old, and barely remember that part, so I am just going by family stories and a somewhat dim memory of watching a ballgame, but not realizing how big a deal that was.

How about the blizzard of 93?

IF so, yeah, that was my first Halloween :D couldn't even see my costume under my snowpants and parka!

does that count?

that would probably count.

BIG, historic news--apparently

My wife and I were in Hamburg, 30 miles from the East German border, and watched
in stunned astonishment as the newscast from East Berlin was repeated over and over.

We said, well, we'll see how true it is tomorrow morning, if there are a flood of
East Germans in town tomorrow (this was a Friday night). Sure enough, downtown Hamburg
was completely jammed with East Germans the next day, just gawking at all the stores
and stinking up the town with their East German cars that ran on motors that operated
like lawn mowers. Most of them were just as curious about us as we were about them. It
was a time of great optimism and expectations, most of which went unfulfilled when
reality intruded on the festive mood.

He works in Manhattan, and saw the second WTC tower collapse on Sep. 11, 2001.

Talk about something to freak you right out of your wits!

Me, nothing too interesting. I go to see the 1996 Olympic torch go past. The Georgia State Troopers were driving BMWs, I remember. :-)

Took our two oldest children, ages 8 and 10

Me and 400,000 of my closest friends.

My immediate friends and I got there three days early and camped. Easy, no hassle. Then people kept on coming in, all day long, all night long. We didn't realize how bad the roads were until we left.

:silly:

there are about 12 hours of the experience that I don't remember.

Was it as muddy as the pictures look?

on the way home we could tell anyone who had been there by the encrusted reddish mud on their pants.

at the Athletic Club where the jury was staying. Started at just before midnight and we had just passed through that intersection moments before on our way home. We covered parts of the trial in the news phase of military photojournalism training.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonton_Tornado



I was at school in the West end and a tremendous thunderstorm started up. One lightning bolt hit the gas station across the street. The operator bolted, ran down the street and never returned. I was looking East and saw what looked like a huge funnel cloud.

http://www.iassistdata.org/tornado/chapt4.html


One report from the western edge of the city (1.9 E, 9.1 N) was approximately 16 km from the tornado. This was the most distant observation which could have been a sighting of the main tornado.

that may be a bit early to be me.

Most of the funnel cloud reports from west Edmonton were clustered around 2 periods: 1600 MDT, roughly the time when the tornado dispersed, and 1800 MDT, about the time when a second storm buffeted west and central Edmonton with hail, rain, and strong winds. None of these observers in west Edmonton, however, claimed to have seen a funnel cloud touch down, excluding the main tornado.

That probably was.

This is sort of what I saw, through a lot of cloud, rain, hail and lightning, from a different angle.



I worked at the time for a volunteer police outfit and we were called out immediately.



My job was primarily to keep people away from the downed power line ("240 Kv line down"), chase the press away before they got themselves hurt and watch for looters (most were driving Mercedes). The second day was spent at the trailer park north of the downed power line looking for bodies. I didn't find any, but I did rescue a cat and found a surprising number of firearms that I secured and turned over to uniformed officers. I also saw bloodstains on the side of flattened trailers and one trailer otherwise intact with a telephone pool through its front door.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budd_Dwyer

January 22nd 1987 he had a press conference in which everyone thought he was going to retire from his job due to corruption. And it seemed that was what he was doing until the very end when he pulled a gun out and killed himself on live TV.




edit note: Yes he was a republican

Trivia note - one of the 3 letters he handed out right before he killed himself was to Bob Casey Sr - the son of current US Senator Bob Casey Jr.

L.A. Riots, Iranian Hostages Crisis (In the Persian Gulf at the time).

