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What were you watching when.....?

I never knew about the Challenger until at least 1 pm ET that Tuesday afternoon. I was home sick from school in Maine with the flu. My two brothers got home and said they mentioned it on the high school's P.A. system. :(

As for September 11, 2001...I was at Hartford's Union Station (Amtrak/Greyhound/Peter Pan) at 8:46 AM ET that morning. :(
 
KML-224 said:
I never knew about the Challenger until at least 1 pm ET that Tuesday afternoon. :(
(
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I was home for Challenger. I had started a VHS recording for my roommate who wanted to see the launch, but had worked late the night before.

I was rolling on the Discovery channel, but it was just a raw feed from NASA select, so I had a very clean recording of the incident without commentary or graphics.
 
RadioPatrol said:
http://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/lest...hile-reporting-on-california-wildfires/351380

The 2017 Southern California Wildfires. I seen this first on Newson App and KABC-TV was the one airing the fires for the app.
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Oddly enough I saw this first in the Facebook group about pet rats. It seemed a lot of people with rats had to leave and of course they had their phones with them to record."..hey this is Jon and Lisa with our rats Marcy and Darcy we are leaving our home due to the fires"...and of course ( again ) they took pics of the actual fire. No word if any of these people returned...of course **sigh**.
 
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4rRuqyggWoo

The SLA shootings in the 1970's aircheck. The mass shooting involving the SLA and Patty Hearst was then the largest Mass Shooting in California history. Note the SLA mass shooting was later over shadowed by the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting and that became the biggest one in California history.

Note this was KABC coverage of the mass shooting.
 
I wonder if any footage of the 1974 TWA jet crash in Berryville, Virginia exist ?? I remember seeing this on then WMAL channel 7 in DC back then. For what it worth I had an Aunt ( RIP ) who lived near the crash site and she got into a huge fight with WTTG in DC because they went on her property without her OK.
 
This is such a fascinating thread, I've enjoyed reading all the previous posts.

I was born in 1980 so obviously I don't remember anything prior to that and was far too young to remember the shootings of John Lennon, Reagan, the Pope or the massacre of U.S. Marines in Beirut. Probably the first significant event I remember, and just barely, is the Challenger explosion - I was not yet six years old at the time and I seem to remember getting very upset when I heard that a school teacher was among those killed, because I somehow thought that maybe my kindergarten teacher, whom I adored, had been the one killed!

Some years later, my fourth-grade teacher had us learn and sing "Flying for Me," the song John Denver (who would have been killed in that tragedy if his dream of wanting to be the first civilian in space had been fulfilled) wrote and recorded in tribute to the Challenger astronauts. I think that may have been the first time I realized the enormity of what had happened.

Some other significant events I can remember where I got the first word from broadcast media:
- The death of Princess Diana. I didn't hear the news until late that Sunday morning, but when I finally did hear it, it was on a CBC radio station out of southwestern Ontario. I had had a friend in middle school who was obsessed with Princess Di, so I can only imagine how he felt that day.
- A few months after that, the death of Sonny Bono. I had to get up early for high school and was usually up early enough to catch the beginning of NPR's Morning Edition, and I recall it being the top story. Some of my classmates made jokes about it, which I thought was absolutely terrible of them. A few days later I was home sick from school and watched the funeral on CNN with my mother, and saw Cher's emotional eulogy delivered live. Cher was magnificent that day.
- Other celebrity or noteworthy citizen deaths I remember first hearing about on radio or TV: Aaliyah, Barry White, James Brown, Beatrice Arthur (as a big Golden Girls fan, that was a shock, since she'd never announced she was even sick), and Teddy Kennedy. Also the assassination of Pakistani stateswoman Benazir Bhutto. But none of them affected me as much as Whitney Houston, which I heard about the evening it happened while flipping through the channels and coming across the continuous coverage on CNN. That floored me more than any other celebrity death in my life, more even than Michael Jackson's or Prince's. The AC station in Lansing, Michigan, did all-retro weekends at that time, but when I tuned in on my way to the store that Sunday morning, they were playing Whitney's 2009 ballad "I Look to You," and that, I think, was when the enormity of it hit me.
- And of course, the mother of them all, 9/11. I turned on the TV as I got ready for my 9:00 class that morning, and couldn't believe what I was seeing was real. I went to class as usual, and of course none of us could think of or talk about anything else. When the teacher came into the room, she announced that she was canceling class; she was obviously as shaken up as the rest of us. I also recall that the college cancelled all other classes that day. My friend and I solemnly proceeded to the fast-food diner in the student union to watch President Bush address the nation. I spent the rest of that day in a daze, of course. Not to mention terrified - I didn't think terrorists would bother to attack Grand Rapids, Michigan, but we've learned in the years since that terrorists are adept at striking where they're least expected.
- Hurricane Katrina. I was vacationing in northern Michigan at the time the grim statistics about the storm's appalling death toll were coming to light, and I remember shaking my head that a disaster with such a high death toll could still occur in the 21st century! Speaking of appalling death tolls, there was also the Japan earthquake and tsunami in 2011. I was getting ready for a job interview as I watched the tragic scenes unfolding in the Tohoku region that day. I didn't get the job and that might have been because I was so shaken up and could barely think of anything else.
- The Pulse nightclub tragedy. It happened the night before my cousin, who had recently been married in South Carolina, was to host a reception for family who weren't able to attend the wedding. My mother was up before I was and let me know what happened as I made breakfast. I was supposed to read a prayer at the reception, and my heart was not in it, but I went through with it anyway, but otherwise spent most of that day glued to NPR coverage of the shootings. As I am gay and also have many close friends who are, I couldn't help feeling that but for the grace of God it could have been any of us.

Probably the only moment in my life I remember seeing the first bulletins of breaking news was with the Bastille Day terrorist attacks in Paris. I believe I was watching "Judge Judy" on my local Fox affiliate when Fox News broke in with bulletins.

Needless to say, I'm quite fascinated with "breaking news" reports broadcast at the moment a major story breaks, and I've often sought them out on YouTube and tried to imagine myself in the place of a listener or viewer hearing or seeing that news for the first time and what I would have felt or thought. The ones that have fascinated me the most include the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and natural disasters such as the 1974 tornado Super Outbreak, the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.
 
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