May 25, 1979 was the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. For me it was the first paid holiday of my working life as I had begun my career in advertising just six weeks earlier (at New York ad agency Scali McCabe Sloves). I was going out to Hicksville on Long Island to spend the holiday weekend with a friend. As I was on my way to Penn Station after leaving the office I saw the headlines of the New York Post and Daily News reporting a plane crash in Chicago a few hours earlier. American Airlines Flight 191 crashed less than a minute after take-off from O'Hare Airport. All 279 on board were killed, making it the deadliest air crash in U.S. aviation history.
What made this disaster even more chilling was the fact that there were photos of the plane as it crashed and exploded. This was less than a year after another deadly plane crash was photographed, the mid-air collison between a Southwest Pacific passenger jet and a private plane over the skies of San Diego on September 25, 1978. And in later years there were a number of crashes captured on video, e.g. the crash landing in July 1989 of United Flight 231 in Sioux City, Iowa, and the deliberate crashing of United Flight 175 into the south tower of the World Trade Center on 9-11, an event witnessed by millions on live TV.
Another tragedy also occurred on May 25, 1979. That morning 6-year old Etan Patz vanished while walking to school alone in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. He was never seen again and his disappearance hung heavily on New Yorkers for the rest of the year. But as the 33rd anniversary of this unsolved case approached there were indications that a resolution might finally be at hand.
Of all the natural disasters that wrack our planet a volcanic eruption seems the most exotic, something I expect in the Andes or Pacific islands (or Pompeii) - but not in the U.S. of the 20th century. But on the morning of May 18, 1980 Mount St. Helens, a largely inactive volcano straddling the border of Oregon and Washington erupted. And although it was a frightening occurrence for those living in the Pacific Northwest I don't think many of us living in the East appreciated how serious a disaster the eruption was. One photo etched in my memory showed a young boy who had been asphyxiated lying face-up in the back of a pickup truck covered in ash. In total more than 60 people died from the eruption.
My memory of the disaster is linked to my first visit to Provincetown, a largely gay resort at the tip of Cape Cod. It was Memorial Day weekend and I drove there with my boyfriend Gordon. We left from Poughkeepsie (he lived there and I took the train up from NYC after work) and drove there on Friday night. This holiday trip was memorable because it was the first time I tried marijuana - and it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Rather than smoke it Gordon put the pot in a Pepperidge Farm chocolate sandwich cookie (which I don't think they make anymore). I became paranoid, which wasn't a nice feeling, especially in unfamiliar surroundings. I remember thinking that two female friends of Gordon's were witches. (Alas, because of how I reacted I never became a regular user.) The trip back on Monday afternoon was stressful because of heavy traffic on the only road off the Cape. Throughout the weekend the news reported on the effects of the eruption of the volcano.
When a bomb tore apart the Alfred P. Murrah federal office building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 I had been at my new job as media research director at New York ad agency Foote Cone & Belding for just a month. It was a sunny Wednesday afternoon and I was at my desk in my office in the GM Building. In the background I had oldies station WCBS playing (the radio was in the style of one from the 1930's, a send-off gift from my old staff). It was from that radio that I first heard the shocking news about the explosion that occurred earlier in the morning.
The front of the building had been completely blown off and the death toll slowly mounted as the days went by (the final toll was 168 with nearly 700 injured). I found it curious when initial reports mentioned children being among the many casualties. I thought that perhaps a group of students had been on a field trip there. Later when I got home is when I heard that a daycare center for workers' children was in the building.
At first many jumped to the conclusion that this was the act of Muslim terrorists, so it was surprising when the FBI showed sketches the next day of two suspects who were Caucasian. Indications were that the attack was carried out by U.S. citizens who were part of a burgeoning anti-government "militia" movement.
It annoyed me that reporters regularly remarked how awful it was that such an attack happened in "the heartland" as if it would have been less of a tragedy if it occurred in a big city on the East or West Coast.
Six years later the driver of the bomb-laden truck, Timothy McVeigh, was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, three months before the attacks on 9-11 - which would surpass the Oklahoma City bombing as the worst terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland.
On February 26, 1993 New York, and the nation, was shaken by the terrorist bombing in a parking garage at the World Trade Center. Two weeks later Mother Nature was preparing her own assault as a monster storm swept up the East Coast. I didn't pay much attention to news of the impending storm until the night before it hit, a Friday. After work I had gone out with friends to Splash, a sprawling new gay bar in Chelsea. Once home I turned on the Weather Channel to hear about the approaching "white hurricane". (And the first day of Spring was just one week away).
