Where Were You?

I will never forget after Ronald Reagan was shot back in March of ’81, someone held up a paper the next day and on the front page in big bold letters it said, REAGAN SHOT.

My teacher said, ‘Class, very few times in history will you see a headline this big.  Sometimes it is good, most times, it is bad.”

I remember that day and that headline, vividly.

Which leads me to Monday, April 21st, 2014.  A year ago, it was the Boston Marathon bombings.

Where were you when you heard what had happened?

I was at home, getting ready to pick up my son and was checking twitter and some one tweeted that there was some kind of explosion at the Boston marathon.

I refreshed Twitter and all of these reports starting crossing my Time Line about the bombing.

I will never forget that moment.

And I will never forget where I was when other tragedies happened.

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Challenger Explosion

 

January of 1986, living in Nashville.  Out of school that day because of snow.  Getting ready to go sledding around Noon and TV happened to be on and watched the entire thing happen.

Still very surreal, 28 years later.

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First World Trade Center Bombing

March of 1993.  Just came in from working out at the old Club Vita on Murfreesboro Rd and was eating lunch and turned it on CNN and saw everything.  Will not resonate with a lot of people immediately, but I will never forget that moment.

 

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Oklahoma City Bombing

 

 

 

Was on a tour of channel 2 in 1995, a good 16 months before I started working there, and this horn goes off and the guy taking us around said, “Hold on, I will be right back,” and he never returned.

ABC News was breaking in with coverage of the bombing and the guy that was showing us around, had about 4 phones to his ears and talking to everyone of them at the same time.  I became fascinated with news at that point and stood in the corner and watched a newsroom get extremely busy.

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Columbine

 

April of 1999.  I was off from Channel 2 for 2 days because I had gotten a free lance job working for David Letterman.  He was doing a ‘Nashville’ based theme show and myself and Todd Dunn, were the cameraman.  We were sitting in a car with Biff Henderson at Centennial Park getting ready to do an interview when one of the writers with us said, “There has been some massive school shooting in Colorado.”  We sat there and turned on the radio and then more reports started coming in about what had happened.  We didn’t tape a single thing the rest of the day.

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Osama Bin Laden

 

 

I have written before about 9/11 where I was but it was May 1, 2011 and it was my son’s birthday and I just read him a book, tucked him in and grabbed my phone to check twitter, (shocker) and started seeing reports that President Obama was going to speak to the nation on National Security manner and almost immediately, reports started coming out that Bin Laden had been captured and killed.

I refreshed Twitter faster than I ever have and then all the news organizations started confirming it and waited until Obama’s speech around 10:45.  In fact, the HBO show, “The Newsroom,’ their best episode ever was about Bin Laden’s death and news surrounding it.

I thought of my teacher the next morning when I saw the headline of Bin Laden’s death.

“Very few times in history, will you see a headline this big.  Sometimes it is good, most times, it is bad.”

This one was good. Very good.

@BIGJOEONTHEGO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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