I remember Kennedy's inauguration, because my Dad had just built a TV.

My earliest news memory is the Falklands War, when I was, um, six. What I mostly remember is Harriers. I thought Harriers were the best thing ever, even better than monkeys (apparently when I was five my ambition was to be a monkey).

As it happens my uncle was in the RAF at the time and when we went and visited him there was always an airshow* and I got lots of RAF posters and hats and badges and rubbish like that, and I was definitely going to be in the RAF.

(Later I grew to be 6'5 with bad eyesight, the cold war ended leading to defence cuts and I grew through a variety of other ambitions, but that's another story).

* Or so it seemed at the time.

I was born in late 1952, and I remember the election of '56 because my mother took me with her when she voted for Adlai. I also remember people talking about the rare 1955 double-die penny and watching them sorting through their change. And I remember panic over Sputnik.

I remember Kennedy's assassination because I had never seen a teacher cry. I was in 2nd grade.

Until then I was pretty unaware of news in general.

Dag Hammarskjold (U.N. Secretary-General) went down in a plane crash in 1961; that was one of the first non-American news event I remember. I was eleven. I'm pretty sure I remember Sputnik.

I remember Kennedy's inauguration. I have vivid memories of his assassination and that entire weekend, including the graveside services, which I attended along with 25,000 other people.

Does sports news count? Because the earliest "news" memory I have is the Phillies winning the world series, when I was four. After that it's quite likely Regan's second election when I was eight. There might be stuff in between that I'd remember if you asked me about them, but those are the two that stand out.

I was born in 1959, and I remember the time when I couldn't watch Bozo the Clown because there was news on the TV all the time. I also remember watching the 1964 election. An interesting question about this sort of thing is the difference between a memory and a memory of a memory. I think I still remember the 1964 election, but it's possible that I'm remembering that I used to remember the non-Bozo period of November 1963.

I definitely don't remember the Glenn flight or the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Weirdly, my early memories of famous events are all about sports. I vaguely remember seeing Bruce Jenner on cereal boxes... I was five in 1976. Though I didn't know who they were at the time, I distinctly remember watching TV when "Minnesota Fats" played pool against the legendary Willie Mosconi in 1978 (and was crushed, of course). This may explain my latent desire to own a pool table.

I remember Reagan getting elected, and a bunch of brouhaha about hostages, but I wasn't really paying attention. I guess I remember seeing footage when Reagan was shot.

The Challenger disaster is crystal clear.

I remember Sputnik, but that's because my father took me outside, after dark, to stand in the middle of the street (a combination of things that was strictly forbidden as a rule) and showed it to me as it passed over, and told me all about it. I was four. The first outside event that I picked up on my own was the campaign leading up to the 1960 election. I was, in fact, six in 1959.

P.

What a neat post. First, to contribute: I remember the Challenger. I think I was a little older than six, though (I'm 29, born in 1978). I don't know when it actually occurred, but I remember its being when I was in a private, religious grade school.

I've been thinking about mutability lately, though. Especially today, as I read in some magazine or other (Wired?) about Chernobyl. The piece mentioned an explosion in '86. I would've been 8, then, and I remember hearing about Chernobyl when I was a child, but I don't remember actually knowing what had occurred.

I actually don't remember many major news stories. The Berlin Wall, vaguely, but not much besides those three stories (and very little of their actual events).

What I remember is Darth Vader. And the Muppets, and their monsters.

I remember the first Gulf War, but not as a big news thing. It was just there, the same way Thanksgiving and Christmas are just there in first grade (or so; I don't actually know *when* I remember it) and you react to them. I was aware, I think, of Bush I being President and this being a change, but I didn't know what from.

I vaguely remember the Bicentennial (July 4th, 1976) when I was just shy of three years old (born late summer, '73) but that's more a sense of red, white and blue bunting EVERYWHERE and lots of Yankee Doodle music.

The first news event I'm conscious of seeing on television was the assassination attempt against then-president Ronald Reagan (1981? 82?) and I remember being distinctly annoyed that he didn't die, because that broke the year-ending-in-zero curse (which was very pleasing to a third grader.)

To this day I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't an animatronic puppet or a zombie in the White House all those years. It would have explained a lot.

I was in kindergarten in the fall of 1963, and I recall Kennedy's assassination.
Of course, 1958 is only one year after 1957, so that's not much of a stretch.
It was one of the first times there was wall-to-wall, minute to minute television coverage of a major news event that went on for days and days that I can remember, and that sort of thing always helps to imprint an event on the consciousness,

I remember Montreal Olympics and wanting to be a tiny Russian gymnast. I was 5.

I was going to say that I remembered Alan Shepherd's launch back in 1961, but then I remembered that Superman shot himself in the head.

To which I thought, shouldn't it just have bounced off?

I was born in 1962. I have a very clear memory of being in a playpen while my mother was sitting on the sofa crying and watching a state funeral on television. For a long time I thought it must have been Bobby Kennedy's funeral, but then I realized I wouldn't have been in a playpen at six years old, and it must have been JFK's funeral. I was only sixteen months old when he was assassinated. It must have made quite an impression on me, and I'm sure it was a big deal in my Irish Catholic household.

For me it's the Challenger, when I was four. I'm pretty sure that the specifics of my memory are false (I would swear up and down that I heard about it from my first grade teacher, but since I was in preschool when it happened...), but there's definitely a kernel of something remembered in there.

I remember at some point when I was very little asking my father if Republicans were evil. He said, "Well, the president's a Republican..." This blew my mind, and made me think perhaps they weren't evil, because surely the president wasn't evil. I don't think this is what my father meant.

I have a very powerful memory from when I was nine (this being 1991): the principal of my school came into the lunchroom while the whole school was in it, had us all be quiet, and tried her very very best to impress upon us how momentous the time we were living through was, how our hypothetical children would ask us what it was like to live through this time. I was too young to really understand what was going on in the world, but she impressed me in that moment.

