DBRP: What is the Earliest Historical Event You Remember?

I was only 5 but I still remember getting pulled out of school and watching TV with my parents on 9/11. My mom actually saw the tower go down.
 
OOC: No Nukes....

IC:

For me it would have to be either the assassination of President Wellstone in 1996, and ofcourse 9/11. Seeing the President shot on live TV was enough, but damn, a plane crashing into the Capitol building is tough on a kid. The 90's were a tough time for America..

My apologies, I didn't read the intro carefully....

With that in mind, let me offer this alternative:

I remember sleeping in my family's shelter during the Cuba war, with the TV running 24 hour coverage of the fighting. The news that the airstrikes (and those commando raids that we didn't find out about till years later) took out the Russian missiles was too much for a 4 year old to understand, but I remember seeing my parents crying with joy at the news that the world wasn't going to end...
 
I'm twenty next month, so I guess I would have been about four or five, but I remember my dad looking really, really white faced during the Hong Kong Blockade. For you Americans it might not have felt like a big deal, but when we saw the Chinese ships on our TV screens and those angry proclamations from President Li... it was the closest we came to our own Cuba War, no matter how unlikely it seems that any missiles would have landed on Britain.

Years later I asked my dad why he looked so stressed and different during that time. He told me it wasn't so much the fear - everyone felt that - it was made worse by his frustration that more hadn't been done to avoid it. 'I don't say this very often at all,' he said, 'but Thatcher was right - right up until she left Number 10 in '84 she was saying we needed to talk to the Chinese about arranging a handover.'

Makes you think, doesn't it? No-one was hurt in the end (apart from those poor sailors washed overboard during the brief storm) and we handed it all over like cowering dogs (as the Chinese no doubt put it) in '97 anyway. I might go to one of those counterfactual websites and ask what the effects of a Thatcher 1984 victory would have been, particularly on Hong Kong.
 
Lots of kids here! Not a bad thing, of course:). My first was Ford losing to Carter. Puts me right in the middle I suppose.
 
1980 is where it actually starts for me. (Sorta)

I remember the Enterprise launch. That was funny, actually. By then, I was closer to four being October, and my dad actually woke me up to see it. So there I am, standing in the family room, half asleep, with my dad, at like five o'clock in the morning, and Cronkite's talking about a bunch of things I didn't understand or even remember but then the countdown started and when the engines lit on the stack, it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. Wasn't until I was older that I realized what "that Sky Lab thing" was they kept talking about. I remember asking my dad "Where are the astronauts going?" and my dad saying "Sky Lab." I asked "What's that?" and my dad said "It's the space station." to which I replied "What's that?"

My father and I still get a kick out of that story.:)


OOC:

Real life, the first things I remember (sorta) were the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the assassination attempt on Reagan and the Columbia launch, although I was only three (for Iran) and had just turned four when Reagan was shot and Columbia went up.

The attempt on Reagan was actually pretty scary, from what I remember, because, I'm sitting in my family room, playing in front of the TV and my mom was watching "her stories" and folding the laundry and then, all of a sudden, Dan Rather's on TV saying the President's been shot and my mom getting this really scared look on her face and saying, very quietly, "Oh God, please, not again. Not again."

Hey, I'd just turned four. Mom looked scared. What the hell do I know what's going on? (At that time, turns out, nobody really did, but for a small child, it was very scary.)

And the Enterprise bit above is based the true story about where I was when Columbia launched, which really is the first significant historical event I remember in more than the abstract. My dad really did wake me up (he tried to get the whole house up but I was the only one who did) and I did watch the launch with him.
 
I was a newborn child when my mother witnessed at French TV the summit between President Dukakis and Saddam Hussein to let the latter annex Kuwait.
 
I remember when I was 6 watching the NBA Finals with my family when it was interrupted by the OJ Simpson car chase. The traumatic ending to that saga still makes me shake my head.
 
Like most people my, age, it would have to be the dramatic rescue of the Challenger crew, thought doomed by the extensive damage to their heat shield during liftoff until the heroically rushed Colombia mission and that unforgettable shuttle-to-shuttle spacewalk.
I totally agree. Christa McAuliffe's broadcast after the rescue was amazing. I still get a bit teary-eyed thinking of it.
I do remember the US invasion of Panama-the first death announced was a Marine from my hometown. Then, the US went into the Vatican Embassy after Noriega...
 

loughery111

Banned
I think the first major event I remember was in 1996 when King Fahd died and Saudi Arabia fell to extremists. I remember seeing a shot on TV of the East Arabian fields burning as the 2nd Marine Division moved inland to try to hold them. That was a few months before we moved into an apartment downtown and Dad got a new job working for Exxon designing gas wells in Pennsylvania. In hindsight, thank God he did... we had enough money to make it through the New Depression. And we even got to move back out of the city when he got one of the new fuel cell cars and the economy started moving again a few years back!
 