I was sleeping in my single bed in Orange, California, during the Sylmar quake and the bed started bouncing up and down about a foot. I woke up thinking someone was trying to wake me up, but there was nobody else in the room. It was weird. I heard my Mom's voice in the hallway so went out there, and the whole family was standing there wondering what to do. But by then it was all over, so we just went to bed. Later in the morning when it was light out we turned on the TV and all the stations were giving live reports from the worst-hit area.
During the Landers quake I was standing on our driveway in San Diego and I felt the entire (concrete) driveway moving back and forth horizontally. Not up or down at all. It was actually kind of cool to feel it, but for a day or two afterwards, my equilibrium was off and whenever I was standing up, it felt like the ground was moving a little. That went away after 2 days.
My grandmother was 8 years old, and lived in San Francisco during the time of the 1906 earthquake. She was terrified of quakes for the rest of her life, but lived most of her life in San Diego which sees relatively little seismic activity compared to other areas of California.

Welcome to L.A.

my office when the second plane went it. They were located at the Empire State Building at that time.

One of my friends there saw the first one go in, and most of the office (who was there, anyway) saw the second.

All I remember hearing is crying and screaming after that plane went in. Then, I was desperate to find my brothers who worked in Manhattan.

Lost a couple of friends that day. :cry:

:hug:

world trade center. Saw the second plane fly by and then heard it hit the south tower of the wtc.

:scared:

I imagine that's a sound you will never forget. :scared:

metal against metal ever again.

My bil has a atm receipt from the WTC dated Sept.10th. Yep him and my sister visited the twin towers the day before..

morning, and had a been going into my office in the World Financial Center, I would have walked underneath where the first plane hit within +/-2 minutes. (I would take a route from the Fulton Street station through the WTC and over West Street to the WFC where I used to work) As it was, I had an appointment about 5 blocks away on Wall Street doing a site survey.

:hi:

and it was cancelled.

:scared:

I was in our office building a few days afterward, and we had several windows broken on our floor, and everything was covered in that dust. The smell of that dust is something that never goes away. The only thing I salvaged from my desk was a water bottle i had gotten a few years before.

The night before the fateful event, I was, I believe at-Love Field with my parents, and we were watching someone quite famous getting off a plane there. I'm unsure of the Kennedy's itinerary, had they come back from Austin the night before with Connolly? Anyway-I remember being too short to see, but I knew we were there.

Also in 1973 on a trip to Germany, our group visited East and West Berlin. I saw the wall. Saw a couple waving a sad goodbye, with a forced separation. Nazi types were looking at our passports.

IRA bombing. It was rough. Our parents had just left to go to Paris for the weekend and when the bomb went off and blew all our windows in, my sister and I were sure our parents were dead. It was a car bomb that went off too soon. The only person hurt was a man jogging, a doctor studying cancer - he was killed.


Khash

and the "Dean Scream." :woohoo:

And just so everyone knows, the "scream" didn't happen the way the media described it. :P

The quake was VERY scary. I was 12 and living in Oakland. I thought I was going to die. I thought the building was going to collapse. It was a wood frame building and the sounds of all the boards creaking was SO LOUD. Everything in our apartment that could fall over, DID fall over. We went out on the patio, listened to the burglar alarms from the neighbor's house, and watched the fires in Berkeley and the Marina. Initial news reports were horrific... collapsed freeways, bridges, buildings... whole towns and neighborhoods destroyed. We slept outside for a couple days until the danger of big aftershocks had mostly passed. It was scary.

OMG, now I feel really old. I was 25 back then.

Sigh. :eyes:

:hi:

I was there, had a great time. Was way too far away to be involved any of the bad trips or anything...I really remember the Dead not playing and the Stones coming on hours late.....I was 14 at the time and went with my cousin Skip.

I was at the speech where Reagan told Gorbachev to tear the wall down.

A few years later I was at Potsdamer Platz the night they actually did it.

Been through two hurricanes (Fran and Floyd) and worked disaster relief for Andrew.

dad.

I wasn't there, thankfully, but one of my friends at my high school had gone there for a couple of years and new three or four of the people who wound up dying. I remember being angry, and scared, and sad. I was just a sophomore in high school then, so it all hit pretty hard. Everyone was just in shock. There were support rallies, counselors, and a lot of confused and scared kids and parents.