(And since we're talking about memories of historical events, I would like to plug my very most favoritest book in the whole world, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering by Marita Sturken. I highly, highly recommend this book, for everyone.)

Dave MB #7: I definitely don't remember...or the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Sounds like you and Dana Perino have something in common!

It was the '72 election for me, too, but I was in the Nixon camp, because he had a really cool name, with an "x" in it.

Oooops bad math I keep getting 72 and 76 games mixed up. Most of my early memories are of stuff on the CBC: hockey, Trudeau, Friendly Giant...

My first memories of that kind are of the UN presence in the Congo in 1962. For some reason, that item of news stuck.

I was born in 1965. My first news memory is of the moon landings, probably in part because my grandfather worked for Rockwell and we all gathered at his house to watch.

I have distinct memories of thinking that the bicentennial was so far in the future that I could hardly believe it.

I remember seeing coverage of the Vietnam war, but no specific events. Also Gemini flights, but just vaguely. I was mainly interested in the cartoony segments of how stages separated.

The first YEAR I was aware of was 1967; the Romper Room lady had a little board on which she assembled the current day and date. My mom explained what a year was.

Which set me up for the next year, with its election and all the horrible crap that happened. I remember the anguished coverage of Robert Kennedy's assassination, and MLK's assassination. The only SPECIFIC thing I recall of those events -- which? -- was a slide of the word SHAME left on the screen. And the bit of light at the end of that year . . . Apollo 8.

I was born in '58.

I remember the Kennedy assasination -- remember John John saluting because he was near to my age (and lo! we end up at the same college years later).

I remember the Beattles on Ed Sullivan. I remember Robert Kennedy's assasination because the nuns had us praying all day.

My daughter, age 11, remembers 9/11.

I was born in 1947, and would have said my earliest was the Suez Crisis in 1956, but when I looked up 1953 on Wikipedia I found a number of things I do actually remember: Christine Jorgensen and the first successful gender reassignment surgery; Hilary and Tensing Norgay climbing Everest (though I don't remember Tensing Norgay being mentioned so much). Trawling back to 1952, I find the coronation of Elizabeth II, of which I have very clear memories -- at least of the special coronation mugs and paper cut-out coronation coaches on display in shop windows. But nothing else from that year.

My earliest major news memory is the Challenger explosion and, looking it up now, I was 4 1/2. I'm not sure if I was in preschool or kindergarten at that point.

As someone else said, I too apparently have the specifics of the situation wrong - I remember eating lunch in front of the tv and seeing it live, but my mom says I must be remembering seeing it on the news, because I didn't see it live.

I remember toddling into the kitchen where my mother was making hamburgers; after tugging on her leg to get her attention, I said, "Mommy, President Nixon just got fired." I must've been watching the impeachment proceedings on tv, or at least a news program that was pre-empting "Sesame Street" or "Electric Company" (I was 4).

I was born at the very end of 1970. I remember the Bicentennial (I was five) because I was in a parade and dressed up in colonial clothes with the rest of my kindergarten. The first news event I remember was probably the gas shortages (at least, I remember waiting in line for gas -- wow, I just looked that up and I would have been between three and five years old).

I was six in 1977, and I remember Carter being elected President. Oh, and Star Wars coming out -- we went to see it at the drive-in!

I just asked my 11-and-a-half y.o., and she *doesn't* remember 9/11 -- we turned the TV off that morning and didn't turn it on again except for PBS kids' shows for *months*. She was in kindergarden, and I think she remembers a little -- because she remembers that she had a substitute teacher (her teacher had a family member killed, so she left school first thing in the morning).

She does remember the anthrax attacks, because we were in the "zone".

I was born in '56, and I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis -- or rather, I remember events that years later I put together and realized what they were: me coming home from school, all excited to tell my mother about the bomb drill we'd had that day, and her telling me to "shut up" (I can't convey how unlike her that was) so she could watch the boring man talking on TV.

I was not quite five, and (as I remember it) my mother and I were getting off the basement escalator at the local Sears when a friend called out to her, "The president's been shot!" Of course, the memory has been brought out for polishing innumerable times since then, and I might have been primed for caring about the incident by having been presented to JFK when I was 3 (which I definitely don't remember). But I can also call up vague pictures from a newsmagazine -- we didn't have TV -- of LBJ taking the oath of office on Air Force One and suchlike.

(Either oddly or tellingly, I don't remember what my mother always said was her response to the friend's cry: "The president of what?")

I remember the Army-McCarthy hearings, the spring/summer before I turned six.

My earliest memory is of my baby brother's coming home from the hospital; I was not yet three (doing the math, I was two and a half, in fact), but I have a distinct visual memory (my aunt and uncle brought my mother and the baby home, I see them walking into the family room at my grandparents' house).

We got a TV sometime after I started primary school, I seem to remember. Without checking yearly events, the earliest news memory I have now is Apollo 11 landing on the moon when I was eight. But I was a big fan of space leading up to that (I did a project on it at school, I remember), so I must have been aware of the news in general well before 1969, even if I can't recall any event in particular.

Born in 1956. The first world-news thing I have a really clear memory of is JFK's assassination; I would have been 7 at that point.

I have some fugitive memories of other things: the concern about JFK's Catholicism in the 1960 election, Sputnik, and the change from a 49-star to a 50-star flag when Hawai'i became a state. But none of those are very clear, and the 1960 ones are probably attached to the assassination, since they're not associated with the house in St. Clair Shores.

John Kennedy's assassination, and the Mercury space flights.

I remember Reagan beating Carter in the election and being really, really, really mad about it. I was 5-on-the-cusp-of-6.

I was born in '78, and the first thing I remember is the '84 election because my mom and I had a conversation about Geraldine Ferrarro and the possibility of the first woman president. If that doesn't count, I have to say Challenger, a year and a half later.

