Where Were You When...?

It must be a generational thing. We each have our version of the question, the one that is always answered, “I’ll never forget where I was when...” For some it’s “...when I watched the twin towers fall.” For others it might be “...when man first walked on the moon,” or “...when the shuttle exploded” or “...when Elvis died.” Whatever it is about, it really refers to that singular event that changed your view of the world forever . It is so shocking that everything about that moment engraves itself indelibly in your memory. For me, it’s “Where were you when JFK was shot?”

I was in tenth grade Biology class, at Park Rapids High School, when the Principal made the announcement over the P A system.

Had it been for anything else, it would have been a welcome break form the classroom routine. Actually, calling it a Biology class was a misnomer, I learned many years later. It was properly called a taxonomy class. We spend a whole year reading from the overhead projector, copying the outline down verbatim and learning it by rote - kingdom, class, phylum, family, genus, species, probably not in that order - while the teacher droned on, filling in a few details here and there in an attempt to make it more understandable. He was also the school coach, obviously hired for his coaching skills. We learned the difference between deciduous and coniferous trees, stamens and pistils, endo- and exoskeletons, and that spiders weren’t insects. Page after page was filled in our notebooks, while one plastic sheet replaced the last on the projector. I thought I hated Biology until I encountered a real class of it in college and found out it was fascinating.

The two highlights in class were the two dissections we were allowed/required to perform. In teams. Ick! Teams meant you likely didn’t actually get to do anything but watch, and had to put up with however incompetent and/or squeamish your lab partners were. The first dissection was on giant worms. Wait! What? Worms had parts? Now I realize just how stupid that reaction is, coming from an otherwise intelligent 10th grader, but I had been thoughtlessly tearing worms in bits for fishing since I was six, since more than a bit was wasteful, what with perch expertly nibbling the worm off the hook without actually getting caught. In all those years I hadn’t noticed any “parts”. And truth be told, there wasn’t much to see in class either, having to look over and between shoulders. Just another disappointment.

The second dissection was on frogs, way more interesting than worms. These definitely had parts, although the limitations of working in teams still held. The only thing that bothered me with these was that they were not killed before we started wielding our scalpels, but the coach spouted a bit of nonsense which basically boiled down to “I know best. I’m the teacher. Get on with it.” So we did. I do hope someday we’ll all be forgiven.

But that day, all we were doing was copying down another page of outline. I have no idea what it was, and care even less. I still can clearly see the projector, the screen at the front of the room it was shown on, the desks where we sat, the grill over the PA box up in the corner of the room that we stared at as though we might learn more that way. A Presidential assassination meant Lincoln, or McKinley, something so impossibly far back in history as to be unreal. It couldn’t be part of our lives! Yet here it was. Life had just changed for all of us.

I recently became annoyed at some talking head who was blithely yammering on about how we all had these indelible memories of where we were when we heard... followed by a whole string of events which I of course remember, but have no clue about where I was at the time. After JFK, after all, Bobby and Martin, tragic as they were, simply were additional tragedies. Assassination wasn’t earth-shattering any more. It had already been done. The first steps on the moon were just the culmination of a long series of launches with that as the end goal. It was expected. Widely celebrated, yes, but expected.

A few events did stand out. When Challenger blew up in '86, I was in my car approaching the IDS Tower in Minneapolis, getting ready to park. We were still on dispatch radio then, so had to listen to that instead of a standard car radio with music and news. Phil, or #316, better known as all drivers were by his number, came over the air with the announcement during a moment when the dispatcher was on break. He was a bit of a blowhard at times, so I hoped for a while it wasn’t true, but found out it was. The pictures of that crazy corkscrew smoke plume, seen later on TV, are also etched on my mind. The Columbia disaster, however, leaves me no picture of my where and when. It had been done already. Nothing changed in my personal world.

9/11 also stands out. While Oklahoma City was history, this was a story that started hesitantly and became more horrific as the day progressed. This was an attack, not home grown, not over in a single blast, but seemingly endless, and after the first cautious reports, definitely terrorism. So I know it was a beautiful sunny day, clear blue sky, and what company lobby in Stillwater I was in making a pick up when the news broke, and which church in Wayzata I was delivering to where I first saw a TV monitor and stood riveted while floor after floor pancaked down onto the next onto the next until all disappeared behind clouds of dust and smoke. About this too, I will always be able to say, “I will never forget where I was when....”

Where were you?