Modern Vespa

Sorry, I just hijacked this thread started in Scooter Gallery. It's a topic that's probably been discussed before over the years, but it's interesting all the same. Those momentus occasions in history like the shooting of JFK and the death of Princess Diana.

9/11

Weirdly, on the morning of 9/11 I was on the phone trying to book a shipping container from Liverpool to New York. It was around 1pm UK time and unaware of what was happening. The (UK) booking agent on the phone said you want to turn on your TV as there were some terrible things starting to happen stateside.

I finished booking my container and was unable to continue working for the rest of the day horrified at what was unfolding.

I was in Istanbul and supposed to fly to JFK. I got a flight to London the next day but could not fly to New York for about a week when they reopened the route. There were tourists in Turkey at the airport complaining about the delays from the security who had no idea what had happened. It was a strange flight into JFK as the plane was pretty much empty. I remember landing with a whiskey in my hand and no seat belt on and nobody seem to care.

My wife and I were getting ready to go to the airport to fly to Savannah, Georgia, when the first plane hit. The second plane hit while we were actually en route to the airport, and as we listened to the radio, it became apparent that we weren't going to be going to Savannah that day. We turned around and went home, very much in shock.

Dianna's death was Sunday morning we lived in Bowden Manchester at the time just been to buy the papers found out about it then. About 8am told wife and then watched the news unfold. 9/11 was at work but watched in disbelief when I got home. lived in Northwich Cheshire then. Shocking is a word that doesn't cover the events.

On 9/11 I was at home listening to my local NPR station when the news of the first plane hitting the WTC came on. I turned on the TV and saw the second plane hit.

I was also at home watching when the Challenger space shuttle disaster occurred. I was a teacher at the time and, somewhat churlishly, I was disgruntled that a teacher was on board and it wasn't me. Silly, I know.

Both events shocked and saddened me deeply.

I found out that JFK had been assassinated when my 10th grade English teacher announced it to the class. She then broke down in tears. As a 15-year-old kid I didn't fully comprehend the momentousness of the event. The summer before, I shook hands with Vice President Lyndon Johnson as he walked through Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen on a state visit. He had two guards who let anyone come up and talk with him. Little did I know...

When RFK was killed, the band I was in played for a high school prom four days later in the same space. We walked through the very hallway where he was shot.

I was driving from Palatka, FL to Lake City, FL to do a web app training for teachers and principals. I was listening to Howard Stern. He was up to his usual shenanigans when the first report of an explosion came in. They could see it from their studio. Stern called it a terrorist attack just a few moments later when it was confirmed a second plane was involved.

When I got to the PC lab I turned on the TV just as the first tower collapsed. Needless to say training was cancelled.

It starts at about the 6 minute mark.

For Challenger I was stationed in Greenland. We had just acquired Challenger with the tracking radar as it cleared the horizon then it disappeared. We thought the radar malfunctioned. It was about 30 minutes until Space Command notified us of what happened.

Oddly I don't remember where I was when Diana passed.

I was driving to work (at the Eastside Federal complex in Portland). When I turned on the car radio, the South Tower had just collapsed. While I was listening to accounts of all that had happened, the North Tower collapsed. When I got to the parking entrance to the Federal complex, a security guard told me the buildings had been closed for security reasons, so I turned around and drove home. A strange and shocking day. A fellow that I knew and worked with was on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.

When Challenger was lost I saw it in my college dorm common room as I was walking through headed to my political science class. Missed class as we were all just stunned. Heard the news about Princess Diana as we were loading up the UHaul to move from San Diego to Louisville. It was odd, even the dog started whimpering. For 9-11 I was getting ready to head in to DC for work. Missed work that day too just watching all the news. All three were just surreal to me.

I was at Burning Man when Diana died. This was in 1997, and nobody at Burning Man really had any meaningful connections to the outside world, so rumors were trickling in word-of-mouth from people who were arriving at the event late.

Then we heard that it was just a rumor being spread by the Bureau of Misinformation, so we really didn't know what to believe.

We didn't get the full story until we were on our way back home, and could actually tune in some radio stations.

On 9/11 I was in Queens working at the intersection of the Long Island Expressway and the Cross Island Parkway. First the air cleared of planes as flights into Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark were halted. Then traffic disappeared on the LIE as traffic was halted and was First responders only. Then Nassau County Police started coming in to cover for the NYPD in the area as City Cops moved towards Manhattan.