The storm's full fury hit NYC Saturday morning (March 13) and continued thru mid-afternoon. (This photo, near my apartment in Greenwich Village, was taken at around noontime.) However, after ten inches of snow had fallen a changeover to sleet and rain began in the late afternoon, keeping the accumulation down. I was outside when the changeover began and the sleet pellets really stung because they were being propelled horizontally by 40-60 mph wind gusts. The noise the sleet created as it lashed against the windows in my apartment was deafening. I was concerned that my floor to ceiling living room window might blow in so I pulled down the blind.
Happily, I suffered no window damage, but after the storm subsided (at around midnight) that's when my problems started. Hearing a dripping sound I looked up and saw that the ceiling in one corner of my living room was cracking and buckling. It turned out that the snow on the roof (I lived on the top floor) had piled up high enough to cover a drain pipe, so melting snow had nowhere to go and collected in one spot.
I was thankful to be home so I could move my sofa and TV out of harm's way. However, I couldn't get in touch with my building super so I had to make due with a collection of pots and pans to collect the dripping water. However, the steady "ping" of the dripping made sleep nearly impossible. The next morning I got up early and found the super shoveling snow. He was unable to go up on the roof and clear the blockage because snow was drifted against the door so he brought up two large trash bins to my apartment to collect the water which pored out when he poked a few holes in my ceiling.
Compared to other parts of the Eastern U.S. New York was spared paralyzing amounts of snow (a nearby street in my neighborhood is pictured). Elsewhere, however, there were record accumulations not only in the Northeast (Pittsburgh had 26", Syracuse 36") but in the South as well, e.g., Atlanta had 9"; Birmingham 13"; Chattanooga 23". Even Mobile, Alabama on the Gulf Coast reported three inches of snow! The Weather Channel would later rank the storm, which affected nearly half of the U.S. population and left more than 250 dead, as one of the top five weather events of the entire 20th century.
If you'd like to read about other New York City snowstorms I've written a post on my weather blog, NYC Weather Archive, that recaps the snowstorms we've experienced since the winter of 1978/79. To go to it please click here. And on this blog I've written post on four other famous NYC snowstorms:
February 1, 2003 was a gray and chilly Saturday and I was immersed in my winter project, which was a makeover of my apartment. I did it with the help of my ex-boyfriend William. I supplied ideas and the capital and he made it happen, which involved painting the bedroom Arctic blue, California gold in the living room and the kitchen antique white; hanging artwork; assembling a glass TV stand for my new plasma TV and drilling decorative shelving into the living room walls.
We had just returned from breakfast when we heard the news on the radio about the disintegration of space shuttle Columbia. It happened over the skies of Dallas during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere - just 15 minutes before it was scheduled to land in Florida. All seven astronauts on board were killed. By eerie coincidence NASA's two previous fatal space accidents also occurred in the dead of winter: On Jan. 27, 1967 a fire on board Apollo 1 as it sat on the launching pad killed the three astronauts on board (pictured), and on Jan. 28, 1986 the Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all seven crew members.
January 28, 1986 was a cold Tuesday morning in New York following a surprise 1.5" snowfall overnight (the first significant snow of the winter). I was back at work (ad agency Young & Rubicam) after having been out sick on Monday and the previous Friday. Shortly before noon my secretary, Voula, came clomping into my office to deliver the day's mail and blurted out that the space shuttle had exploded. Then she made a snide comment about the teacher, Christa McCauliffe, who was on board, let out a little cackle, and walked out.
I left my office and walked over to the office of a broadcast buyer to watch the unending replay of the shuttle's disintegration against the clear blue Florida sky. What was chilling was the crowd reaction at the launch site because at first they didn't understand what they had just witnessed but as the realization came over them their excited gasps of wonder turned to sobs of distress.
This date also sticks in mind because after coming home from work I went to electronics store Crazy Eddie near my apartment in Greenwich Village and bought my first color TV - a 14" Sharp. I paid $329 for it, at the time the largest single purchase I'd ever made. I was really looking forward to watching that evening's episode of Moonlighting in color.
