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.
Final episodes of long-running shows often get high ratings but rarely do they have memorable storylines. For instance, the final episode of Seinfeld was notorious for being such a disappointment (especially considering the hype surrounding it). And although they delivered huge ratings does anyone remember much that was memorable about the last episodes of M*A*S*H, Cheers or Friends? The final episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show was an exception - as was the sendoff for Newhart which aired tonight in 1990.
Earlier that afternoon I had attended ABC-TV's "upfront" presentation. (I worked in TV research for ad agency NWAyer so attending it was part of my job.) The big news was about Twin Peaks, which had become a sensation the previous month. It was renewed for next season and was scheduled on Saturday at 10:00 (what a different world it was back then). At the party held afterwards I had my photo taken with one of the show's stars, Madchen Anick.
After taking my leave from the raw bar I rushed home to watch Newhart. I was taken completely by surprise by the delightful ending in which Bob (after being hit in the head with a golf ball) wakes up in bed with his wife Emily from his classic Bob Newhart Show from the 1970's - it turned out the Newhart Show was a dream! This topped the episode's other surprise when the silent brothers "Darrell and the other Darrell" finally spoke. The telecast posted an 18.9 household rating/29 share (7 share points above the series' season average).
Twenty-two years later Bob Newhart is still with us at the age of 83. Sadly, cast members Mary Frann, Suzanne Pleshette and Tom Poston have all passed away. As have the careers of Julia Duffy and Peter Scolari.
With our lease up for renewal at the end of May 1992 my roommate Todd had decided to move in with his boyfriend and take a new apartment. I didn't want another roommate situation, but couldn't afford to keep the apartment on my own, so I decided to look for a new apartment. On April 29, a Wednesday, I left work at 4:00 to see two apartments, one a garden apartment on Christopher St. and the other a small 1-bedroom in the Sheridan Square area of Greenwich Village, both a few short blocks from where I lived. Largely because of the amount of light it got (it was on the top floor) I decided to take the 2nd apartment (where I still live).
After seeing the apartments I got a haircut and then arrived home shortly before 6:00. I switched on the evening news and heard the breaking story that the LAPD officers involved in last year's Rodney King beating had been acquitted. The verdict was met with frightening fury by L.A.'s Black community and rioting began shortly thereafter.
Later that evening a news-copter showed a truck driver being pulled from the cab of his semi at an intersection in South Central L.A. He was kicked repeatedly in the head and bashed with a cinder block. Like the beating of King this video clip was aired endlessly. Two days later an overwrought Rodney King addressed the media and delivered one of the decade's most quotable lines, "Can't we all just get along?"
Two days later was Friday and that morning I signed my new lease. Then later in the day as I was walking back to work after lunch it seemed that everyone from my office (ad agency NWAyer, located at Worldwide Plaza) was walking in the opposite direction. It turned out the office (like many others) had closed early because of wild stories of looting and transit disruptions.
These rumors turned out to be untrue (e.g. Macy's was being looted, the Brooklyn Bridge had been blocked by rioters), but since no one knew it at the time the trip home on the subway was made with trepidation as riders wondered what might be occurring above ground. Indeed, some of the stores in my neighborhood were closed and a few had boarded up their windows.
Later that afternoon I was curious to see if there had been any further problems in my neighborhood so I went for a run but found nothing out of the ordinary except for a larger police presence. That night President Bush addressed the nation to assess the situation and assure viewers that calm would prevail and justice served.
The inconvenience suffered by New Yorkers on that day paled by comparison to Angelenos who struggled through nearly a week of unrest. More than 50 persons were killed, thousands were injured or jailed and damage was close to $1 billion. Since the turmoil threatened to spread to affluent neighborhoods some residents there stood on rooftops with guns. Sporting events were cancelled, freeway and air traffic was disrupted and restricted. It was the worst rioting in the U.S. since the assassination of Martin Luther King 24 years earlier.
This unrest coincided with the final episode of the Cosby Show on Thursday. NBC considered postponing the telecast until the following week but Cosby was against the idea because he felt airing it as scheduled would maintain a semblance of normalcy. (He asked NBC if he could address viewers in L.A. to plead for calm.) The episode posted a 28 household rating/45 share (nearly double its season average), making it the 6th highest rated telecast of the 1991/92 season.
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.
