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I found out I was born the year the greatest number of new polio cases were reported. One of my friends in Jr. High was a survivor, and she still had mobility and speech problems. I also remember the first vaccinations which were free and the LONG lines waiting to get their shot. I really didn't understand at the time.
Then later I learned about MacCarthy and the hunt for reds and all... didn't know about that either. Its strange what you miss when your a little kid.
As a child in the early 60s (born in 1955, but I do not recall any of that decade) I had a friend that survived polio. I recall that he walked with very marked limp (sorta like Grandpa Walter Brennen in Real McCoys).
One early television ad I recall from those early days: warning kids to beware of blasting caps! Apparently a real problem, although I was never able to find one (I looked and looked!).
9/11/2001. I remember being in my 6th grade Communication Arts class that morning when the teacher turned on the TV and the whole class watched the news footage. I also remember going to visit one of my older sisters w/ my mother after school that day. Let's just say that my sister didn't have a happy 28th birthday. I was 12yo and will never forget that day. It was awful.
When I was six, I was so oblivious that I didn't even know that JFK had been assassinated. However, the day of the funeral, I came home either from playing outside or from school, I can't remember which, and saw my mom crying while she watched it on television. I can still see the images from it in my mind (in black and white, of course). My mom explained to me what had happened, but I think I was more nonplussed than anything else. But it definitely left an impression of, "this is huge."
After that, it would be the various Gemini launches. I became pretty obsessed by what was going on with the space program during my elementary school years. Bobby Kennedy's assassination pretty much killed the buzz from that, though. This country seemed to be making so much great progress and then that happened.
So how about you?
I was oblivious to such things as a child. I do recall the whole JFK event, but it did not make much of an impression on me at the time.
Many years later - I think I might have been an adult at the time, I read a book about Andersonville, which was a POW camp during the War of Northern Aggression (Civil War), and it really touched me. I even wrote a song about it.
Remember JFK's assassination, although I didn't really understand what was happening. I remember my mother watching the funeral and crying and saying to her, "Why are YOU crying? Did you know him?" Even at the age of five I was already on to my mother's trick of using tears as a manipulation tactic, hehehehe.
I think what impressed me more as a child, though, was my mother telling me that China had the capability to shoot a bomb over the ocean and hit us. I had trouble sleeping for years over that idea.
The Suez Crisis. I was about seven years old and everyone seemed quite excited about it. Didn't know why then, and (deeply ashamed to admit) don't know why now...
A little off topic, but it got me thinking…I was 13 and way more politically/globally aware when it happened, but I have absolutely NO memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis!
I suspect living, even for a few days, with the near certainty that I and everyone I knew and loved was actually, really, truly going to be burned to a crisp was too damned traumatic to process.
A little off topic, but it got me thinking…I was 13 and way more politically/globally aware when it happened, but I have absolutely NO memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis!
Be glad; be very glad! I had forgotten this. I was a junior in high school. We sat in our classrooms waiting for the moment of confrontation between the Russian ships and the US Navy destroyers, and for word that ICBMs were inbound. As I sat there, I remember thinking that the entire "Duck and Cover" scenario seemed totally inadequate.
It sounds strange now, but as a young child the events of the late Cold War-period in the early 80s really made a mark on me as a youngster. I was born in 1979 and was a pretty precocious kid--learned to read at around age 4, and picked up on things in the news but couldn't really understand what they meant. I remember flying(for the first time) to Anaheim when I was about 4 to go to Disneyland right after the Soviets shot down the Korean Airlines flight that went off course over Sakhalin Island. I think I saw it on the news and my dad made a remark that my toy airplane was a 747 just like the flight that went down. Apparently I had to be reassured by my mom that our flight went no where near Russian airspace.
I guess anyone younger than my immediate age group is probably too young to remember the Cold War paranoia of the 80s and the fears of nuclear war that accompanied the era. The 80s wasn't all just "We Are The World" and Cabbage Patch dolls... I remember talking with one older neighborhood kid who said that nuclear war with the Soviets would probably eventually happen. There was also a whole genre of films in this period that either dealt with: A) Soviet invasions of the United States(like Red Dawn) or B) the aftermath of a nuclear war(the Day After--and even post-apocalyptic sci-fi like Mad Max). As an adult they seem somewhat silly, but as a little kid at the time they seemed like realistic scenarios.
I remember feeling almost relieved as a kid when glasnost started to take hold in the later 80s and later the Eastern Bloc countries fell. My mother's family was Polish-American, so the solidarity movement and Lech Walesea were always sources of pride...I remember when the Berlin Wall fell too as a big event--and later on a Christmas vacation in 1989 watching the Romanians depose Ceauşescu.
Weirdly enough, the Challenger exploding in 1986 didn't have that big of an impact on me as a kid...I remember feeling sad a little, but even as a kid I felt that in perspective it wasn't going to effect us that much.
The first historical event that really mattered to me was when my dad took me out in the back yard in October 1957 and pointed out the first satellite, Sputnik I. Realizing the the USSR was ahead of us sent a chill down my spine.
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