Episode #37: My Real Life "You Are There" Moments

When I was in elementary school, which in those days was 1st - 6th grade, I remember I always enjoyed it when the teacher would roll the film projector into the class room on that small metal cart. We would spend about half an hour watching a film that would be recreating an event from American history. The narrator would briefly describe what we were about to see and in a deep voice he would look into the camera and say "AND YOU ARE THERE!" We watched several of these hokey films but the only ones I really remember were the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Gettysburg. The acting was pretty poor and lines were delivered in a weird sort of way, but they were kind of interesting and it broke up our regular school day. As long as these films did not interrupt one of our two daily recesses I liked watching them.

A week ago I shared a post on Facebook to start a thread about where you were and what you were doing on Nov. 22, 1963 which was 61 years earlier and the day of the assassination of JFK. There were several comments to my post and they prompted me to document my memory of that day and a few other significant events that had the attention of the entire world.

This event of November 22, 1963 was the first news story of consequence that I can remember in my young life. I had turned 6 years old in August of that year and started 1st grade a month later in Oak Cliff which is an area immediately southwest of downtown Dallas. We lived only about 5 miles from Dealey Plaza when this happened. That year November 22nd was on a Friday and it was just after lunch and I was in the restroom washing my hands and some older kid (who was probably  8 or 9 years old) said 'hey kid did you hear the President has been shot'? Being just 6 years old, this was a story that I could not fully comprehend and the only thing I could think of to say was is he dead? The other kid said he did not know and left. Even though I was only 6 years I do remember this event quite vividly.

The next day I remember all of the TV channels were covering this story and I just could not understand why all of the 3 or 4 channels that were available in those days were nothing but news and none of my regular Saturday morning cartoons were on. 

The pictures below are my photos of Dealey Plaza near downtown Dallas, an X marked in the middle of the street where the President was killed and the School Book Depository building where Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John Kennedy. I took these pictures in 2010 when I took Brad to this location on a day trip to downtown Dallas.

The photo below is of Brad at the monument there in the immediate area to commemorate the event and to honor of JFK.

July 20, 1969 was a day of monumental and historic significance on a scale that we will likely never see again. Barely eight years earlier in mid 1961 President John F. Kennedy promised to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely back home by the end of the decade. In retrospect it seemed to be an impossible task based on the scientific knowledge and available technology at that time. I have read reports that state our current cell phones have more computing ability than what was available for this launch, moon landing and return trip to earth. That is an amazing testament to those involved in this undertaking.

We had just moved from living in the city to the new home place in the country about 75 miles north only 10 days prior to the Apollo 11 lunar landing. As I noted in Episode #27 The Year I Became A Country Boy, when we moved in that year we had a couple of things that had to be completed as soon as possible, that being the completion of the septic system and no water coming from the well yet so we hauled water for a week or so. Facing those priorities, having a TV antenna was not the top of the list. The TV set we had was one of those furniture style types and would require an external antenna since it did not have "rabbit ears". At that time the TV had no picture however, we could get sound out of it. We had a small portable black and white TV with rabbit ears so we could get a picture but it had no sound, so we set the portable on top of the color set so we could watch and hear this moon landing. Since the telecast was in black and white anyway, it didn't matter that the color set wasn't working that day except the screen was smaller. We were all home and watched this together since July 20 that year was on a Sunday and the landing occurred around 3:15 that afternoon.

An interesting detail worth noting was the location of the lunar module (nick named The Eagle) landing, which was not the original planned site. As a matter of fact when Neil Armstrong took the controls to manually land The Eagle, they overshot the original location in that shallow crater in the area known as the Sea of Tranquility, and found their next best location nearby in the same area to safely and dramatically land on the moon. What we did not know at the time was the lunar module had only about 20 seconds of fuel left as it slowly descended to the surface of the moon. This makes the incredible landing story even more fascinating to me as the four of us sat there witnessing this historic event in a double wide mobile home in the middle of the country and we had to have two television sets to see and hear it happening live. And the Apollo 11 crew thought they had challenges. 😀😂

September 11, 2001 was an event that brought horror to every American and rightly so. While the attack on Pearl Harbor definitely was an attack on America and I certainly do not diminish the devastation of that event, but Hawaii was not a state at the time and is 8 hours by plane from the west coast of the US and New York City has been the largest city in the nation for over 30 years and recognized as the financial capital of the world. This attack hit home in a dynamic way due to the proximity of its location and the impact to the nation and the world. 

The day of this attack was a Tuesday morning, and I was in a staff meeting at the Redi~Mix corporate office in Carrollton. I had been a Vice President for this company for three years and during this time, nobody ever knocked on the conference room door so we were all surprised when it happened. The front desk secretary emerged through the door way and told us that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. Our thoughts were it must have been a small private plane and went back to the meeting. A few minutes later there was another knock on the door and we were told that a second plane had hit the WTC and they were both fully loaded 767 jets and a 757 jet had just hit the Pentagon. 

With this information we brought in a small TV set and watched the news for about 15 minutes or so until Bill said that we can't do anything about what had just happened and we have a business to run, so he turned off the TV and we went back to the meeting. I for one was uneasy about this decision and could not focus on the meeting any longer. As soon as it was over I left the office and called Carol Ann and we discussed what we knew. I called the school where the boys were in to see what if any action they were taking. I was told that the students had been informed and they were doing their best to keep the schedule as normal as possible. They said parents could pick their kids up if they wanted, but we chose to leave them there. The fear of what's next for our nation was very real.

Saturday morning February 1, 2003 finds me up early as usual and I had been drinking coffee and reading a book for a couple of hours and decided it was time to get ready and cook breakfast for Carol Ann and me. The house was  quiet since everyone was still in bed asleep. I had walked into the kitchen about 8 am, and suddenly there was a loud noise that was was louder than any sonic boom I had heard before. I thought it may have been a nearby explosion of some sort. It was so loud that the house shook and the dishes in the cabinet rattled. I looked out the kitchen window toward the road but couldn't see anything. It was so loud I just knew something catastrophic had happened and went outside for a look around for smoke or anything out of the ordinary. I did not find anything or hear any emergency vehicles and went back into the house surprised with what I heard there was nothing to see. 

A few hours later I saw on the news what I had heard was the space shuttle Columbia had broken apart and disintegrated as it was reentering Earth's atmosphere at an altitude of 40 miles and at a speed of 12,500 miles per hour. At that altitude and speed which was almost 210 miles per second, by the time I heard this massive sonic boom it was well out of sight which is why I did not see any evidence when I was outside looking around. Debris from the shuttle landed in the fields and undeveloped areas from east Texas to western central Louisiana.

 All seven crew members were killed as a result of the accident. The root cause of this terrible accident  was attributed to a piece of foam insulation that was damaged during launch hit the left wing which lead to catastrophic overheating during reentry. This was the second Space Shuttle mission to end in disaster, after the loss of the Challenger explosion which occurred just over a minute after it left the launch pad 17 years earlier in 1986.

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