Do you remember where you were when John F Kennedy was assassinated?

I wasn't born yet but my birthday is November 22.

Before sitting down to the dinner table on my 16th birthday, I heard over NPR that Jeffrey Dahmer had been beaten to death in a prison bathroom.

I was working in a liquor store when that happened. One of the register ladies saying she only wished he had died in the same fashion as his victims. And me going, "Who the hell are you going to find to do that?"

I'm too young, but of course I grew up with the stories. One of my earliest memories was seeing the Warren Commission report sitting on the kitchen table.

I don't remember the moon landing either - I'm a Manson baby.

Oh and my dad met JFK too - when waiting tables at posh restaurant. He was very impressed with him! Unlike Harry Truman...

My earliest world news memory is off my mother reading the paper at the breakfast table and saying "we're going to war." This was over some early 80s incident in either Libya or Lebanon. I can't remember which. I replied "yay!" Or something. I was excited by the idea. Mom solemnly explained to me why war was nothing to be happy about.

We had a very similar conversation a year or so down the line when Reagan beat Mondale.

my grandma's oldest friend is from missouri so she's got a lot of harry truman stories -- they used to just see him walking around town, going to the barber, no bodyguards or anything.

my earliest "i remember that" memory is the challenger exploding, prob mainly because it was the moment my 5-year-old self decided he didn't want to be an astronaut anymore.

I didn't see it on TV. I was in second grade and for some reason only third graders and above got to watch it. Everybody was talking about it as we got out of school though. I don't know if I already knew about Christa McAuliffe carrying her son's toy frog with her or if I found out about it later, but that really drove the tragedy home for me and made me understand how this news event connected to actual people.

I remember the Reagan assassination attempt mostly because the news coverage prevented me from seeing Captain Kangaroo the next day.

My earliest memory of a news event was when my cousin and I built a snow cave and tried to collapse it in each while playing a game we called "the shah escapes from Iran".

Collapse it on each other, that is

That reminds me of a former coworker who said she would play good guys/bad guys with her brother when they were kids and the bad guy was always Idi Amin.

i ticked no in case Plato was right

Dad had an Ayatollah dartboard.

i still have my osama bin laden toilet paper

http://thumbs4.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/mMYuG3Gma6bXtWCChGZXYvQ.jpg

A co-worker had a "Buy Iraqi War Bonds" bumper sticker then (Iraq was fighting with Iran), and I remember wanted to zing him on it when the Kuwait thing happened, but I think it was already long gone.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Sixteen old people. One present and accounted for.

Two.

3

my earliest "i remember that" memory is the challenger exploding,

I was in school, a friend was not (this was exam time, I had some, he didn't), he saw the live TV coverage. Apparently, the coverage showed the big explosion, and a bystander close to the TV camera/mic said "ooh.... Is it *supposed* to do that?"

Schoolfriend comes over one spring afternoon.
Him: Kurt Cobain died yesterday
Me: Who?
Him: (puts on Territorial Pissings)
Me: Oh right!

My 7th grade science teacher was a teacher in space finalist and we were in his class, watching the launch when the Challenger exploded so I definitely, definitely remember that.

O_O

The earliest big, big news story I remember for sure is the Jonestown mass suicide. Someone in my father's unit had a relative there and had to be given emergency leave to go home from Germany.