What's the First Big News Story You Were Aware Of As a Kid?

I vaguely remember when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot. So I guess the first big one was Apollo 11. I was taken camping in Yosemite that weekend and we heard about the landing driving back while listening to a Giants-Dodgers game. We watched the walk over at my grandparents' house and, since we didn't have a color TV yet, thought it was kind of cool it was in black and white only.

 

Vividly remember a radio broadcast saying the Russians had invaded Afghanistan. I was about three, but remember an image in my head of pilgrim type guys using a giant toothbrush to break down a castle door. However, I have no way of knowing if it was the real invasion or something on the radio later,

I do remember the eagles playing in the super bowl in 1981. I had gotten an Eagles "uniform" for Christmas and wore it every chance I got. By uniform, it was green sweat pants with a white long sleeve shirt that had Eagles on the front and a large 7 on the back. I thought I was Ron jaworski wearing that, I remember the game starting that day and then falling asleep. I excitedly ran down for breakfast that Monday morning. My dad told me the Eagles lost

 

This was probably the one that immediately pops to mind for me, which makes me feel like a dingus since I was 9.
I guess it just depends on what you consider a "big news story."
I remember the Phillies losing in the World Series in 1983; for some reason the Korean Airliner getting shot down by the Russians that same year; doing a mock election in 1984, when I was in third grade; Game 6 of the 1985 World Series; Watching Super Bowl XVIII (I lost my first tooth in the fourth quarter); and a whole bunch of other personal stuff.
I guess I was just a happy, sheltered little kid who didn't pay much attention to anything other than cartoons and sports when I was 7.

 

Every year, when ESPN did the Super Bowl highlights marathon, my dad would change the channel for 30 minutes when the Super Bowl XV episode came on. I don't think he ever watched that in his life. I was probably in my teens before I saw it.

 

Zodiac Killer in SF. Had me scared to just be home at night in our house.

 

Mount St. Helens was my first memory of an event on the news. I remember the time during the Iran Hostage Crisis, but can't say it was the news and it was right around the same time of the eruption.

During the hostage crisis my brother showed me this joke, for the lack of a better term, where you said 'I crawled, I walked, Iran' and as you said each phrase you would stick out a single finger. First your thumb, then your index finger, and finally the middle finger. Anybody else remember this?

 

There was a near-mutiny by the Apollo 7 crew because everybody had head colds and were in pissy moods, and the mission was just packed with too much stuff to do (TV broadcasts being one of them).

 

I was born in 1968, mine are Watergate (my great-grandparents watched every minute of the testimony on PBS) and the last US soldiers returning from Vietnam. I think they were both summer of 1973.

 

Nixon resigning.

Hard to say, though. Huggy mentioned the hostage in Munich in '72, and I'm inclined to say I remember that, but it's so hard to determine if it's a real memory or one created by seeing the video so many times over the years.

 

Plus, there was an absolute ton of pressure on Apollo 7. It was the first flight since the Apollo 1 tragedy and virtually the entire interior of the spacecraft had been redesigned.

If there had been any snags whatsoever on Apollo 7, the plan to send Apollo 8 around the moon in December gets rolled back, the momentum of the program stalls, and then in January there was a pretty decent chance that the White House gets taken over by Nixon, who hated JFK with the blazing fire of a zillion suns, and a setback on A7, even if only marginal, gives him the perfect excuse to pull the plug on the whole shebang, so as "not to risk the lives of our brave astronauts."

And even if Nixon resisted the temptation to deep-six the whole program, the golden legacy of JFK, a marginally-successful Apollo 7 probably makes another low-earth-orbit shakedown flight necessary, kicks the schedule back three months, and probably shifts the first landing attempt to A12 in October, which would be cutting the margin of the end-of-the-decade deadline down to a couple weeks.

So there was humungous pressure on Apollo 7 to bring home a flawless flight, and Schirra in particular saw the teevee broadcasts as a sideshow which simply increased their workload.

 

Wow, that's a day or so before they found that fifty year old piece of steak in his colon.

 

I vividly remember when LBJ announced he would not run. My Grandma lived with us and she yelled..."he isn't going to run, he isn't going to run". I just turned 6. I had some idea of what was going on in the world because my other grandma lived in Madison and I knew of the protests. She was a cool grandma, she was in her mid 60's and she marched with the kids in the protests.