My mother, Mary, was 19 in the spring of 1945 and had a war-related job in downtown Pittsburgh working for the American Bureau of Shipping. The Bureau was located on the 32nd floor of the Grant Building, the 2nd tallest building in Pittsburgh (it had been the tallest until the 44-story Gulf Building opened in 1933). Mom's job, her first out of high school, was as a typist who prepared shipping certificates that were attached to crates of munitions being shipped to various European destinations (she was under strict orders not to discuss her work). In smoky Pittsburgh of the 1940's this was a great place to be working, and the Grant Building was one of the city's premiere business addresses.
April 12 was Thursday and she and her friend/co-worker Willa left work and walked down to Joseph Horne department store where they got on the streetcar for the 20-30 minute trip to their neighborhood of Chartiers City. Shortly after arriving at their stop they bumped into a neighbor, Mrs. Frankel, who told them the news that President Roosevelt had died a short time ago. FDR died of a stroke in the middle of the afternoon while having his portrait painted in Warms Springs, Georgia.
The president was only 63 and just three months into his unprecedented 4th term. Shortly after the news was reported on the radio paperboys were on the streets selling an "extra" edition of the paper with the breaking news. Mom said it was difficult to imagine life without him; after all, her formative years had been lived entirely under FDR's presidency. And Harry Truman's countrified persona couldn't have been more different from that of the more worldly FDR with his trademark monocle and cigarette holder.
One month later the war ended in Europe and Mom was without a job. However, she said it was all done in a very nice way and everyone who was let go was given a bonus. With part of hers Mom bought a pair of earrings she had been admiring for some time at a jewelry store in the lobby of the Grant Building. They had three small clusters, each with a different colored gemstone surrounded by rhinestones. They cost $5 (about $65 in today's dollars). And she still has them.
(To further immerse yourself in FDR's legacy you may want to consider the book FDR or the PBS video American Experience: FDR).
Spring had arrived two weeks earlier, the 1982 baseball season had begun the day before and Easter was less than a week away. Yet here it was April 6 and we were under a blizzard warning, the first ever issued for New York in April. Rain began overnight, changed over to wet snow by a.m. rush hour and then the blizzard's full fury set in from 10AM-4PM. Most offices closed at noon, and the Mets and Yankees cancelled their season openers. I stayed at the office (ad agency Young & Rubicam) because I lived in Manhattan and getting home wasn't an issue.
That evening when I emerged from the PATH station in my Greenwich Village neighborhood I turned the corner onto my street and was amazed by the drifts I had to trudge through to get home. However, despite the snow the bowling league I participated in at Bowlmor Lanes still met.
Although Central Park had 9.6" of snow many suburbs reported a foot or more (Albany had 17.3"). It was NYC's biggest snowfall in four years. By midnight the temperature had fallen to a record 21 degrees.
The next day not much in the way of snow melt occurred as the temperature stayed below freezing all day - as opposed to a typical high in early April approaching 60 degrees. (By contrast, on the same date 28 years later NYC reported its earliest 90-degree reading.) Three days later I flew home to visit my parents in Pittsburgh for Easter and it was snowing there (two inches fell). Thankfully, this wasn't a precursor of an unusually cold April as a string of mild days occurred mid-month and then on April 25 the mercury hit 82 degrees.
If you love reading about snow, I've written five other posts about New York snowstorms:
And 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.
It was a gray, showery Monday afternoon and I was in a meeting in a conference room at my office, ad agency Scali McCabe Sloves, where I was a media planner on the Volvo auto account. This was my first job out of college and I was coming up on my 2-year anniversary. The last person to enter the room before the meeting started reported that President Reagan had been shot, but she had no further details.
I don't recall anyone acting overly concerned - I suppose we were a room full of Democrats. And I wasn't alarmed over this news, perhaps because it seemed too shocking to comprehend something as bad as this happening so early in his presidency - and I thought back to the two attempts made on Gerald Ford's life which he survived (but no bullets hit him). Also, I was still in disbelief that Reagan had been elected president, so I rationalized that if he didn't pull through Vice President George Bush would be more suitable. But Reagan lived - the first president to survive after being struck by a bullet.
The biggest impact for me was that the Academy Awards were delayed one day out of respect to the former actor. (Up until 1999 the Oscars were handed out on a Monday night.)
