Reply #36: Uh, how could you be born before JFK was shot but be only 1 when RFK was shot??? [View All]

[HamdenRice]

I know what you meant. I'm being a nit picking asshole.

Anyhoo, OK:

JFK -- I was about 3, but remember the day very clearly. My great aunt, who was some kind of live in nursing assistant on Long Island always spent the weekend with us in Queens, and she always arrived on Friday afternoon. I remember running down the driveway to tell Aunt Ella that President Kennedy has been shot.

MLK -- It was a big coincidence that I had just really come to understand who he was. My parents had purchased an LP, "March on Washington" which was a recording of all the speeches that day, including the "I Have a Dream" speech, and would play it frequently. I had just finished a book report on a book -- I remember the title to this day -- "Martin Luther King: Peaceful Warrior." I was doing my homework in my bedroom when I heard about it on the evening news. I went out to walk my dog and actually expected riots to begin any minute.

RFK -- I don't remember.

Reagan shot -- I was a recent college grad working on Wall Street as a paralegal. All of us paralegals in the "paralegal department" crowded around a tv and watched the coverage. There was one right wing young woman from the south transplanted to NYC, who had been bragging about how great it was that the Repugs had taken over, and she was really shaken by the assassination attempt. Just a few weeks later, the same scenario played out in the office when the Pope was shot.

Challenger -- I was in law school. Launches were a big deal back then and we crowded around in a tiny student lounge to watch it and saw the disaster in real time.

9/11 -- Ugggh. I was in lower Manhattan. I had come into Manhattan by train right under the towers early that morning and was preparing in my office by about 7:30. I always listened to the radio early in the morning while I worked. My office faced West, just a block east of Avenue of the Americas. I was startled to hear a plane screeching low over the building and then heard a loud explosion. My first reaction was that a military jet had just done a bombing run over the city. Then the radio news said that a plane had hit the WTC. I went down to the street and watched the north tower burning. A homeless type guy standing next to me said he saw it and that the plane was so low he thought it was going to hit my building. I went back upstairs and heard about the second plane on the radio, and a few others had arrived at the office and we discussed how this was obviously terrorism. I went downstairs again and watched, went back upstairs and friends and family started calling me telling me to get out of Manhattan. After the towers collapsed, the thing that I remember most clearly is the size of the smoke plume. The only thing I had ever seen comparable was the smoke plume coming out of the volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii.

I walked east to First Ave, and then downtown to get to Brooklyn. As I started to cross the Williamsburg Bridge with thousands of others, the police suddenly stopped us and said that the bridge was wired with explosives and had to be closed. I walked to the Manhattan Bridge and saw thousands and thousands of people covered in white dust walking up town, as I walked downtown. As I crossed the bridge with thousands of others, we heard a plane screeching above us and everyone groaned because there were rumors that planes were crashing into bridges, but someone identified it as a military jet protecting us.

At the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, the nurses, doctors and staff of Long Island College Hospital (right there) were handing out bottled water and helping however they could. I must have stopped at three or four bars to down beers and listen to the tv on the way home. A lot of people were getting blasted to calm their nerves and were all saying this is pearl harbor, this is world war III.

One really creepy aspect was that the next day the military was all over, even way out in Brooklyn, and we had soldiers on our subways for about a year.