Whew. The earliest event I remember is my dad waking me up to see a Saturn V launch. The most likely event would be Apollo 17 -- but that would mean I was just under 3 at the time. Another candidate would be the launch of Skylab six months later.

Political events are harder -- I have no 'political' memories until the Carter-Ford election of 1976, when we held a mock election in kindergarten. I do have very clear memories of the Bicentennial -- all the fireplugs were painted as Revolutionary War figures, and they were all just my height at the time.

Born in 1960 in Jacksonville, Fl. First event I remember experiencing as it happened was MLK assassination. I distinctly recall them breaking in to "Bewitched" to announce it.

I have delayed memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Jacksonville with 2-3 military bases, was considered a first strike target. When I was six or seven, I asked my mom why I had to wear the "stupid dogtags"; name, father's name, address, D.O.B., phone #, race, religion. She made some evasive answer about "they wouldn't want me to get lost". I didn't think about it again until I was about 16 and found them in a drawer. Looking at them, my first thought was, "this was in case I got F'ing incinerated!"

I still have them.

Like Michael Cohen (#3), I remember the 1956 election. My mother was working for Adlai, and took me and my sister with her to election HQ. Of course, what I remember was worrying tremendously about how she would be able to see to drive home after dark, until one of her friends explained headlights to me. What can I say? I was 4. I don't have any particular memory of Sputnik, but my mother remembers my coming home from kindergarten talking about it. The satellite I remember going outside to see at night was a few years later, an American satellite (Telstar?).

In terms of "where were you when?" memories, I remember the Kennedy inauguration (age 9), the first Russian man in space, the Cuban missile crisis, and, of course, the Kennedy assassination.

Without prompting, the earliest thing I can think of that I remember is the Challenger disaster as well. I was 10 at the time.

I don't have a very good memory of my childhood in general, though, sadly.

Born in 1975. I remember Terry Fox's run, a little. First foreign news event would have been the Reagan assassination attempt.

My earliest news memory is also Reagan being shot in 1981. I was born in 1974, so I was six and a half at the time.

I do also remember Jimmy Carter being president; I was a little frightened of him because his teeth were so disturbingly large. But I can't connect him with any specific event so much as I remember seeing him on TV.

Oddly enough, on another site people were talking about how young guys (it's a gay men's site) don't remember Chernobyl except as a name where something bad happened. I wrote this:

I remember where I was when Kennedy was shot (bouncing on the bed).

I remember being the only kid in my grade school lunchroom who didn't cheer when it was announced that Nixon had won (1968).

I remember learning to type...on a typewriter. In a typing class. I remember what a luxury an electric typewriter was.

I remember when "solid state" was an advertising plus instead of an automatic assumption. (It means "no tubes," whippersnappers.)

I remember when most TV programs were in black and white, and TV stations were required by law to periodically announce "Some of the programs seen on this station were mechanically reproduced for presentation at a more convenient time."

I remember when calling someone on the phone and asking "where are you?" was a patently ridiculous thing to do. If they answered the phone, you knew where they were, unless you meant upstairs or downstairs or something.

I remember programming computers by sitting in front of a cardpunch machine. Then you'd go and feed your deck of punched cards into the reader, and come back the next day to see if your program worked, because it took that long to compile and run on the mainframe.

I remember using DOS 1.1 on the earliest IBM PCs. No hard disk, only floppies; you had to have a boot floppy, and then you could put in your data floppies.

I remember having to type commands at a command prompt to get a computer to do anything. I know what "rm -r *" does when you type it from the root. I know what a root is. I can write a bubble sort without thinking about it. I programmed in FORTRAN IV, PASCAL, and Old C.

I remember that I watched the first human being set foot on the moon, live on (black & white) TV. I watched the very first broadcast episode of Star Trek on September 8, 1966. I remember when Ron Howard was a little boy on The Andy Griffith Show.

I remember that I was sitting at the kitchen table eating my cereal when I heard that "the High Priestess of Acid Rock," Janis Joplin, had died. I hadn't heard of her before that. I was a child.

I remember when we thought Saturn was probably the only planet with a ring in the entire galaxy. Since then we've discovered that pretty much all gas giants have rings, including (arguably) the Sun (the asteroid belt is a ring on a grand scale).

I remember being the only person in my school (including TEACHERS) who knew what a laser was. Except it was written LASER back then, because anyone who'd heard the word knew it was an acronym (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation).

I remember when the Post Office came up with the Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) code system. Hardly anyone writes that one all in caps any more.

I remember when you had to get to the bank before 5 to stand in line with a withdrawal slip to have cash for the weekend, because ATMs weren't invented (or hadn't made it to where I lived, at any rate).

I was born in 1977, and I remember when Reagan was shot and understanding that it was a bad thing and made a lot of people upset. I also recall a plane being shot down over Moscow, and the promise of lunar colonies by 1985, which had me in tears about five or six years later when I wasn't living on the moon. Mind, at 18 months of age, I either impressed or terrified my mother by stating, whilst on the way to buy my first set of Underroos, that the president owned Carter's Children's Wear. (I have a very vague recollection of freaking out a saleslady a short while later--she didn't think a toddler should be having full conversations, much less discussing the apparent state of Washingtonian business interests. ;) )

First things I recall: the 1980 decade turnover, although I wasn't quite 3. Also the Reagan-Mondale debates and Barbara Bush not-quite calling Geraldine Ferraro a bitch. The Challenger. Oliver North. The Berlin Wall. Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos getting ousted.

Also I recall watching a news report about what I think was the Pan Am flight that blew up over Lockerbie. I'm pretty certain it was terrorist-related anyway, because of one interview of the mother of a teenaged girl who had died on the flight. And the mom kept saying how her daughter never feared flying, just terrorists. (Which was something weird that always stuck with me, and whenever terrorists attacked the US, I always associated it with that interview. And whenever Bush invokes terrorism as a new threat, I keep thinking of how long it had been around and to my child's point of view, we weren't running around like chickens with our heads cut off.)

