Where were you when .....

I'm still having some problems with my attitude today, so the rest of the stories about my Navy career are just gonna have to wait.  Today is election day (though I won't publish this until tomorrow).  It isn't a big election year.  We'll just be voting on some representatives to Congress, our sheriff, local school boards and stuff like that.  I applied for an absentee ballot so Bud wouldn't have to come all the way home to drag me back out.  The ballot never came in the mail, so he'll pick me up after work and cart me off to our polling place so we can vote.  I insist on exercising my right to vote.  I may not have children in school, but I care a great deal about education.  If I'm gonna be critical of the government, I at least better have done something to try to make it more suited.  When I was 18, the voting age was 21.  When I was 21, they changed the voting age to 18.  I have voted in almost every election since I became eligible.  In 1972 Richard Nixon was running against George McGovern.  I was furious with Nixon (the incumbent) because of his public stance on abortion, but I could not in good conscience vote for McGovern.  So I voted for every other position on the ballot except the President.  Nixon won, of course, but I felt good about not giving him my vote.  For the record, Richard M. Nixon signed my discharge papers from the U. S. Navy.


But this post isn't about election day or elections or anything even close.  It's about those moments in time that are forever rooted in your memory -- those flashes where you remember exactly where you were, what you were doing, and with whom when the event occurred.  For me, some of those moments of crystal clarity are political hot spots.


The first time I remember being overwhelmed by a news story was in October of 1962.  I was a freshman in high school and I was in my second period study hall.  The teacher who was the monitor for study hall was Mr. Joseph Mahal, (but we all called him Taj, which he hated) who taught history.  The event was the Cuban Missile Crisis and it was the first time I remember being truly frightened of the world in which we lived.  Several of us were discussing the standoff with the Russians, whether this was the end of the Cold War and the beginning of something much worse, and what this would mean as far as increasing the draft of young men into the military.  Little did we know the war that would effect us most brutally had been seething for years in a little county none of us knew in southeast Asia.  But, instead of Mr. Mahal making us be quiet as he had done every other day of study hall so far that year, he came and sat down with our group and discussed the impact of the news with us as if we were contemporaries.  Fortunately, an agreement was signed within a few weeks and the immediate crisis was ended.


My next moment of stark reality was 0n November 22, 1963.  I was in my sophomore English class.  My instructor was Mrs. Ruth Tichner.  She had been a teacher at the high school since before the Stone Age, but she was an excellent teacher and always had command of her classroom.  For reasons I will never understand, the administrators in our high school had been listening to the news from Dallas for quite some time without letting anyone in the school know what was happening.  With perfect timing, they decided to air the radio broadcast over the school's public address system at exactly the moment Walter Cronkite said "President Kennedy died at 1:00 PM Central Standard Time".   We had no information prior to this that the President had been shot.  We had no idea what was going on.  We were dumbfounded.  Mrs. Tichner looked up at the PA speaker, burst into tears and raced out of the classroom.  The rest of us just sat there and listened to the rest of the broadcast, unable to assimilate the words we were hearing.  I don't remember anything that happened the rest of that day.   There was more carnage to come:  Jack Ruby would shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald two days later,  on April 4, 1968 James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King, Jr., and on June 5, 1968 Sirhan Sirhan would executed Bobby Kennedy.  Yet, the assassination of President Kennedy is the moment burned into my brain.  I hope it isn't a sign you become inured to bloodshed and mayhem.


In January of 1964 I was on a date with a young man named Butch Barabbas.   It was the only date I ever had with him and I'm sure the only reason I remember his name is because of what happened.  We were in his car, sitting at a stoplight in the little town in New Jersey where we both lived.  The radio was on (WABC in New York played rock 'n roll then) and a song came on I had not heard before by a group I didn't know.  It was an epiphany.  The group was The Beatles and the song was I Want to Hold Your Hand.  I turned up the volume, and before the song had ended I was a lifelong Beatles fan.  It was clear to me in the first notes of the song these guys were going to change the way music was made.  


On August 4, 1964 (my 16th birthday) President Lyndon B. Johnson took to the airwaves with a speech in response to the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Viet Nam.  I watched that speech on my brother's television while I was living with him and his family in Brooklyn.  There was an ever increasing fear in the pit of my stomach and a growing dread of things to come.  In my mind this was the beginning of the U. S. war against the north Vietnamese.  I can still close my eyes and see LBJ on the tube.  If only we could have known how bad it would become before it was finally abandoned.


Around 6:30 PM on the evening of August 16, 1977 I was working late at my job at the Daneker Clock Company in Fallston, Maryland.  The only other person there was the president, Frank Simms. It was not unusual for us to work late; the company was in Chapter 11 bankrupcty and we were working desperately to save it.   Frank walked out of his office and said "I just heard on the radio Elvis Presley is dead."  Now, I have no idea why that moment remains anchored in my memory banks.  I liked Elvis, but I wasn't one of the screaming fans.  I've never been a screaming fan about any entertainer.  I saw Elvis when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show.  I had even gone to see him in concert when I lived in Atlanta.  But he really didn't have any special place in my heart, so I have no idea why the news of his death effected me so strongly.  But I can replay the entire scenario in my mind just as if it happened yesterday.   I do not remember where I was or what I was doing when John Lennon was killed, yet I was more a fan of his than I was of Elvis.


Another thing I remember being imprinted on my brain cells for all eternity is the space shuttle Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986.  I had gone to have lunch with Bud at his place of employment.  I walked into his office and sat down, but there was no one else there.  The radio was on and I was just waiting for Bud to break for lunch and come back to his office when the announcement was made that the shuttle had exploded.  Bud came into his office shortly thereafter, but I was so stunned and horrified, I was not able to tell him what had occurred.  Of course, it took only a few seconds of listening before he too knew of the tragedy.  There have been more disasters since, but it seems the first one is always the one that sticks with you.


And finally (please God), where were you when the first airplane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, just before 9:00 AM?  I believe for a brief second time stood still, the earth shifted on its axis, and our world will never be the same.