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I don't really remember ever watching TV when anything big happened. Often, I turned on the TV and that was my first look.
I remember watching Linda Ellerbee on Nickleodeon talking about the OKC bombing when I was in kindergarten. Kids in particular were really scared because of all of the children who were killed in the attack.
I remember getting home from school in 5th grade with my brother ready to duke it out about which afterschool cartoons we'd watch. We turned on the TV and were glued to the coverage of Columbine until our mom got home from work and made us turn it off.
9/11 happened when I was in 8th grade and our principal came on the intercom to let us know what had happened and ask our teachers to open up the phone lines for kids who wanted to call home. I had one teacher for two classes back to back (we had 4 a day) who turned on the TV. I was very angry and even walked out of class when my last teacher of the day tried to teach class as usual.
I had planned on going to the Boston Marathon in 2013 as I do every year, but I had a conference later on that week so I had to come into work (we were closed due to Patriot's Day). One of my student workers came to meet with me and we both suddenly began getting tons of phone calls and texts. When my mom called my work phone (which she never does - in fact, she didn't even have it and had to look it up), I knew something bad had happened. Normally, I would have been standing right where the first bomb exploded and had many friends caught in between the two though luckily no one was injured. Several days later, I was at the conference in Cambridge and noticed a ton of police cars going the opposite direction from where I was headed as I went home for the night. I got onto Twitter and saw that there had been a shooting at the building where the evening reception of my conference had been (the Stata Center at MIT). I spent the rest of the night on Twitter because I had a very bad feeling about what was happening - Cambridge isn't a city where police officers are shot in their squad car. It's not a city where *anyone* is shot. Twitter was a much more reliable source than even the local news, who weren't covering it. Because I was one of the few locals at the conference, people were tweeting me all night to get directions back to the hotel (which was behind a barricade) and get more context about where everything was happening.
When Darryl Kile died, I was expecting FOX to show the Cubs-Cardinals game. Anyway they started showing the Red Sox-Dodgers game which was the backup game because the Cubs game was being delayed, and that it might not be played. a few minutes later, they went to a split screen and then you saw Joe Girardi, the Cubs' catcher and player representative, stride out of the dugout, and then he said "I thank you for your patience. We regret to inform you because of a tragedy in the Cardinal family, that the commissioner has canceled the game today." Then it hit me right then, that Kile had died.
Ironically, I was watching a documentary on the Pearl Harbor attack when the 9/11 attack occurred. I don't remember if it was on The History Channel, Discovery, PBS, or what.
I wasn't actually "watching" TV at the time, but the TV was on at the bowling alley (yes, I bowled in a morning league) when the Challenger shuttle blew up. From what I remember, that was the first shuttle launch that wasn't being broadcast live. When it came on TV, everyone gathered around it at said the same thing; "That's the one that had that teacher on it!" .
Show? I was at Yes's and Asia's rehearsal in Fantasy Springs Casino, CA when the news of Michael Jackson's death spread. It was surreal. All the band members' phones buzzed with the texts, and finally Carl Palmer stood up and announced it to everyone in the pre-show venue.
I was a young child, but remember we were all watching the police transporting Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby on live television. I remember it was a Sunday.
There was little innocence in the childhood of the baby boomers, I don't think. First there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, then JFK was assassinated. Oswald was killed. Martin Luther King. Rioting in Chicago. Then RFK.
And so many graphic views of the war on the news. The Tate murders. Richard Speck killing eight nurses in Chicago. And one of Charles Percy's twin daughters was stabbed to death in her bed, in Kenilworth, a very wealthy suburb of Chicago.
I think we grew up a little faster than the kids of the '50's did.
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