I think it was May 1st that my parents, my sister, and myself all went down to Columbine to visit the makeshift memorial that had been put in place on the hill in the park overlooking the school. Those big wooden crosses with the pictures of everybody who died, surrounded by hundreds of flowers and letters and notes, words of sorrow and the like. Every square inch of the crosses had been covered in hand-written notes from friends and strangers alike.

It was overcast and stormy - perfect weather for the kind of sorrow I saw in the people there that day. The ground was muddy from all the people who had visited the site. We left flowers at every one of the crosses and prayed together. I still remember looking off toward the school and seeing the plywood sheets covering up the windows in the library that had been shot out...

That was the most significant event I was "there" for. I also went to the first-ever World Series game in Denver last fall, and I was at the last MLB game in which a position player won the game as a pitcher - August, 2000. Those were pretty cool.

:hi: I don't know that I've witnessed anything particularly historical in person, though...

There you go

I walked outside my house and gazed up at the moon while Neil Armstrong was walking there, taking the first steps on a world other than earth.

If that ain't participation in a historic moment I don't know what is.

then looked up to the moon. Two weeks later i was in Wapakoleta,Ohio welcoming Neil Armstrong back to earth in a home town parade!

Saw WTC crash from the 3rd floor of my new neighbor's house.

Was at *'s "inauguration" march down PA Ave in 2001 and saw his limo being pelted with eggs and tomatoes. In fact I was right there with the pelters but I didn't have an egg or tomato.

Which has since become a major life regret.



Cher

Sorry; that's the best I could come up with.

So, the two of us will sit in the bleachers and watch the people who have been to stuff that was actually important. :-)

I was at the Old Executive Office Building with my friend, Gus Weiss, who was then one of Nixon's national security advisers. I saw people like Eliot Richardson and Sam Ervin getting in and out of black cars. Ervin looked enormously pissed off.

My friend was about to come out publicly in November of 2003 against the Iraq invasion when - as it was reported a week after his death - he went to the roof of his Watergate apartment building and jumped. I never for one second believed that Gus committed suicide; I'm no conspiracy theorist in most things, but I knew him well, and I am sure that he was murdered.

:(

Huh ... what was that? Thunderstorm brewing this early in the day?

Not a good day.

Both were equally disgraceful.

I was on the 12th floor of a building downtown. We were watching this blob of a cloud slowly creep across downtown, then we finally figured out it was swirling. The glass panes in the building puickered and popped back out. We hightailed it to the restrooms at that point.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0HBMOuMWzM0&feature=related

That weekend I went down to East Nashville to help clean up--chop up trees, clear away debris, etc.

I was a Junior in college at the time and I had just come out of giving a major presentation for a final. I remember coming out of the building and my tie was whipping around and standing straight up from the wind. It looked like the thing was going right down West End Avenue into downtown. My girlfriend lived in some high-rise dorms down the street and I remember running to them to see if she was OK.

I also remember a student died across the street from where I was having class :(

They installed tornado sirens on campus a couple of months later. I still remember being woken up every sunday at noon for the tests.

He went to work after the tornado hit less than a quarter of a mile from our house. His dept only found out it was a tornado because I called him on the off chance that they didn't know about it. Scary times.

That's about it. :shrug:

Most notable would probably be Super Bowl III, Namath's guaranteed win over the Colts in the Orange Bowl.

I was 4 years old and my sister had just turned 7. We were going to go to the launch earlier that week but it had been canceled.

I don't remember much of it, just people looking up the sky. My sister remembers the trail of smoke.

People lined the tracks from New York to Washington DC. The normal 4 hour trip took 8 hours. Two people jumped the tracks and were killed in Elizabeth NJ by another train passing in the opposite direction. I remember seeing Ted Kennedy waving from the observation car platform.

...I wasn't quite ten, and Dad took me to The Lincoln memorial because he thought this would be something I'd want to see and always remember...and he was quite right, of course...I've deliberately avoided seeing the speech rerun on TV, because I don't want my memories of it watered down...but it was quite an experience...