I also will probably always recall that in eighth grade sometime, Portugal outlawed dwarf tossing. (This is because EVERY week, we had to write down ten current events garnered from the local paper. And one week, I was really scrabbling for items. Anyways, who wants to write about interest rates when Portugal is outlawing dwarf tossing.)

I have some vague memories of the 1980 elections, when I was not-quite-five, but they're very vague-- I don't remember the Iranian hostage crisis at all, for example, despite one of the hostages being a local. But then I wasn't in school yet.

After that, there's kind of a lacuna-- I don't remember Reagan's shooting at all. The next things in the wikipedia rundown that I remember having any awareness of at the time, instead of reading/hearing about well after the fact, are Princess Diana's wedding and Sandra Day O'Connor's appointment, in summer to fall of 1981.

Hmm. I have vivid memories of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Much vaguer ones of the Kefauver hearing on organized crime in '51. What stuck with me was the name: I thought Kefauver sounded neat. Somewhere in there is the memory of my dad getting all heated up about Adlai Stevenson losing to Eisenhower. Twice.

Born 1973, I remember Skylab crashing back to earth (July '79, when I would have been just over 6), but only because my day camp did used it as the theme for a treasure hunt they were running ("find the pieces of Skylab!").

I definitely remember the Iranian hostage crisis, and Reagan's election -- I remember asking my mother the morning after the election who was President now, not having grasped the whole "Inauguration Day" part yet.

Born 2/1958. I clearly remember JFK's assassination, including details. To my embarrassment, one thing that irked me greatly at the time was that the cartoons were preempted for days. I also remember my grandfather pointing up at the night sky and saying that there was a man orbiting the earth and his name was John Glenn. That was when I was not quite four. Oh, and I remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.

Born in 04/62, and my first datable memory is from when I was about one and a half -- but it's a weird, isolated memory-picture of seeing a horse following a coffin down the aisle of a church, on television(1); it's associated with an emotive framework of profound grief extending out to either side of the actual memory. I suspect the reason I can remember it is that -- well, as mother described it when I asked her what the heck she thought that might be a memory of, she started crying, I started crying, the dog started crying --- that kind of thing apparently sort of cements memory.

((1) not the assassination, of course: the funeral.)

Other than that, I have dim memories of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 (when I would have been roughly 6), clearer ones of mother going to a sit-in at the University of Wisconsin despite having walking pneumonia (did you know pepper gas is not good for walking pneumonia??) and of the Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern campaigns, and of course *quite* clear memories of Watergate.

(I also remember shocking my parents because, when I saw a flag at half-staff sometime in the late '60s, my question was "Who got shot?")

*wry grin* Do you get the impression I come by my politics honestly?

I saw the first few lines on my reader, and thought about it before clicking over. It's Rosa Parks. I was six. I knew who the president was when I was four, but that was because my mother was very involved in politics at the time, and she'd hated Truman.

Rosa Parks intrigued me--I used to sit on my dad's lap while he read the paper and listened to the news on the radio in the living room, and I remember being confused about why anyone would have to give up a seat on a bus, so I asked about it. I wanted to know where this happened, and ended up getting maps and asking more questions. I remember my dad reading the complicated bits of the newspaper article to me, but I know that I first noticed it as news on the radio.

I was born in May, 1958, so I wasn't quite four for John Glenn's flight, which I remember. I had a lot of context for imprinting it on my memory, though -- my parents bought their first tv set specifically so we could watch the events, and they also bought a toy space helmet and spring-powered rocket launcher for my brother and I to play with. Lots of reinforcement. I think the next newsworthy event I remember was JFK's assassination (when I was five).

'62. I don't think I remember JFK's assassination, but I also don't remember a time without the Zapruder film. I do remember going to hear Bobby Kennedy speak, and watching NASA mission coverage from the time I was about 5 -- my parents would get me out of bed if the landings or takeoffs were at night. I remember Vietnam and the troop withdrawal, the Yom Kippur war, Kent State and riots in Berkeley and Santa Barbara, Nixon in China, Brezhnev's eyebrows and Detente, Mrs Thatcher and the Falklands, the Munich Olympics (pretty much all the Olympics between 1968 and 1984), Watergate, Bobby Sands' hunger strike, the Freedom Train and the Bicentennial, voting for Carter in my first election ...obviously not in that exact order.

I think my first political memory was the local kerfuffle of the snail darter fish being endangered by Tellico Dam, but that dragged on for so long (mid to late 70s) that I'm not sure how old I was when I became aware of it.

I remember when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. I was in sixth grade, and remember walking down the hall of my school muttering, "Sadat got shot" and feeling pleased with myself for making up such a clever rhyme. God knows where I'd heard about it; maybe my class sometimes talked about current events, but if so I don't remember it.

I remember the Bicentennial--I was born in late 1969 so I would have been 6--but I didn't know it was the Bicentennial then. I just remember the Fourth of July being an unusually huge event, with a parade with horses in our very tiny town. There were palominos!

My personal memories go back to the age of 2 or 3, but apparently I wasn't very aware of things that happened outside of my little sphere until I was 10 or so.

Daria @28--I saw Star Wars at a drive-in too! My best friend Laura and I lay on the car roof to watch it, and I remember seeing the Milky Way and knowing what it was for the first time. It was hot and humid and a beautiful clear night. I remember the weather, but I don't remember what I thought of the movie at all.

Born at the end of '56, but I don't remember JFK's assassination happening; only having happened. I was aware enough of the '64 election, though.

"Nine Eleven" is prehistory for my five-year-old daughter. In her lifetime, there hasn't been a World Trade Center. If something big happens in the next couple of years, she might remember it when she's in college.

