What is the first big news story you remember from childhood?

Tiltsta

Tiltsta

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Moon landing? Reagan assassination? Berlin wall?

What is the first thing you remember from the news as a kid?

I bet we have witnessed some amazing things. Some of us have maybe participated in some of the history.

For me it was the fall of Saigon. It was 1975, and I was 5 years old. I remember watching it on TV, and my mom being really interested in it. I remember asking her why all those people were trying to get on a helicopter, and she explained they were trying to escape the communists because they had worked with the Americans. My parents are Dutch, but naturalized US citizens, and they have an insane hatred of communists. I don't really know why, but I'm guessing it is just part of being alive when the iron curtain descended across Germany and all that.

Saigon-hubert-van-es.jpg
 
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Tiltsta said:
Moon landing? Reagan assassination? Berlin wall?

What is the first thing you remember from the news as a kid?

For me it was the fall of Saigon. It was 1975, and I was 5 years old. I remember watching it on TV, and my mom being really interested in it. I remember asking her why all those people were trying to get on a helicopter, and she explained they were trying to escape the communists because they had worked with the Americans.

Saigon-hubert-van-es.jpg
Click to expand...

i was in the USAF when that happened. NOT a pretty day.......and days after.......the NVA murdered tens of thousands.

my first really big news story was when i was sent home from school in the afternoon of november 22, 1963
 
Looks like Kerigan/Harding wins it. Unless someone else mentions something I remember, but forgot that I remembered.
 
Kurt Cobain's suicide, probably. I was 11 and had only a few months before discovered MTV. I had broken my arm skateboarding a the day before and was stuck in bed.
 
That I remember now: Challenger. I was 7, so I really doubt it was the first I was aware of at the time. No idea.
 
I don't know if it is considered big, but the hillside strangler. I guess I was 6 or so when it hit the news. I remember my parents talking about it when they thought I wasn't listening and it scared the bejesus out of me.

The first one I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing was Reagan getting shot.
 
actually......maybe before that was watching the "ask not what your country can do for you" speech in january of 1961
 
Moon landing. Watched it live. Then Louis Armstrong dying (newspaper). Then Nixon resigning on TV.
 
First thing you remember now is fair game. I think we all have bits and pieces of childhood memories, but there are things that stick with you over time.
 
I was 4 1/2...my parents had us all gathered around the TV watching a shadowy figure walking on the moon...
 
i remember nikita kruschev pounding his shoe on the podium screaming about destroying america.
 
Wow,lots of kids here....Ha ha...I kid


Maybe team Canada beating Russia in hockey......

But by that time I was in grade 7.......
 
Everything in 1968, the whole year just blurs together. Olympics, assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Apollo 8, Vietnam crap.

I was 7, it was the first year I knew what year it was.
 
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