Ten days later I was transferred to a trailer at the corner of Church and Liberty Streets opposite the remains of South Tower. I worked as an Office Manager for the Construction Management firm overseeing Tully Construction as they cleared Tower debris in their quadrant. I was there for a month before resigning and moving to upstate NY. It was a pretty eerie sight.

On 9/11 I was about 1000 feet away, calculating from what today we would call "map view," in the south tower of the World Financial Center, across the street from the WTC. My building was evacuated by stairwell in a very orderly fashion after the second plane hit. I distinctly remember riding the escalator down the last half-story to the outdoor exit with a group of Japanese employees of Nomura Bank. Usually New Yorkers walk up and down moving escalators, they don't stand on them. But the Japanese stand and, being stuck in a gaggle of them, I did too. Got outside, looked around, obviously could not help the situation and didn't want to hang around waiting for it to get worse, chatted briefly with a college friend standing on the sidewalk - we hadn't seen each other in five or six years - and walked two hours home to the upper east side. I think I'd been walking about 15 minutes when the first tower fell.

My father was in the AirForce, aircrew, stationed in W Palm Beach FLA. during Cuban missle crisis

Our school class practiced getting under our desk. Dad didn't come home for says.

We were at an on base theater when Dad was stationed at SHAPE, in Paris. Lights came up, movie stopped when Kennedy was shot. Dad disappeared again for days. Do not remember the name of movie.

I was on a ladder building an office in a Child Support Enforcement bldg, lady in nearby cube had radio on when planes hit in NYC.
Massive lines formed at gas stations.....all were gone, back to normal the next sunrise.

Watching TV w/wife when news of Princess Di broke in.

O.S.

On 9/11 I had awakened and showered as normal, then walked into the living room and saw the first tower burning. I rode to work, where the break room TV (and many screens) were showing the second plane hit. People were in and out of the break room all day to watch. Little work was done.

I had tickets for a flight to Boston on 9/14. Newscasters warned of terrible lines and three-hour waits. I was dropped off at the curb nearly three hours early, at 5am, and was at the gate 5 minutes later. As it turned out, few were flying. But I ended up on some list, and could not get a boarding pass online for some years.

On the evening of 9/11 (South African time) I was in a band booked to play a gig at a country club. We set up, did sound checks and had a drink. When we went back to the venue for the dinner-dance it was empty except for a few silent and clearly sad people. The organisers came to us and said they doubted if the event would continue and suggested we go into the lounge area where there was a large screen TV.
The event did go ahead with the food being served and we just played background music for the meal.
A colleague of mine was on an international flight home from Johannesburg that evening. With the chaos in the airline sector after the Blue Sky order, it took him four days to get there.

Diana died overnight so I heard it on radio news drinking coffee. I was so shocked I didn't even go on my morning bike ride.
I watched her funeral procession live on TV and that total silence from the many thousands of people lining the route of her last trip to the estate made me weep.
Charles consumed his first wife after she bore him "the heir and a spare."
I don't like his second wife.

The Challenger tragedy was covered in our TV news broadcasts so I would have been watching before supper. In typical South African dark humour when dealing with tragic events, it gave an alternative meaning to NASA - Need Another Seven Astronauts.
Brave people, astronauts. RIP.

Challenger - My Senior year of HS. I was in Great Books class (world literature) when it happened, and the principal came on over the PA system to inform us of the explosion, and hold a moment of silence for the crew. Later in the day in my Physics class, we spent the period watching the VHS recording the teacher had made of it live as it happened, and he kept running it in slow motion, even the parts that were broadcast in slow motion, to find out if he could see any more detail. Looking back on it, that was extremely morbid, and probably very inappropriate, but at the time I didn't think anything of it.

Diana - Don't remember specifically what I was doing. I know that a drinking buddy of mine was extremely upset by it that night, and had to be consoled at the bar.

9/11 - I was asleep. I had been fired from my job about a month earlier, and was dealing with what I now understand was depression over it. I vaguely remember partially waking up when my girlfriend (now wife) called and left a message on my answering machine about "planes crashing into buildings." When I woke up later that afternoon, I got on the computer, and my web start page had a news article with the title of "list of crashed planes." I thought, "WTF" and turned the TV on CNN.