Born 1972, I start to have memories sometime in 1976; I remember some Bicentennial events, such as seeing a copy of the Declaration of Independence that was on tour, and the 1976 election. Like Xopher, I had a firm opinion on who should win based on fundamental fairness doctrines, but I came up the other way -- Ford should, since he hadn't yet had a full turn.

I don't start feeling like I have anything close to continuous memories even of important things until maybe mid-1978 or so.

Xopher @ 43 I remember learning to type...on a typewriter. In a typing class. I remember what a luxury an electric typewriter was
Sadly, so do I. In high school, in 1988, after having typed on computer keyboards for 8 years. There were two Selectrics in the classroom; the rest were manuals. The next year, they were all replaced with Macintoshes and the class was renamed "keyboarding".

'83 Kentucky gubernatorial election. Martha Layne Collins won, which was personally significant in our house because she had been a teacher in Woodford County when my parents were growing up, and my grandfather gave the invocation at her inauguration. I well remember all the hubbub surrounding her (first woman to be governor of Kentucky) but until I looked it up online just now I didn't remember that she had beaten Jim Bunning. Obviously, that was the not the important part to remember then.

I was six.

When I was not quite 5, in early July of 1974, my normal kid's television show was apparently interrupted by the state funeral of Juan D. Perón. I am pretty sure I didn't understand what I was seeing, but I remember every detail about the room I was sitting in and can even pull back a still picture of what was on the television, down to the granaderos accompanying the flag-swathed coffin and the endless crowds.

The maid was watching from the kitchen.

I don't remember if she was crying (or her name, or what she looked like), but she must have filled the space with her emotions, whatever they were, because of the way the memory stuck with me.

For years I disbelieved that I truly remembered Perón's funeral, but there's not anything else it could have been. I'd love to re-watch footage of that now, but I don't believe it's made youtube

I can remember my parents making sure I watched a Viking landing on TV* (1976, I was 4) and earlier that year I remember lots of Bicentennial excitement**. Oh, and because of my name people made Patty Hearst comments, so I had to figure out who she was.

*I don't know which one, maybe 2 because it was in color?

**My father worked for the Air Force, I remember a huge party on base, lots of planes and kids and stuff.

Born late 1957, and my first political memory is of the Kennedy funeral. I do remember something about walking by the school office while the assassination announcement was being made.

I was also equally fascinated by the Kentucky Derby *and* the Presidential election the following year--Lucky Debonair's year, if I remember correctly, and I was the only kid in my classroom for Johnson.

Am I the only one who's a little depressed that the majority of people cc:'ing people on emails have never seen a sheet of carbon paper...and probably don't even know what cc: stands for?

And get off my lawn!

(xopher: you win)

I was six in 1969, here in Australia, when I saw, on live TV, the whole Apollo 11 saga, from launch through the agonising three-day wait (various local experts sitting at a panel talking and talking us through the slow patches, explaining what all the bits of hardware were about) to the landing, the first steps, the first words. It was spellbinding.

The odd thing was that at that age I had not fully grasped the concept of *other countries*. So while I was fully prepared to believe there were men walking around on the moon, I also believed that the Apollo launches, at Cape Kennedy, were so close by that I wondered why we couldn't just hop in the car and go and see the next one. I vividly remember drawing a picture in (must have been grade 1 or 2) of my family and me doing just that, driving off to see the big rocket launch. When, later, I learned that there was a humongous great ocean in the way, I was very disappointed.

Around that time I also remember seeing the Vietnam war on TV most nights; having some awareness of Australian national politics; hearing stories about "hippies"; antiwar marches; etc.

Tania... I watched a Viking landing on TV

I hope it was a sturdy TV set.

I was born in 1972, and the earliest news event that comes to mind is the Tutankhamun exhibit coming to Chicago in 1977. (I remembered the event, but not when it happened; I just looked up the date.) I have a much clearer memory of the Iran hostage crisis, the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics, and the 1980 election.

The first news I remember being aware of was the Challenger disaster, when I was 8. Since most people here seem to remember news stories from when they were 5 or 6, I wonder if my comparatively late awareness of the news is due to some aspect of my own personality, or if there were no sufficiently gripping news stories in the two years before Challenger. I doesn't seem like anyone else here has come up with a major national news story between late '82 (when I turned 5) and the Challenger disaster.

Well, I definitely remember watching JFK's funeral, and I was less than 3 (born 2/61). My parents say they saw how I stared at the screen and said "he'll remember this."

I barely remember anything else that far back.

I remember family things from about 15 months old but only in brief flashes: being frustrated that I couldn't go swimming, being happy that mom was going to to teach me something, being sad that the color TV broke during the thanksgiving parade.

But I do remember, at age 3, my family making me watch the moon landing on TV because they said I would want to remember that for the rest of my life. Which was clearly ridiculous, I tried to explain, because the image was so grainy and noisy - you could see it so much better on Star Trek. But they didn't get it, so I watched. I don't really remember the watching, but the "they don't understand me" part - that's vivid.

Oh, and if we're doing first Kentucky Derby (Joyce @60): Genuine Risk in 1980. Back when I thought that the horse who was 99-1 must be the best, because that was the biggest number.

I'm another who remembers Charles and Diana's wedding (because I was allowed to stay up to watch). I was born in 1975.

Presumably some 12 year olds would remember the millennium.

Up until a year ago, my mom taught third grade. September 11 was always hard for her, as she had to explain what happened to a bunch of 9 year olds. Each year, it got worse. By the fifth anniversary, she was explaining it to kids who were toddlers at the time.

Also, it was the day before her birthday.

My earliest news memory was Reagan's second inaugural. We watched it on TV in the cafeteria. I was 7 and could tell he was up to no good.

