The Where Were You Meme

[heidi]

First, a personal addition: Where were you when Bill Clinton was nominated for President?

I was on my way into Vienna with my friend Stacey. We'd been staying in hostels and little hotels throughout the 2.5 weeks of our trip around Europe, but in Vienna we were going to stay at the Hilton, for $60/night/room (thanks to discounting points). We took a cab from the train station to the hotel, as it was not on any of the public transportation lines, and in the cab, the driver had on the BBC, and they were talking about Perot dropping out of the race and Stacey and I were giddy in our excitement. And after a dinner of chocolate at the Hotel Sacher, we came back to the hotel, where I spent the evening glued to CNN international's coverage of the Democratic Convention, where they showed the amazing A Man From Hope film and Clinton gave his acceptance speech and the guy who I'd seen four years before giving a never-ending keynote address at the Dukakis convention blew my mind. I was already agog over him, and after that night, in my comfy bed and watching the amazing show from across a continent and an ocean, I knew that he would change the world. Sigh. Love the Bill. Still.

2. When Mt. St. Helens blew (18/5/1980)
I remember when this happened, but I don't have any context for it.

3. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded (28/1/1986)
On the basketball courts, about 160 miles south of the thing, just lying in the gorgeous sun and waiting for the teacher. He came out, called us into his office, and we spent the hour listening to the radio instead. That night, I went to see Barishnakov dance for the first time; there was a moment of silence before he began and in the first piece, he fell. I don't think he ever does that; everyone was out of sorts that day.

4. When the 7.1 earthquake hit San Francisco (7/10/1989)
I'd just returned from Fall Break in Miami; my ex boyfriend was across the street watching the game, but he ended up coming over to watch the news with me. I remember those pictures of the collapsed freeway. So scary.

5. When the Berlin Wall fell (7/11/1989)
Sophmore year of college. My dad and I nearly hopped a plane to Berlin, to be there for it. It was amazing to watch all of it, and I still have a bunch of Newsweeks and newspapers from that wonderful month. And two and a half years later, I got to go to Berlin and Prague and Budapest and walk around East Berlin and chip off my own piece of the wall, which I still have tucked into my filofax from that summer.

6. When the Gulf War began (16/1/1991)
I have it on videotape; I found it last week. When they didn't start on my birthday (the 15th, when it was supposed to start) I thought maybe it wouldn't happen, and then, a few hours later, it did.

7. When OJ Simpson was chased in his White Bronco (17/6/1994)
In a restaurant in DC. Not sure which one. Then I was on the phone with some friends in LA for a few hours, and people were making bets on whether he'd kill himself.

8. When the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed (19/4/1995)
I was en route to NYC, so I didn't know about it until I got to Aaron's apartment. I think it was still during Passover that year, because I remember going to the Paramount for dinner that night and talking about nothing else. When WACO had happened, two years before, I was in DC, driving to the FCC to drop off a summer job application.

9. When Princess Di was killed (31/8/1997)
When I first heard about it, she was still alive. Aaron and I had been at Mesa Grill for dinner, and were coming home to grab books to take up to DTUT's, but we never made it. I flipped on the tv for one second while Aaron changed into jeans, and I saw them talking about the accident on CNN. As I learned later, she died about 15 minutes after I started watching, but I think it was pushing 30 minutes before they announced it. I think I stayed up until 3am watching; I felt so bad for those boys.

10. When the shooting at Columbine occured (25/05/1999)
I was very pregnant, at work (so I assume I was working late) and tuned into the CNN website to keep my eye on what was happening. So sad. Again, I think I started watching when the boys were still alive, and we didn't know much of anything that was going on inside, especially not in the library.

11. When Bush was first announced President (7/11/2000)
Watching CNN, and occasionally posting over the course of the evening to HPfGU-OTChatter. Le sigh. The next day, I got a call from my grandmother; one of her friends had screwed up the ballot. We don't talk to that woman any more (although for other reasons).

12. When the 6.8 earthquake hit Nisqually, WA (28/2/2001)
What was this?

13. I've replaced the Galvaston tropical storm with Hurricaine Andrew.
I was in DC, just starting at law school, and I didn't know where my parents were. They said they were going to drive up to Orlando, but there was traffic and nobody knew how long it was going to take. As it was, they made it, my dad played golf the next morning (before we knew how badly south Miami was damaged) and they drove home to find trees and powerlines down all over the Beach. Our house only lost some rooftiles and a bunch of plants; thanks to the window barriers, everything else survived. My friends in DC took me to see the second Jack Ryan movie - the one where Harrison Ford goes after the terrorists in a hurricaine off the northeast coast. I walked out of hte theater and threw up, purely out of nerves for my family, my friends and my home.