Thousands of people marched through downtown and traffic was rerouted. I was stopped by National Guard troop and had to produce ID and explain what business I had in a building near the site of the WTO talks. I remember a couple of Starbucks stores were vandalized.

by Jack Ruby. He was shot right in front of the television cameras. Much of the country saw it.

Summer Jam at Watkins Glen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Jam_at_Watkins_Glen

The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen was a 1973 rock festival which once received the Guinness Book of World Records entry for "Largest audience at a pop festival." An estimated 600,000 rock fans came to the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway outside of Watkins Glen, New York on July 28, 1973, to see The Allman Brothers Band, The Band, and the Grateful Dead perform. It was the largest musical concert up to that time, with an audience of over 600,000, but this number has since been superseded.

more..

and all the little ones in between until September 1999.

I saw the Sally Ride shuttle launch when I was 11 and visiting Florida with my family.

It was a warm sunny Monday, after a weekend of troops on campus. I was a junior living in a dorm right next to the hill on which the shootings took place. I was out there - right there - when the Guardsmen started firing teargas at the students and the students threw the canisters back, forcing the troops to retreat a bit. When the shots were fired, I had ducked into my dorm's stairwell and was standing there behind glass on the 2nd floor of the stairwell.

Immediately afterward, I was out in the crowd where students and faculty encircled an ambulance, making room for the EMS people to load a stretcher. I have a couple photos I took of that scene.

An hour later I was in my dorm room packing up to leave campus as it was being shut down indefinitely by a 5:00 pm curfew. I was an out-of-state student but my sister had a car so we were unexpectedly heading home (to N.J.) right at 5:00. As we drove north toward Cleveland, it started to rain. (I remember that the upcoming Spring Fling event was to feature B.J. Thomas, whose hit song at the time was "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." Of course that was canceled.)

Back in NJ shortly afterward, I remember shopping with my brother and hearing the reaction of a shopkeeper when he heard I had just come from there. He said (and this was a typical comment at the time because of student protests against the Viet Nam war and, in this case, specifically Nixon's invasion of Cambodia) "They should've shot them all!"

It was quite a time, quite a historical moment to witness, and quite an event to have participated in. -- May 4, 1970. "Four Dead in Ohio."

I remember my mom telling me one of her neighbors ran down the street to tell her what had happened. She turned on the TV, and then she walked outside, and saw that same Y-shaped contrail. She took a picture of it that she still has, but it was always hard for me to look at. I was 9 years old at the time, and that was one of the first disasters I can clearly remember.

I was on the floor for all seven endorsing ballots that year, as a delegate. It may not have been hugely historic, but it was kind of cool to be a part of history

smoking and collapsing on 9/11. With my own eyes.

it; I was really little. My dad had asked Dr. King to be the keynote speaker/preacher at a national Lutheran youth convention in 1963, and had done some work with the SCLC, and he thought it would be a good thing to go to, good experience for me and my brother. My brother is ten years older than me; he remembers it well, and is a total Reich Wing Nut. I was hardly more than a baby, but MLK is one of my heroes, always has been. But he was a hero to my dad too, and Daddy was always my MAIN hero, so that figures :-)

In 2000, I was going to school in Volusia County, one of the four Florida counties where they conducted a hand recount of the votes. I remember driving by the Supervisor of Elections office every night and thinking about what a historic moment it was, and hoping against hope that the recount would turn the tide in Gore's favor.

the night of the 1996 Olympics Bombing.

We were standing about 100 yards away, at the front of a stage when the blast happened. I was in shack for a few seconds, then moved very quickly out of the area.

Sept?, 1963 - George Wallace shuts down my elementary school to prevent desegregation.
July, 1971 - Watch Apollo 15 launch.
April 1974 - super tornado outbreak - We watch as an F4 tornado passes less than a mile away.

living in Santa Cruz. I remember at the time actually being aware of the fact we were in the middle of something historic....especially in the days immediately afterward. It was an amazing time.