The earliest news item I can remember is the moon landing. My parents woke me up so that I could watch it on our teeny-tiny black and white tv. I also have vivid memories of watching coverage of the Watts riots on television.

My husband remembers MLK getting shot.

My nearly-14 year old says 9/11 is the first big thing she remembers.

My earliest national/world affairs memory is of listening on the funny-smelling radio (it had big, open, glass-tank batteries in the cabinet underneath) as the election returns reported that Alf Landon had been defeated by FDR, to my father's Intense Displeasure. We were also getting the first snow of the season, that day in 1936 in Trilby, Ohio, and (aged 8) I was much more interested in the possibility of using my birthday-present sled.

I am an American, but my family lived in Germany from 1974-1980. My first political memory is Helmut Schmidt's election, which Wikipedia says was in 1974, when I was 6. I remember that his party, the SPD, did not have enough votes by themselves, but that they made a coalition with the FPD and together beat the CDU. I seem to remember that the coalition was big news.

My first American political memory was my parents voting for Jimmy Carter in 1976 by absentee ballot. Overall though, I was pretty oblivious to what was happening in the U.S. until we moved back when I was twelve.

Oh, scratch that. Juan Domingo Perón's funeral has made youtube. Holy cow, do I love living in the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0lS2dFg1ZA&feature=PlayList&p=FAB9EA9C4169EA86&index=51

Relevant footage begins around 2:15.
And it's now even weirder how much of that I remember.

Except I saw it in black and white, Argentine televisions didn't broadcast in color until later.

Sputnik. I was five.

I was born in Oct. 1959, and the first news event I remember was the moon landing in 1969. It was the summer before my fifth grade and my elementary school showed free movies for kids every Saturday afternoon. That Saturday they showed us the footage of Armstrong jumping down onto the moon. I remember going outside afterwards and looking up at the sky and feeling disappointed because I couldn't even locate the moon, let alone see the astronauts.

Probably Tiananmen Square, when I was 6 1/2 years old. I remember expressing frustration to my mother about my Saturday morning cartoons being interrupted, and she kept telling me to pay attention to the news broadcast because I was witnessing history.

I also have memories of living through a huge hurricane that hit the NY area, which may have been Hurricane Gloria; I would have been just short of 3 years old at the time.

Born 1963. My first news event was the Red Sox winning the pennant in 1967. Then the funerals of RFK and MLK the following year. Happily, in the 40 years since, the Red Sox have repeated-- and high level assassinations have not (at least in the U.S.).

Oh wait. Now that I've read comments, I have to include the 1956 election, though I don't really count it because it wasn't the result but the process I was aware of. We were living in Germany; my parents had to make repeated visits to the consulate in Munich, thirty miles away. When they got back from doing the actual voting, and were having drinks on the porch, my father asked my mother who she'd voted for. It was in the nature of a leetle joke, as he assumed she'd joined him in voting for Adlai Stevenson.

When he found out she'd voted for Ike, canceling his vote after all the trouble and expense they'd gone to to vote, he didn't speak to her for days.

To this day I don't know if she really did vote for Eisenhower or just wanted to see what kind of a rise she could get out of my father.

My earliest political memory is of Dwight Eisenhower beating Adlai Stevenson for the Presidency in 1952. My parents were Stevenson supporters, so it was a big deal. I recall their disappointment.

I remember when Stalin died in 1953. I was with my mother at the library: she took me outside to the park, even though we were wearing coats, so it must have been chilly, and danced with me beneath the trees, telling me to remember always that we were celebrating the death of a bad man.

I was born in 1967 and have a memory of the moon landing and Neil Armstrong stepping on to the surface. I don't know if this is, as my memory goes, that I was sat in front of the TV by my parents so that I could see it or if this is a manufactured memory from having seen later landings and lots of footage of the first.

7/1953. I don't think I remember Sputnik directly (i.e., rather than through all the noise about it since then); I do remember the Nixon-Kennedy election, but that may have been helped by the electioneering reaching as far as my then-exurban village.

Xopher -- I remember all of those except COBOL; I knew of it, but wasn't involved enough in computers to work with it. Do you remember whistling at acoustic couplers to make the computer N miles away acknowledge your existence?

I don't think I'd previously realized quite how wide an age range this blog spans; the in-person groups I connect to seem narrow by comparison.

Born December 1977; first thing I remember is watching my parents see the vote totals in the 1984 elections. It left a strong impression on me-my first real memory of circumstances clearly beyond my parents' control, that whole "Damn! They're not omnipotent!" moment.

Thinking about it, I really got how they felt when I watched the results in 2004.

Huh. 7-8 years old is the best I can do for current events, with Mondale/Ferraro running in 1984. Nothing on Wikipedia's 1983 list is ringing a bell except maybe Flashdance. Likewise, I *might* remember Thriller in 1982. But I'm known in my family for having few early memories, so it doesn't mess up the "six" theory. [de-lurking]

Born in 1956. I remember spreading the newspaper out on the floor to examine the aerial photos of the missile sites in Cuba. As we lived in Tampa, only a few miles from Macdill Air Force base, the news dominated the papers and local television for days. I could only read a few words, such as "Cuba", but I was able to match them up with what I was hearing on TV, and the pictures in the paper were clearer.

Nathan, #61: Actually, I find it cause for rejoicing. I've had to decollate carbon-duplicated computer reports, and that stuff was NASTY. I think the current expansion of "cc:" is "courtesy copy", and I don't have a problem with that.

Moon landing. I hadn't turned four yet. Yes, I'm sure I know which landing, but you don't really need me to spell it out, right?

I remember the first television broadcast in Australia. 1956, I think, but no doubt I can look it up. I'd have been five, if so.

Joyce@60 and Jen@68: My first Derby-related memory is not of the actual Derby, but when Swale died in '84. The first actual Derby for me is the next year: I thought Spend A Buck was a stupid name for a horse.

