TomW said:
Being a post war baby I heard this 1000 times.
What were you doing when you heard the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor?
It was popular at parties and I don't remember ever hearing anybody that couldn't answer the question.
I was born just under a year AFTER Pearl Harbor (12/03/1942). At the time of Pearl Harbor, my dad was a French instructor at West Point and they were having a late lunch when a friend called to tell them.
Ok What were you doing when you heard.....
Kennedy was shot
I was on my way to a class at the American University in Washington, DC, when someone stuck his head out of awindow and screamed out the the President had been shot. At first, nobody believed it and then it was all too true.
We had watched the landing on TV at our apartment with a friend only to have a summer thunderstorm knock out the power in our part of McLean, VA, not too long before the walk was scheduled. We called my parents who lived in another part and they said that they still had power and that we were more than welcome to come up, friend and all. So we did and I was dumbfounded by the sight, having grown up watching s-f shows on TV and reading s-f. Now I was seeing it for real. My mother apologised to me for having made fun of my addiction to s-f, saying that she had never believed it possible.
The space shuttle exploded
A friend and I had gone out to lunch and we came back to work to hear the place buzzing with the news.
I had gotten to work at about 0845 that morning and all of a sudden, I heard this rolling explosion of cries and calls of disbelief coming down the hall from the offices of the SES types who run my Division and have TVs or radios in their offices. I ran down to my boss' office to listen to her radio and heard the news. I also heard that there was a 4th plane that they believed was headed for DC and that nobody knew where it was. We are about 5 blocks from the Capitol Building and they wanted us out of there, PRONTO. So we left and I started walking down toward Constitution Avenue since they had closed the METRO subway system. As I limped along on my cane, my boss caught up with me and walked with me. It occurred to me later that she was making certain that I was OK. As we passed the Archives/Navy Memorial METRO station, we gotr word that they ahd re-opened the METRO, so we both headed down to the trains. It took me 4+ hours to make a trip that usually takes about 30-45 minutes in rush hour, getting to the Ballston station in Arlington in the afternoon. It took my wife about 1 1/2 hours to drive to the station from our daughter's school, which had also closed and which was about 3/4 mile away. it then took us another 1-1 1/2 hours to drive the 1 1/2 miles to our house. Please remember that the Pentagon is in Arlington County and that the Arlington police and fire were the first responders, so the traffic elsewhere was just totally screwed since Arlington is a very small and densly packed place through which all of the commuters from Virginia must drive to get to or from work.