9/11-My better half and I departed DC for Seattle at 7:30 am for a vacation. We were on a USAir cheap ticket so we had to change planes in Pittsburgh. At 9:30am, we were about to taxi but were asked to deplane and take our stuff.
We watched the second plane hit on the bar tv next to our gate. Ten minutes later, all the shops started shutting their gates, and an announcer told everyone to go to baggage claim because the airport would be closing in an hour. What a scramble. No rental cars or ground transport of any kind, until a kindly American Airlines flight attendant offered us a ride to their hotel on a company shuttle. We took Amtrak back to DC the next morning (at a leisurely 20 mph).
A week later, I was in Uzbekistan coordinating some of the incoming military support flights for the buildup.

Princess Diana-overseas managing logistics flights for State

JFK-First grade, but I remember the adults around me reacting.

Challenger-Coming back from playing racquetball with a couple of my flight crew mates at Dobbins AFB (suburban Atlanta-the Lockheed Georgia plant).

Hmm... For JFK's death I was about 9 years old, living in Montana - he had visited Great Falls not so long before. I recall teachers at school being very upset, and my mother crying in the kitchen of our house when I got home.

When Challenger was destroyed, I was living in California, had been working in the back yard to clean up a few things, and came inside to check on the tv and see how was going. I was just horrified when I turned it on...

9/11 I was at the Pentagon, taking care of some business. Left the building and drove away approximately 10-12 minutes before the airplane arrived. I had no idea what had happened, until I got to my office - which happened to be at the FAA Command Center near Dulles Airport. My co-workers were concerned that I was hurt or dead when I came strolling into the office. I went out onto the floor and watched the towers fall... Horrible. I was also there when the airspace was shut down and turned over to NORAD. Spent the next couple of days handling phone calls from frustrated military aircrews who'd been forced to land when the airspace was closed - they weren't allowed to return to base for about 4 days....

I was at my parent's home when Bambi's mother was shot.


Hope no one minds me interjecting with a Canadian perspective. Carry on...

I got reading the post and went back to look, I am a new forum member and was browsing through the gallery and saw the post about the 9-11 ride and posted about where I was, and how since I was in traffic on a motorcycle and traffic was acting weird I knew something was up I just didn't know what. Pretty cool thread, for me it was about knowing something was up by the way people were behaving while driving their cars. To survive as a motorcyclist or scooterist as the case may be I think pattern recognition is huge. At work where safety is a huge topic they always say stay out of pinch points but dodging the cars on the road using them as a shield is a good idea and also since the cars don't see us but do see the other cars sometimes a pinch point is the safest place to be.

I will never forget that day! I was in Los Angeles California on my way to work in downtown LA from where I lived at the time in San Pedro.

I was riding my motorcycle to work as I did many days but on this day I knew something was up from the way the traffic was behaving. It was crowded as usual but people were just driving different, they were leaving room from the vehicle in front of them using their turn signals (the last thing you want to do in rush hour traffic is use your turn signal and let someone know you are trying to get over they will block you) and letting people merge, generally acting like good polite citizens which is just super weird in rush hour traffic.

When I got to work in downtown is when I found out what had happened, and since we were downtown it was determined that we might be a target as well so we were all told to go home, no work that day.

I always ask when the subject comes up where were you when it happened, I was on my bike on my way to work for a 7:00 AM start Pacific time.

I had always had a nice wave radio in the office to provide some pleasant background
atmosphere music. The week before 9/11, I brought in a television for others in
agency to watch the news. I had just turned on the TV and Wow - heavy crap
is happening. We spent the rest of the day glued to the TV.

JFK, I was in High School in class. The teacher announced his death. The principal
came on the public address system to inform everyone and closed the school.

Challenger and Diana - evening news.

Bob Copeland

Don't remember. Not a big deal. Neither affected me directly.
I have also missed a few oil crises and two world financial ones.

Challenger explosion, I was sking in Sun Valley Idaho. I'd come in earlier than usual after a time on one of the back bowls.

9/11 ironing some clothing in a B&B in San Francisco waiting for it to get late enough that breakfast would be available when I went out to check out whether or not to accept a job transfer. Had the TV on since I was still on Texas time so had on an early morning local version of GMA when they switched live feed of GMA in NY showing the first plane hit. Saw the second plane hit "live" as it happened.

JKF, in elementary school. No idea when Diana was killed.

I was in Magdeburg, Germany. In a shopping center/mall and happened to near the TV section of the store. It was live on all the screens just after the first plane hit. The entire store froze in shock. A few days afterwards there was a parade of firemen and police honoring the fallen.