It was shortly after 3:30 on January 15, 2009, a bone chilling Thursday afternoon when I heard about the accident. I had just returned home from the gym where I had done a weight routine for backand shoulders (I was out of work at the time). Checking my e-mails I saw a New York Times News Alert reporting that a plane had "landed" in the Hudson River. I assumed it was a small private plane; however, after reading that it was a passenger jet I wondered how many had died (it brought to mind a plane that crashed into Jamaica Bay upon takeoff from LaGuardia in March 1992 that resulted in the drowning of 27 passengers).
I immediately tuned to New York's cable news channel NY1 for further details and was shocked to see an intact USAirways plane surrounded by boats and hear the remarkable news that there were no fatalities! If I hadn't had a massage scheduled for 4:30 I might have walked over to the river to see the plane float by.
In speaking with friends over the next few days I attributed the miraculous landing to the aura of positive energy created by Barack Obama's upcoming inauguration. I joked that if this accident had happened the year before while George Bush (and his eight years of bad karma) was still in office the plane would have gone directly to the bottom of the river. I thought it fitting that this "miracle on the Hudson" dominated the news cycle, pushing from the headlines Bush's televised farewell address to Congress that evening.
January 1982 was very cold and snowy in the Eastern half of the U.S. Today a snowstorm paralyzed the Southeast and moved into the mid-Atlantic states as the day progressed. The storm proved deadly for passengers of a Ft. Lauderdale bound Air Florida jet flying out of Washington, D.C in the middle of the afternoon.
Not de-iced properly, the plane was unable to gain sufficient altitude and crashed into the Potomac River after takeoff from National Airport when its tail wing clipped a nearby bridge - just a few miles from the White House. Dramatic TV footage showed rescuers desperately trying to reach some passengers in the icy waters. Unfortunately, unlike the "Miracle on the Hudson" 27 years later, very few passengers survived since this was a crash and not a water landing. Only five passeners survived - 78 others (and four motorists on the bridge) were killed.
Although my office (ad agency Young & Rubicam) had closed early because of the snow (which began during lunchtime in NYC) I was still in my office when I heard the radio bulletin reporting on the crash late that afternoon.
Because I briefly worked on the Eastern Airlines account at Y&R I knew the repercussions a plane crash had for media planners working on any airline account. All media outlets carrying airline advertising had to be contacted to make sure all ads were pulled (although most outlets knew to do this without being contacted, the calls still had be made). However, this time no one at Y&R had to scramble because the agency had lost the Eastern account four months earlier (after 17 years).
The morning after Christmas Day 2004 found me relaxing at my mother's house in Pittsburgh reading Sunday's Post Gazette when I came across a small item in the paper's "World News Roundup" section. It was just one paragraph, about a tidal wave that followed a very strong underwater earthquake in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia. It wasn't until that evening that the enormity of the disaster was communicated to the West. And for the next week horrifying first-person accounts and videos appeared (see below), bringing the year to a sobering end.
The tsunami struck the shores of eleven countries and caused an estimated 230,000 deaths (including 9,000 foreign tourists). It ranks as the deadliest tsunami in history and joined a 1976 earthquake in China and a 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh as the deadliest natural disasters in my lifetime. Less than a year later the U.S. would experience one of its worst natural disasters when Hurricane Katrina produced deadly flooding in New Orleans. However, Katrina was tame by comparison to this cataclysmic wave of water.
It was early Saturday afternoon when I brought in the afternoon paper (Pittsburgh Press) from the front porch and saw the headline about a bridge disaster in nearby Point Pleasant, WV the night before. The Silver Bridge fell into the Ohio River during evening rush hour, killing 46. It still ranks as the nation's deadliest bridge collapse.
Although I was just 10 at the time the tragedy resonated for two reasons: 1) It was incongruous to my young brain that such a tragedy could occur at Christmastime and 2) Because of its famed three rivers Pittsburgh was a city of bridges and every Sunday we traveled over one (the Wind Gap Bridge) to pick up my grandmother for church. For some time after the Silver Bridge disaster I'd become nervous whenever we'd be stopped on the bridge because of traffic.
All disasters are unfortunate but those that occur during the Christmas season are particularly tragic. Some of the more high profile in the past 50 years include: 1960 - On 12/16 two planes collided over Staten Island killing 134; 1975 - A bomb exploded in a locker at LaGuardia Airport on 12/29 killing 11 and injuring 75; 1988 - Pan Am flight 103 bound for NYC exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland on 12/21 killing all 259 on board and 11 on the ground; and 2004 - The great Indian Ocean tsunami (pictured) killed 230,000+ the day after Christmas.