I still can remember the images of the Second Russsian Civil War, fought between Pro Communist, Pro Democracy, and the Rebels in Europe and Central Asia. I still remember Moscow in flames after the Battle of Moscow which was won by Pro Democracy Forces. Those poor people :(
 
OOC: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.

IC: JK ...

My First Memory, Would have to be The Rather Anti-Climactic Death of President Reagan ...

It was Touted as a Fairly Routine Surgery to Remove Cancerous Polyps from his Colon, Routine that is if he'd Managed to Wake up from The Anesthesia; I Remember Thinking just How Presidential George H. W. Bush Seemed on Taking Power that Day, Boy was I EVER Wrong!

:eek:
 
My first memory, at least the first one that I can remember really vividly, was the West German tanks blasting down the Berlin Wall. For whatever reason, I didn't remember the invasion of East Germany following Chairman Honecker's assassination and the establishment of martial law, but the flying chunks of concrete bouncing off buildings (and even off that one unlucky camera) stuck with me.
 
Yom Kippur War. Didn't understand it at the time, was only 6 years old, but for years afterward the Religious Right was saying the End Times were at hand, because Israel had been destroyed, meaning we were somewhere in the middle of Revelations instead of at the beginning. Only thing was, they couldn't figure out who the Antichrist was - some said Nixon, some said Brezhnev, some said John Lennon... you could make a case for just about anybody in those days.

The most impressive thing to me was how the RR got tied up in fits around 1980, which was their last deadline for God to appear, and He hasn't shown up yet. No one's given them the time of day since. Pity, we could use some of that old time religion these days...

(OOC: I'm sure if no one put much stock in the apocalyptic timelines usually derived from Revelations, the RR would actually find something else to market itself with...)

EJH
 
Uh, we can post ATL stuff, too, right?

Here's one for you guys :)

I can kinda remember when that truck bomb went off in downtown Dallas in January 1997. Took out the whole LBJ Expressway and killed about 100 people.

I also remember the cruise missile that dropped on Kansas City in April, and the Emergency Broadcast System telling us that President Clinton was leaving the White House, and about an hour later WBAP, KRLD, and several other stations telling us that the Second Civil War had just begun.

Those were scary times.......my dad ended up dying during the Y2K massacre in New York after the militia group that he joined betrayed him. Really sad, because, even though I would come to vehemently disagree with his decision years later, he really believed in these guys' dogma.

When it was all over by 2003................we were some of the lucky ones. My brother J.D.{a pseudonym}was born in June '98 so he wouldn't remember much. But I sure did; the anthrax attacks on Tucson and Buffalo, the Aryan Nations shooting up Atlanta's Bankhead neighborhood, the JDL and Hamas suicide bombing attacks in Detroit, and the nuclear weapons scare in November 2001, just shortly before the violent implosions of Russia and China.{Thankfully, nothing happened, but we came close}. And so much more.

America is still picking up the pieces to this day, but with Rosa Gonzales and Tim Canale in office until 2012............I guess it ain't so bad after all :cool:.

Pretty interesting, huh? I figured since some people had already posted ATL stuff, why not do one myself? :D
 
I remember the Cubs winning the world series in 2008. Before that everything is a blue blur...

You most certainly do NOT! Not in 2008. I was at a victory parade with, reportedly, over a million other people on a glorious fall day about 750 miles east of Chicago.

That's in real life.
Also in real life: I remember Nixon's inauguration and the Moon landing (I turned five between the two).
And someone else mentioned the attempted assassination of Reagan: my mother was apparently sufficiently concerned that she came to school to look for me - it was after hours and I was hanging around for some reason - and take me home. Normally I walked. Was she afraid war would break out?
 

loughery111

Banned
You most certainly do NOT! Not in 2008. I was at a victory parade with, reportedly, over a million other people on a glorious fall day about 750 miles east of Chicago.

That's in real life.
Also in real life: I remember Nixon's inauguration and the Moon landing (I turned five between the two).
And someone else mentioned the attempted assassination of Reagan: my mother was apparently sufficiently concerned that she came to school to look for me - it was after hours and I was hanging around for some reason - and take me home. Normally I walked. Was she afraid war would break out?

OOC: Go Philly!
 
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