Hmm...recent discussions in another online community reminded me that I was very absorbed by the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956, when I was four and a half. I must have watched TV news coverage with my parents or something like that - I know I kept our copy of the NY Times with the front page picture and headline for a while.

Also, I recall, rather later, sitting with my father and sounding out some of the words in the NY Times story about Sputnik, or maybe one of the later Soviet satellite shots wth the dog...IIRC I was in kindergarten or first grade at that point.

I hesitate* to mention, but it is relevant in a meta way, a classic article on memory: "The Ecological Study of Memory." I've summarized it here.

In short, with "flashbulb memories"- memories made at moments of "great stress and surprise"- the stronger the memory feels, the weaker the accuracy of the memory, down to the point where people are very confident of memories where they have none of the key details correct.

That disclaimer made, I've got a memory of a volcano eruption which quite possibly was Iceland 1973. I remember it well because I didn't believe my parents when they told me lava was red. We had a B&W TV then.

My first meta-news memory was when Elvis died. I remember going to school and telling people "the king is dead." I had no idea of who he was, and i had to ask my parents later.
________
*well, not really. It's one of my favorite studies.

I have a hazy memory of the US Bicentennial celebrations. I don't remember the actual event, but I remember quite firmly deciding that I was going to live to be 104 so I could see the next one. (I can't imagine why, though I love fireworks to this day.)

My first clear and detailed memory is of Reagan getting shot in '81 (I was 9). News coverage pre-empted afternoon cartoons, so I watched the news because darned if I'd give up my allowed hour of tv-watching. =P

Born in 1971. Not so much as a news event, but I could remember fireworks and celebrations of July 4, 1976. I suppose my first news memory was the death of Elvis. I was riding in a car with my mom when one of his songs came on, and she said "He's dead now... died today."

I don't remember the song that was played, though. Odd.

8/1980. The first thing I remember is the Chernobyl incident. I have a very vivid memory of one of my friends' parents driving us to the in-doors swimming pool when it started to rain and the slightly overprotective mother got very worried and told us to hurry through the rain. Being six years old, of course I tried to catch rain drops in my mouth until she all but dragged me inside.

Since I live in that part of Germany that is really farthest from Chernobyl (the Saarland, right next to Luxembourg), I think she was really being a little paranoid.

Incidentally: Thank you, Making Light, for making me feel young.

My first specific news memory was Nixon's resignation and Ford's inauguration, and the only reason I noticed it was that the local paper ran a photograph in color, which I'd never seen before. I was, guess what, six.

I was aware of the war for a few years before that, and I'd heard of Watergate (but didn't really know what it was). But those weren't news stories to me; they were just background noise. The Nixon resignation was the first discrete event I noticed.

It's interesting to think about how I saw things then. The war was like the seasons of the year: winter, summer, winter; war, peace, war. Just a kind of interesting thing that happens in the world; not something anyone's responsible for.

I wonder if there are people who grow up and still feel that way.

My first news memory? The Berlin Wall going down. I was a little less than 4 at the time. I also distantly remember the senior Bush being in office.

Born in October of '78, and my earliest memory is also of the Challenger explosion. Or, I always thought it was, although looking at the date, I can't figure out why I was at day care when I found out, if it was a Tuesday. But I could swear that I was in all day day care at the place where I normally went after school, and we were watching movies during the day, and then when we went between the room with the TV and the usual activity room, someone mentioned the shuttle breaking up.
I have memories of things like the 84 presidential election, and Mt. St. Helens erupting, but I think those are because I was given some educational magazines that were out of date by a teacher when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, and I just read those over and over, as it was new news to me.

Kennedy's election; I was 6. My mother explained that Kennedy would be president starting on Inauguration Day. Nixon wouldn't be anything; or rather, he was vice president but only until Inauguration Day. I didn't know he was already vice president, so I thought that was his consolation prize for losing the election.

14 was a good age for watching the first moon landing.

I envy those who remember seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, because the closest thing to that I can dredge up is the Osmond Brothers on Andy Williams.

My earliest memories of public events from around 1972. I can remember a straw poll in my classroom for the presidential election -- Nixon by a landslide. I also remember being annoyed by the Watergate hearings.

I have a memory of seeing a moon landing on TV and being disappointed I couldn't see the astronauts through binoculars. I don't know which mission this was, though (last landing was in Dec. 1972).

Aquila @ 69: Add me to the born in '75/Charles & Di wedding contingent.

Oddly, I have two memories of the Challenger explosion: the true one (I've confirmed it with my mother), in which I was actually home from school that day and watching tv, and saw it happen live. In the other, I am in the school library media room and see it live there. The second one is clearly false--for one thing, I don't think the elementary school allowed kids to hang out watching tv during school hours, and for another, by 1986 we had moved and I wasn't at that school anymore. I must have seen something there important enough to conflate it with the Challenger, though--I wish I knew what it was.

But I do remember the launch of MTV--not sure what that says about my priorities...

Xopher @ 43 ... I remember having to type commands at a command prompt to get a computer to do anything. I know what "rm -r *" does when you type it from the root. I know what a root is. I can write a bubble sort without thinking about it. I programmed in FORTRAN IV, PASCAL, and Old C.

I'm amused that my first thought was "Don't you mean 'rm -rf *'. Trawling the Unix History timeline is always interesting to me - I caught up somewhere around SYSVR3, iirc - but might have touched earlier versions - and have used/maintained a distressing number of the listed variants.

I don't actually recall any news events in particular, but do very clearly remember returning from a long trip overseas somewhere around 8-or-9 years old, and realizing that what I was hearing on the radio was -real-, and the world wasn't a nice place at all.

Since we didn't have a television growing up, and news was only listened to at 6pm, it's not much of a surprise to me that I don't have many specific memories of 'noted' events - spoken word, especially the calmness of the radio announcer doesn't seem to have the same impact as visuals for me.