I was older than I thought with Challenger. I remember being in the kitchen with Mum, hearing it on the radio. Looking up the dates it was probably school summer holidays.

For 9/11 I woke to hear the news on the radio. The lovely lady I was dating at the time worked now and then at the Pentagon so I spent the morning finding out if she was OK, yes she was. Two weeks later I flew in to New York on a mostly empty plane for a weekend conference.

On vacation at the Jersey shore and was waiting in a chair for a haircut. The barbers mothers calls him on the phone, tells him to turn on the news a plane hit the WTC. He turns it on and the reporters are jabbering how it must have been little plane because it's such a nice day a commercial plane couldn't have hit it.

Seconds later I watched it live as the second plane hit. I blurted out, "fu***** A****" I knew exactly what happened.

All afternoon I had my beach chair facing north. You could see a dark purple/black smoke blowing eastward across Long Island.

Never forget, never forgive.

9/11: I was at work at Quest Communications in the Network division. We all went to the lunchroom where there was a TV after the first strike and watched. After a couple of hours of us being unproductive and trying to pull up slow loading news from CNN were told all non-essential workers were to go home since right below us was the primary internet hub for the twin cities at the time and they figured we might be a target. My wife was in Germany with her sister on vacation and I desperately tried to get in touch with her. I never missed her so much. She was lucky in that the airports opened on the day she was scheduled to return. I dealt with the kids in a zombie-like trance till she got home.

Space Shuttle: At the time I was working for Honeywell in the military avionics area. Once word got out of the explosion, a miracle happened and TVs came out of all sorts of hiding places. (It was illegal to have a TV/Radio in the secured building). Many of my colleagues had worked on the space shuttle program and they just stared at the screens in silence.

On 9/11, I was in my 10th floor corner office facing north, west, and south in downtown Brooklyn. I was walking past a row of offices when a paralegal yelled out. Smoke was pouring out of the north tower. I returned to my office and turned on the television. There was very little in the way of information accurate or otherwise.
I stood staring out my windows when I saw a plane low in the sky coming from the south. My mind was trying to figure out why it was so low. I recognized the dull gray paint as belonging to United Airlines. It was a two engine plane, but my inability to judge the size (737?, 767?) was due to having never seen an aircraft flying so low near Manhattan.
My colleague was not ten feet from me and he was watching the TV. I saw the plane strike the south side of the South Tower and seemingly pass right through. I immediately screamed, and it drew the attention of my colleague who hadn't seen the plane crash as he was looking at the TV. One thing I remember clearly was the stupidity of the local news anchor who wondered aloud whether the air traffic control system might be causing planes to fly into the buildings.
Having lived through the 1993 WTC bombing, this was obviously terrorism writ large.
I watched dozens of fire trucks on Adam's Street pass below my windows, heading onto the Brooklyn Bridge.
My attention turned to my Deputy, who was always late to work. He lived, with his wife and six-week old daughter, in an apartment building two blocks south of the South Tower. I was able to get him on the phone. We talked about what might happen, and I suggested getting out now and heading south. Stupidly, I was thinking that if the towers collapsed, they would do so in one direction or another like a child's Erector Set. It never occurred to me that they would implode straight down.
As we debated what he and his family should do, we witnessed the South Tower collapse strait down and a cloud of dust rise into the brilliant cloudless blue sky. In my last conversation with my Deputy before the cell service failed, he told me that his attempt to navigate the dark staircase of his building had failed; he came back to get his wife and daughter to try the second staircase. He mentioned that a couple of his apartment windows had broken and particles of debris were coming in. I was not able to speak with him again until quite a bit later, when he reached me by phone to report that they were safely on a bus they had boarded near Battery Park and heading north on the FDR Drive. I then called his father-in-law to report they were okay. He hadn't been able to reach them and thought they had died. I will never forget his reaction to the great news.
Now, several colleagues sat around my office. One was an attorney who had moved from Dallas to be a prosecutor in New York. Her first cousin had also made the journey; he was some sort of finance guy whose office, she knew, was on one of the top floors of the WTC. When the second tower came down, she knew he was gone. Never before or since have I seen that instantaneous grief.

I remember that day very well.

Here in Europe it was already after noon and I was in a quite tough 3 hr meeting on future strategic projects. After the meeting we were told by colleagues that a plane flew into the WTC building.

I thought probably a Cessna thing or so that accidentily crashed in one of the towers and checked the news. It was something different.

The rest of the day we were checking all kind of news media to follow what was going on, amazed.