(ok, not really. but quite a lot of them!)

to the Lebanese civil war was the bombing of the offices of a fishing company who had been given the rights to all the fishing on the southern coast of Lebanon. There had been some skirmishes in the south but the fighting hadn't spread to Beirut or the north yet. That changed when those offices, located on Abdul Aziz Street about 1/2 way between the main downtown street and AUB's campus, were bombed.

My apartment was across the street, on the same floor.

My parents had gone to a dinner party and left my siblings and me home alone (age 12, 10, and 7 or so). My sister and I had stayed up past our bedtime reading and, quite literally, the bomb went off at the same moment that I turned off my light. I must have jumped a foot in the air. We ran into the living room and discovered a hole in the building across the street (and a broken pane of glass in our living room). Called my parents and they asked if we were OK (we said yes) and if we needed them to come home (we said no). Stood at the window and watched debris fall from the hole - at one point noting to myself "that one is going to hit the wire" at which point our lights went out. Luckily I remembered where there were some candles. When the power went out our neighbors (whose apartment was actually closer to the bomb site) came over and insisted that we come over to their apartment. We called my parents who got pretty pissed about it but the neighbors insisted (and weren't about to listen to some kids). They got my brother (who had slept through the whole thing despite our repeated attempts to wake him up - to his chagrin and irritation the next morning) and took us all over ... which prompted my parents to come home immediately.

The trouble just escalated from there. I remember standing on the roof of our apartment building at night watching the "fireworks" - mortar shells flying from the newly completed American chain hotel (I can't remember now if it was a Sheridan or a Hilton or something else) and the Phoenician hotel. Occasionally one would hit and burn that room but not spread - quite a statement about the construction quality. I also remember walking home through tunnels that connected AUB's campus to the AUB hospital (right next to the apartment building) and almost being killed by my mom when I decided I didn't want to and came home on city street the day there was a sniper scare on our street! I remember hearing gunfire at night (it was frustrating waking up in the middle of the night to gunfire and not being able to sleep or to turn on the light because of concerns that they would shoot at the lighted window). There were at least 2 other major bombings within about 2 blocks of our apartment over the next few months. We finally left in November of 1975 when AUB closed for "summer vacation" with the intention of opening up again in February (my dad and mom went back in February but we went to stay with my grandparents).

While I don't remember it, we were also evacuated during the 6 day war in 1967 (I was 3).

Living in Santa Monica during the 1971 Sylmar earthquake.

...woke me up out of bed on that terrible day.

I lived through Loma Prieta earthquake.

He collided with a car or cars early in the race and went up and over another car which sent him rolling down the front stretch -- parts flying up and into the stands. He ended up striking the outside wall hard causing fuel to spray into the stands and explode into a huge fireball right where we were sitting. I was nearly four and a half and I can still see it in my minds eye. The folks said I had some trouble sleeping for a couple of weeks afterward.



The second and third major newsworthy events took place when I was a freshman and a sophomore student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. An unflattering painting of then-Mayor Harlold Washington was displayed in the student gallery causing a huge uproar when a Chicago Aldermen, who took great offense to the likeness, removed it from the school and then ordered the police to arrest the painting titled "Mirth & Girth" by David Nelson in 1988.

Here is the Wikipedia entry on "Mirth & Girth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirth_&_Girth

I also attended the school during the ruckus in 1989 surrounding, my old friend, Dread Scott Tyler's, "What's the Proper Way to Display an American Flag?" gallery installation which resulted in heated protests led by veterans outside the school and bomb threats from the day it opened in February 1989, until it closed about a month later.

The following text is pulled from cbs2chicago.com website



more here... http://cbs2chicago.com/vault/Dread.Scott.Scott.2.338317...


I also rock-n-rolled through several major earthquakes in SoCal in the 1990's and witnessed the LA Riots firsthand while living in Long Beach, CA.