🚀 go-pugleaf

9/11:

In Los Angeles, my wife and I were up feeding our 3-week-old daughter when
the phone rang.  I answered, and my sister-in-law in Maryland cried, "Turn
on the TV!"  It had already transpired by then, the collapses, so we were
seeing replays.  (I read later that many children were traumatized by the
multiple replays, which led them to believe dozens of buildings were coming
down all around the country.)  I remember looking at my newborn child and
thinking, "What have we brought her into?"


JFK:

I was in 8th grade at Bowie Jr. High School in Irving, Texas, not much
farther from the assassination site than from the house where Lee Harvey
Oswald had lived with his family.  Coming back from lunch, it seemed
something was going on, and my English teacher was crying.  We settled into
class (world history) and the teacher said something about the president
having been shot.  I didn't think of it as a fatal thing, automatically
presuming he'd been winged or something.  Then the principal came on the
intercom and said the president was dead.  A kid to the side of me yelled,
"Yea!" and the kid in front of him turned around and punched him.  They
didn't let us out of school early, and they tried to maintain normal
classes.  When we got on the bus to go home that afternoon, some kid told
what may well have been the first JFK assassination joke:  What did Caroline
and John-John get for Christmas?  A jack-in-a-box.


Buddy Holly:

I didn't know who Holly was at the time of his death.  I learned of his
death and who he was from a movie magazine in which I was reading an article
about George Reeves, who had died a little more than four months later.
(Reeves's death I heard about while watching the Superman TV show.  My dad
came home from work during the show, sat with me for the remainder, and then
told me.  Did I mention I had a cool dad?)

Jim Beaver