Where were you when… (Part One: Introduction)

A man landed on the moon? When Kennedy was shot? When Saigon fell?

When I was ‘one of those young kids’ at *** News (you got a 1 in 3 chance), I heard these questions all the time. Actually, like Jeopardy, you always got the answer first. Some crusty cameraman would be lounging in the newsroom on a slow Saturday and start reminiscing about the fall of Saigon, when he was hanging out the back of a Huey, a producer holding on to his jacket so he didn’t fall out of the bird. Someone else would chime in that they were in Hong Kong, waiting for the canisters of yesterday’s film to arrive. And so on around the room, until they got to me...

Some senior producer would look at me with rheumy-eyed amusement and inquire where I had been on April 30th, 1975. And I would be forced to smile and say, with all the twenty-two year old moxie I could summon, that I was “not yet conceived.” This would set off a chorus of groans, rueful laughter and other variations on the basic “I’m so f***ing old” theme. Then I would blush, wave and scoot out of the room as fast as humanly possible.

But as the years went by, I began to accumulate my own list of “where were you when” moments. 

When JFK Jr’s plane went missing over the Atlantic, I was on the West Side Highway, late to my weekend shift as a desk assistant in radio. On Y2K, I was ladling carrot-ginger soup into martini glasses, dinner party hostess to the seven or so people in all of New York City who didn’t make plans that night. (Most were journalists who figured they’d be called in when the world went to hell, and didn’t want to be stuck in the rafters of Madison Square Garden watching Billy Joel).

Of course, like everyone else in New York, my defining “where were you when” moment arrived bright and early on September 11, 2001. All these years later, it’s still the first thing anyone who’s not from New York asks you, when they find out you used to live there. New Yorkers don’t ask; they just remember.

I left New York soon after September 11th, for a job in the *** Los Angeles Bureau, (but really for a nice guy, and a chance not to be a 'crazy New Yorker’ for the rest of my life). As an associate producer, I spent most of my time in the field, so I was able to experience more of those memorable “where were you’s.”

When the space shuttle Columbia exploded, I was on vacation in San Francisco with my mom. The morning after a spectacular meal at Chez Panisse, I was awakened at 7am by a 99 mph fastball phone call from my LA bureau chief:

“ThespaceshuttleColumbiaexplodedoverTexas,vacationcancelled,gettotheairportflytoHouston.” Click.

The day before the U.S. invaded Iraq, I got a phone call from my former boss in New York, who told me to get on a plane to come “staff the war.” When the invasion began, I was sitting back in my old spot on the foreign desk, watching green streaks of light across the Baghdad sky.


I stayed in New York a month, at which point I was sent home. The war, of course, did not get sent home.

Ninety percent of the time, the unifying theme of these “where were you when” moments is tragedy. The very purpose of the question is to share collective grief, and for those who weren’t there to somehow borrow the pain of someone who was.

Much rarer is the moment of collective joy. A man walked on the moon and a nation rejoiced. The Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series and Red Sox Nation wept tears of joy and disbelief.

And then there’s November 4th, 2008. The day Barack Obama defeated John McCain to become the next president of the United States, and the first black president in the history of the country. 

A “where were you when” moment if there ever was one. But this moment was unique, not only for its historical significance, but because it was as joyful for one half of the country as it was tragic for the other.

From the media coverage that night, (especially the Happy Hyperbolists on MSNBC), you would be hard pressed to say that anyone in the country saw Obama’s victory as anything less than a history-making, wrong-righting, love-fest. Black! White! Young! Old! Gay! Straight! Dead! Alive! And in violation of my paint thin code of journalistic objectivity, I wanted to join the jumping and shouting and crying and hugging and (as Governor Ahnuld would say) “all of dese tings”.

But I couldn’t. Because where was I on November 4th, 2008?

In Arizona. With the Republicans...

Click here for Part Two: Aimless in Arizona