14. When terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center (11/9/2001)
I got a post on my Blackberry about it, and went into the head of my department's office to watch it on TV. INitially, I thought it was like the small plane that had hit the Empire State Building fifty years before. When the first building collapsed, I was in an elevator, going to a meeting on a different floor in my (60 story) office building. After the second one colapsed, I sent my mom to get Harry from school (it was his second week) and then asked her to come get me - I didn't have a car that day because someone had broken the window, and while I wated at the base of this enormous building, still not knowing if this was going to happen in every major city, I was terrified. I was also Blackberrying back & forth with my friend Sue, who had been doing electioneering at the WTC, and who texted us as she fled the destruction. You can read more here and here.

15. When Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas. (1/2/2003)
On Lj, of course.

Comments

[borgin.livejournal.com]

I only remember the last two. I was in school walking out to a teacher's car for her when Bush was officially announced president, though, and I moved to Berlin two months after the wall went down. And I'm not old enough to experience Mt. Saint Helens or the Challenger.

[wcspegasus.livejournal.com]

I remember those pictures of the collapsed freeway. So scary.

As I said in my LJ, these images still haunt me. Although I remember the movie images (from a TV movie that was made like a year later or something), not the actual news footage. Although I remember news footage and images of other things, the freeway from the movie has stuck with me. I remember it every time I have to take the exits around Philly and Harrisburg which are similar in design (with the stacked lanes).

[casira.livejournal.com]

12. When the 6.8 earthquake hit Nisqually, WA (28/2/2001)
What was this?

Everyone remembers San Francisco and Los Angeles; no one ever notices when it's up the coast.... *wry smile*

It might have set off a few more bells if they'd said Seattle instead of Nisqually. The latter name is accurate, but a bit obscure unless you live here. :) This was the big earthquake the day after the Mardi Gras riots. The Seattle P-I estimated that it caused over $2 billion in damage, although only one fatality was credited to it (a quake-related heart attack).

Since this will actually mean something to people outside the city, here's what happened to Starbucks' headquarters (http://a.abcnews.com/media/US/images/ap_quake_seattle_010301_w.jpg). ;) And here's a whole bunch of photos from FEMA. (http://166.112.200.141/media/hpd1361_11.htm) To give you an idea of what I was going through that day? Take a look at the second photo from the bottom. The white building in the background is where I work. We rode it out okay, but Pioneer Square around us got hit really hard.

I might add that if you look up articles, Boeing claimed immediately after the fact that there was no serious damage to their facilities, but this is total bullshit. Several of their buildings were heavily damaged, to the point where Dad (who worked there at the time; he's since retired) was told a couple of them wouldn't survive another one. He's shown me pictures from inside the plant he was in. It's terrifying.

Of course, to add insult to injury, this was the same year Boeing's corporate overlords decided to bug out and move to Chicago. And after 9/11, Boeing went and laid off 30,000 people. This on top of the dot.com bust and everything else....

Short form: 2001 in Seattle was absolutely shitty. *wry smile*

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

Clever idea to substitute Clinton's nomination, and to mention Waco. Actually, for me, the jury return on OJ was as big as the white Bronco chase, so that could be added to the list.

I was surprised the Reagan shooting didn't make this list - that was 1981? I was in a grade school play rehearsal, and a teacher burst in just completely freaked out and I actually got a little dizzy from a burst of adrenaline. I remember thinking "oh, god, it's our JFK," which is quite morbid in its own way.

This is a very cool little meme. Very US-centric - I'd love to see one put together for the UK.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

The ones that I remember....

2. I was 5, and I live in Washington, so what I remember most is that I couldn't go outside and play in my sandbox because it was full of ash. My tricycle was covered with the stuff too, there was ash everywhere. I was too little to have a context for "volcano" but I was annoyed that I couldn't go out and play.

3. There was a windstorm the night before that dropped a tree in our yard. It squished the roof of my mother's van. My grandpa had to come to pick me up and take me to school and we heard about the explosion on the radio on the way.

4. English class.

5. I was a sophomore in high school, or going to be. Even though I have pictures of this on my wall I didn't really see it at the time, I didn't realise the impact until the year after when I met an exchange student from Germany. Since then it's come to be a big event in my life, but oddly enough, I wasn't actually there for it.

9. Home alone, playing on a PernMOO because my family'd gone on vacation but I had to work.

12. At home in Pullman in bed. My mother sent me an email to say there'd been an earthquake and everybody was fine. She was in the shower when it hit and my dad was on the phone. The state capitol building, where he works (and where I used to) cracked and had to be closed for quite a long time.

14. Pullman. My mother'd come to visit my sister and me, which is the only reason the news was on at that hour of the morning. I was washing my face and heard something come from the TV about "evacuating lower Manhattan" and thought shit, that sounds bad, and went to watch the TV as they figured out what had happened.

15. On LJ, too.