Where were you?

December 8, 1980:  John Lennon is shot...honesty I don't remember.  I was very young at the time.  In fact I don't think I knew who the Beatles were until I got to Junior High in the mid-80's.

March 30, 1981:  Ronald Reagan is shot...I remember hearing that someone had shot the president and thinking who would do such a thing.  I was relieved to hear Reagan recovered.

January, 1986:  The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes:  I was home from school on a snow day.  Channel 5 was doing weather on their local news magazine show, Talk of the Town.  Suddenly they cut to CBS news where it said that something was wrong with the Space Shuttle.  Then they showed video of it.  It lasted all afternoon.  I remember Dan Rather showing a model of the space shuttle about a dozen times throughout and explaining each little part in order to take up time.  This was because NASA wasn't releasing any details until a long time after the accident.

1989:  Berlin Wall falls  I don't specifically remember.  I remember turning on the TV and seeing Tom Brokaw live from the Berlin Wall with people all over it.  It was amazing:  The symbolic fall of Communism.

August 1990:  Iraq invades Kuwait  I had gone to play miniature golf with some friends and came back and found that Iraq had invaded Kuwait.  Not a big deal then, but it really grew out of control since then.  Afterwards I was away at high school band camp when the military buildup started happening.

January 17, 1991:  The Gulf War begins  It was a Wednesday night.  My family was getting ready for church.  Then the newsmen broke in and said the air war against Iraq had started.  We still went to church.  I remember some prayers being offered for our soldiers.  The next day I remember watching the Gulf War in biology class in High School on the Channel One TV's.

April, 1993:  Branch Davidian burn their compound in Waco, TX.  I had come back from lunch in my high school Sociology class to find that the Davidians had burned down their compound.  We watched CNN on the Channel 1 TV's.

August 1993:  I get my first e-mail address.  (Although not an extraordinary historical event...it is a timely personal event...kinda like the first time you got cable TV).  It happened while I was at college.  At first all I did was e-mail.  It wasn't until the summer of 1994 that I started surfing the Web (and that was using Lynx - a text only browser).  In 1995, my school gets Netscape...only on the Macs at first then on the PC's.  In January 1997, I post my first webpage on the web.

June, 1994:  Nichole Brown and Ronald Goldman are found murdered.  I was away at church camp and without the "luxury" of having TV's, newspapers and radios.  Someone who hadn't been at camp for the past few days came and said that things were looking bad for OJ.  I remember not thinking he was guilty at first.  But when the evidence came out, I knew for sure that he did it.
 

1995:  OJ Simpson is found not guilty in the criminal trial  I was in college's daily chapel service at the time.  I thought about skipping it to watch the verdict, but decided against it.  There were quite a few people who skipped my school's manditory chapel service that day.  I remember rushing into a vacant classroom and turning on the TV to find out the verdict.  I was disappointed too.  During the next class period (which was some type of Political Science class) we talked about the OJ trial the entire time.

April, 1995:  Tim McVey blows up the Alfred P. Morrow Federal Building in Oklahoma City  I had come into my Bible class at college and found out that there had been a building collapse in Oklahoma City.  Someone said that we should pray for the children who were in the daycare center at the time, which we did.

Summer, 1996:  The Olympic Torch comes through your hometown on its way to Atlanta - I was able to see the torch twice when it came through Nashville, TN. The first time was on Lebanon Road in Hermitage.  Billy Ray Cyrus was carrying it.  After a celebration of sorts at the Parthenon, the torch stayed overnight in Nashville.  The next day I saw in Brentwood on Franklin Road.

1997:  Tim McVey is found guilty of blowing up the Morrow Federal Building in Oklahoma City I happened to be working at the computer lab during the summer.  I was surfing the net when I saw on CNN's website that they were planning to announce the verdit of Tim McVey.  I told some of the staff at the computer center.  We sat around and watched it on TV.

Aug. 31, 1997:  Death of Princess Diana - I had heard earlier that evening that Princess Diana had been in a car accident.  After Saturday Night went off, I was up watching MSNBC when they announced she had died.  I couldn't believe it.