Reagan's shooting would be Dan Rather's first big news event since replacing Walter Cronkite as anchorman of the CBS Evening News three weeks earlier. And at the end of the week my life became upended when my loft space in Tribeca was burglarized. By coincidence, my friend Marina's apartment on the Upper East Side had been burglarized almost one year to the date of my burglary. (Back then it seemed your first burglary was a right of passage when you lived in Manhattan.)
I've written six other blog posts about U.S. presidents:
After I graduated from Penn State at the beginning of the month I spent the rest of March 1979 going on job interviews in New York City. I stayed with my older brother, Darrell, who lived in Bayonne, New Jersey, which was conveniently located just across New York Harbor from Manhattan. In the months preceding my graduation I had set up meetings at ad agencies such as J. Walter Thompson, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample and Grey Advertising and once in NYC I arranged appointments with a number of personnel agencies.
If nothing turned up I planned to return home to Pittsburgh where I'd resume my job search. (However, the Personnel director - it wasn't called Human Resources back then - at the Kenyon & Eckhardt ad agency insisted that if I really wanted to work in advertising it had to be in NYC. It seems he held a grudge against Pittsburgh and its "provincial" mores because a few years earlier the big ad agency there, Ketchum & MacLeod, told him that if he wanted to be hired he'd need to marry the woman he was living with.)
March 28 was a chilly Wednesday and after having meetings at three personnel agencies I walked across town to the Port Authority terminal to catch my bus back to Jersey. Walking along 42nd St. near the Public Library a NY Post headline caught my eye. It screamed (as only a Post headline could) that an accident had occurred at a nuclear reactor in south central Pennsylvania and there was the possibility of a radiation leak.
Residents of the New York metropolitan area were reassured that if a leak occurred we wouldn't be in danger, at least for the next few days, since the wind would be coming out of the north. Still, the accident was of great concern since 30 million persons lived within a 200-mile radius of the reactor. There was also skepticism about how forthright officals were being with the public as they tried to reassure residents in the vicinty of the reactor. (My Aunt Lee and Uncle George lived in York, not far from where the reactor was located.)
A few days later Darrell and I saw the new movie China Syndrome (starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas) which, by eerie coincidence, had a plot about a meltdown cover up. Looking back, I don't recall ever feeling panicked over the incident at Three Mile Island despite the fact that it was the most serious accident at a commercial nuclear power plant in U.S. history. Perhaps it was the cockeyed optimism that came with being a recent college grad.
A week later my future looked bright as I was hired by ad agency Scali, McCabe, Sloves to work in its media department. And thousands of residents from south central Pennsylvania began returning to their homes. (Later in the year, however, my future seemed somewhat uncertain when talk of war, and a possible military draft, arose after Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.)
I was starting a new job on March 20, 1995 at ad agency Foote Cone & Belding where I was hired as media research director of its New York office. When my clock radio went off that Monday morning is when I first heard the news about the gas attacks on Tokyo's metro system during the morning rush hour. Members of a Japanese religious cult known as "Supreme Truth" carried out the attacks by puncturing small packages containing a liquid form of the lethal gas sarin. They did this on three train lines; once leaked the liquid turned into a vapor which felled thousands of passengers and killed twelve.
Of course, this was especially chilling for the millions of us who used New York's subway system to commute to work every day.
One month later homegrown terrorism visited our own shores when a truck bomb laden with explosives tore apart the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. Unlike the Japanese terrorists, one of those charged in the U.S. attack, Timothy McVeigh, was executed.
Then five years later an episode of a new show on CBS, Now and Again, brought to mind the Tokyo attacks. A villain known as the Eggman (played by Chinese actor Kim Chan) cracked open eggs filled with noxious gas on a New York subway. All of the passengers died but in a somewhat more gruesome fashion than those who died in Tokyo.
Between March 11-13, 2003 I was attending a Nielsen research conference at the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliff resort north of Phoenix. After the second day's sessions had ended at 4:15 I went back to my suite to relax a bit before heading out to an evening rodeo when my friend Nina, who was also at the conference, called to tell me the shocking news that 15-year old Elizabeth Smart had been rescued. Elizabeth had been kidnapped nine months earlier from her home in a suburb of Salt Lake City and was rescued just eighteen miles away in Sandy, Utah. After Nina's call I turned on CNN to watch its coverage of the news conference with police.
This was an unexpectedly wonderful turn of events since kidnappings all too often end tragically, bringing to mind high-profile cases such as those of Adam Walsh, Polly Klaus and Etan Patz . Nine years after her escape Elizabeth was married on February 18 in Hawaii.
