Where were you when you found out about [X]?
The nine national news events for which I can recall precisely where I was when I found out about them. Excludes sporting events, elections, court decisions, and the passage of legislation, and must be a minimum of 5 years ago1:
1. Challenger explodes, January 28, 1986. I was getting off the school bus, and a friend who was home sick that day told us all at the bus stop.2
2. Hard-liner Russian coup, August 19, 1991. My dad informed me at the breakfast table minutes after I woke up.
3. Magic Johnson has AIDS, November 7, 1991. My dad picked me up from basketball practice at my junior high school, told me in the car.
4. Kurt Cobain is dead, April 5, 1994. Standing on the lacrosse practice field at my high school, a teammate told everyone.
5. OJ Bronco chase, June 17, 1994. I had just gotten my driver's license, was out driving aimlessly with friends, dad told me as we walked in the house.
6. OJ trial verdict, October 3, 1995. Sitting in high school calculus, principal announced it over the loudspeaker.
7. Chris Farley is dead, December 18, 1997. Parked at the McDonalds in Loudonville, NY, home from college on winter break. Heard it on the radio.
8. World Trade Center collapse, September 11, 2001. Sitting in my apartment in New Haven, CT, watching on TV.3
9. COVID lockdown begins, March 12, 2020. This is a bit different because you could have picked a lot of days or moments from that week. But the 12th was my birthday, and it was also the day my boss called a staff meeting and told us to leave the office and not come back. It has the same feel retrospectively as the other moments on the list.
A few notes:
So much of this is random. Why Farley's death but not Princess Diana's? Why do I have no place-specific memories of any big moments in the end of the Cold War besides the 1991 coup? Or any military events (Panama, Gulf War, Iraq, etc.)?
I am intrigued by how little there is in the smartphone-age. It's possible that finding out about things on a phone just don't hit as hard. It's also possible that having kids (for me, 2008 forward) dulls your ability for this sort of memorializing. I do wonder if this medium-based theory intensifies things for people even older than me; it's possible that the social spread of news intensified the time/place memories. If you were an adult prior to cable TV, or prior to any TV, maybe these events are more common.
I'm probably forgetting at least a few, but that raises the meta question of whether those should even count even if someone jogs my memory.
I think each of these memories is accurate with 90-95% probability. That is, mathematically I think it's more likely than not at least one of them is completely mistaken, the product of telling myself a story about something and that becoming the story.
The obvious one for me from less than five years ago is Biden deciding not to seek the presidency in 2024. I was sitting in traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike and heard it on the radio.↩
Many people my age recall watching Challenger explode live on TV in their school classroom. While some kids undoubtedly had this experience, most did not. It was not broadcast live on network TV outside of a few station in Florida, you had to have either CNN or satellite, which most schools in 1986 did not, including mine. An estimated 2.5 million children saw it live in school, which is about 5% of kids in K-12 in the U.S. in 1986. Many mistaken memories likely involve seeing network coverage later in the day, which was wall-to-wall.↩
I am not confident as to when I turned the TV on. My unreliable memory tells me that I put it on because the internet wasn't working on my laptop, but I cannot say for sure whether I saw the second plane hit live. My instinct is that I did but rationally that seems unlikely; the internet probably didn't crash until after the second plane hit. I know for sure that I was watching before either tower collapsed, and saw that live.↩