OTOH, I do recall 9/11 very clearly - like many others, I didn't end up going to work that day.

Prenatally, I might have some cellular recollection of the JFK assassination, given the way my mom has described her shock at the news. My earliest actual news memory is of the 1968 Presidential election, when I learned that the world contained "bad" (Nixon) and "good" (Humphrey). Interestingly, it's Nixon that figures strongly in my memory of that time - I had to think for a second before I remembered that it was Humphrey he beat that year.

My first memory of any kind is of the 1964 World's Fair, and it involved pizza. Specifically, waiting in line to get pizza. I was one and a half. Boy, I must have loved pizza.

I remember the Nixon-McGovern election in 1972. I was four-and-a-half. I wanted McGovern to win because he had a normal name, and Nixon had a weird name. I also remember thinking Watergate was a funny word, and not understanding how a gate could be made of water. Not sure what year that was.

I'm much younger than most of my sibs, so it may be that current events were topics of conversation at playtime more than they would be in a smaller family.

Challenger explosion, 5 and a half.

My uncle was minding my sister and I. He switched off my cartoons to watch the launch, because my grandparents were wintering in Kissemmee and hoping to see the launch in person. (As timing had it, they witnessed the whole thing from the parking lot of a grocery store. I have some of the pictures they took.)

I remember my uncle growing very quiet, and thinking that the fireworks were very pretty. It wasn't until several years later that I finally understood what it was I'd seen.

#102: I have sketchy toddler memories of the World's Fair with my mother and sister. Mostly wandering around the pavilions, seeing "It's a small world after all," feeling deprived of not getting to go up to the revolving restaurant, and seeing a "robot" stumping around a plaza. (A conical thing with a speaker grille up front and two legs; it just kind of rocked back and forth.)

The fair was heavily hyped, but I can't recall WHERE. Wonderama, maybe, or local news shows.

Apollo 8 and the Christmas Eve broadcast from the Moon.

I was in college when the Challenger blew. Witnessed two persons' reactions -- one cloddish laughter, the other a sort of ignorant triumphalism -- that soured forever my opinion of humanity.

CHip 82: Do you remember whistling at acoustic couplers to make the computer N miles away acknowledge your existence?

I remember people doing it; I could never whistle that well.

Jon 102: I remember my parents telling me that Humphrey was "the lesser of two evils."

Born July 1981.

I remember learning about the Challenger explosion, but that could have been up to a couple years after the fact - my parents stuck me in a bunch of "girls can be scientists too" programs as a kid, and one involved Sally Ride, so I'm sure it would have come up there.

I definitely remember hearing the Freude>>Freiheit "Ode to Joy" concert celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall on the radio in December 1989, though.

I was born in August '66.

If you count the weather report as news, I remember the news on TV in St. Louis, which I watched regularly - meaning it was sometime before 1970, which was when my parents moved to Israel. I remember looking at the map of the U.S. and thinking how it looked like a chicken with no head, and I remember really loving that image. I guess the picture of the lower 48 still makes me smile.

But that wasn't actually news; the first news item I remember was already in Israel - at the end of the October War, when news announcer Haim Yavin told us we could turn the lights on again at night. I sure hated having to close the windows and draw thick curtains over them after dark! I was seven, and I remember thinking that *that* war had been worse than the previous one (the 1970 war, not the '67 war. I don't remember that one.)

In retrospect, I think that both wars were just battles in a larger one. Depending on my reading for the day, I sometimes think that the larger war is actually a continuation of the Medes and the Persians... ...but when I was seven, I was just relieved about being allowed to have the windows open at night.

Born 1954.

Hmmm, let's see. Kennedy assassination, being told in school, yes. The funeral, yes. I'm another one that was annoyed at it preempting all TV channels. It was quite clear to me that they were all showing the *same thing*, and that was stupid. They could draw straws and the loser would have to show the boring funeral, the rest could run real programs.

I didn't associate Kennedy with "The President's Council on Physical Fitness" until later, or I would have been *glad* they shot him.

Several early rocket launches, including going to a neighbors house to watch it on TV (before we had one). Not sure this was Glenn, might have been the second one, or even a Gemini flight. Stuff before Kennedy, anyway.

Also Echo 2. That was made by a company from the town we lived in (though Wikipedia can't verify that; they don't seem to have anything on where it was made). The G.T. Schjeldahl Co. in Northfield MN. That was in 1960.

Not only do I remember COBOL, and carbon paper, and punch cards -- I've got some punch cards I punched within three feet of me right now (I had them out for scanning some time ago, and haven't thrown them away yet).

Some earlier family memories, not many.

Born in 1951. I have very vague memories of my parents doing political work for Adlai Stevenson, which would have been 1956.

I remember the Sputnik launch and the sense of how terrible it was that we were being beaten by the Russians, but my first clear political memory is watching the Kennedy/Nixon debates with my mother in 1959, and her being dispirited because I liked Nixon better than Kennedy. In retrospect, I have to wonder why I liked the funny-looking older guy rather than the charming younger one.

Mimi #100: Well, a lot of kids did see the Challenger explosion on TV as it happened, at school. There was a lot of educational tie-in programming with that one, what with the whole "First teacher in space" thing.

I was born in 1971. I was too young to remember the Whitlam dismissal. But I do remember the tail end of Cyclone Alby heading through the south-west of WA in 1977. Admittedly this is because it was after this had happened that I startled my teacher by being able to read the "news" lines she put up on the board about it, and then had my reading age tested, to discover I had a reading age of nine at age six. I put it down to having started reading at age two.

The next one which stuck with me was the state sesquicentennial (150 years) in 1979, when I was in year three. Oh, and Skylab landing, because it struck ground near the town where my mother's parents were living.

The first news event I can recall hearing about was when Newfoundland became a province of Canada. That was March