I can remember at age 5 watching live coverage of men on the moon (it was Apollo 17 in 1972). I was with my mother in the living room of our house.
I can remember watching Watergate hearings on the TV news.
I can remember the evening of the big tornado outbreak on April 3, 1974. I was in first grade and we had just moved to Rogersville, Alabama. I can remember the local Huntsville CBS affiliate (WHNT 19) the next night showing dead children being pulled from the mud (I sneaked back to the edge of the bedroom door where I could see the TV after the anchorman had told viewers that children shouldn't be watching...).
I can remember standing in my sister's bedroom listening to her new DuMont cabinet stereo with 8-track player when the DJ from the local FM rock station (WZYP) announced the Elvis had died, then I yelled out to my mother that they said Elvis was dead. We turned the TV on to WAAY 31 and they had just broken into programming with the news. I was 10.
I was in 8th grade at Oak Park Middle School in Decatur, we were between classes, when Gerald Priest came running into the suite (classrooms are in pods there, with adjoining rooms then lacking walls and classes literally sat next to each other in open space; walls have since been added) and yelling, "President Reagan has been shot!" TVs were wheeled into the middle of suites around the school and we didn't have class while we watched the news coverage for the rest of the day.
I already mentioned in another post about fixing myself some cereal while watching MNF when I heard Howard Cosell announce John Lennon's death. Funny thing was I really wasn't aware of who Lennon was at age 13. The only Beatles I knew by name were Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. I knew Lennon had a new song out -- Starting Over. I liked it, it was catchy, but I had no idea he was, you know, JOHN LENNON.
I was at my sister's house with her and my two nieces on the morning of the Challenger explosion in 1986. I was almost 19. I was off work that day (I think I was working at Auto Shack --- what Auto Zone used to be for you young'uns) and I would often go hang out with her and her two baby girls (my nieces, one of whom is working on her Ph.D. in chemistry in UC Santa Cruz and is a full blown new age liberal these days). They still showed all the launches live then, and we were watching when it exploded. I can remember --- like we all can --- just being completely unnerved by it.
(I can also remember watching the first space shuttle Enterprise being piggy backed on an airplane for its experimental flight and landing. I was at the house of my friend, Tim Sapp, when it came on that afternoon. I guess this was 4th or 5th grade because he moved away while we were in early 6th grade.)
I remember watching the Clarence Thomas hearings in my apartment at TC.
I remember watching the OJ Simpson chase on the news in the office of Holt's Pest Control in Athens, Alabama. My brother was a half-owner of the business and I did termite work two summers there while in college and between college and law school. That was, what, May 1994. June? I can't recall the exact date, but it was that summer. We also talked about it all the time in my first year criminal law class that fall.
I was in law school the night Princess Diana was killed. I guess I was 26. My wife and were watching the coverage on NBC News and CNN. We were calling relatives and just ooohing and aaahhing about it. My wife was teased by some friends that she looked like Diana. And, there was an expression that she'd get that did favor her some. One friend of ours had just been to England a few months before and had brought back a big Diana-faced-shaped greeting card for my wife --- he was the one who always made the joke --- and it was on our refrigerator.
I remember standing in my living room putting on a tie getting ready for work on 9/11/2001, watching the Today Show, when the news broke. I was at a bank in Decatur hours later when they had on TVs in the lobby showing the first tower fall.
My wife woke me from a dead sleep to tell me that Columbia had exploded one Saturday morning.
Human government bears the same relation to hell as the church bears to heaven. (David Lipscomb, On Civil Government, 72).