The morning of Jan. 28, 1986, a Tuesday, was a cold one in New York, following a surprise 1.5" snowfall overnight. 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.
Perhaps helped by a weekend snowstorm and cold wave over the Midwest and Northeast, Super Bowl XVI between the San Francisco 49ers and Cincinnati Bengals (played on Jan. 24, 1982) has the distinction of being the highest rated Super Bowl of them all. The game, which the 49ers won by a score of 26-21, posted a 49.1 household rating/73 share. It still ranks as the 4th highest rated telecast of all time (behind the final episode of M*A*S*H in 1983; the "Who Shot J.R?" episode of Dallas in 1980; and the final episode of Roots in 1977). There have been Super Bowls with larger audiences (due to population increase) but no game since has pulled a higher rating.
This game also had the distinction of being the first Super Bowl played in a northern city - Detroit. Luckily for fans and players it was played in a domed stadium (the Silverdome) since the outside temperature was 20 degrees. (44 years later the first Super Bowl to be played in an uncovered stadium in the northern US took place in northern New Jersey.) To read about other fun facts about other Super Bowls, double click here.
I didn't see the big game. That weekend found me in Connecticut visiting my boyfriend Rick who lived in Middletown (the following year he'd move into Manhattan with me). That Sunday afternoon we drove up to the hamlet of Norfolk in snowy Litchfield County (in the northwestern corner of the state) to visit his friends Debbie and Mort (a burly forest ranger). We had a brief delay on the drive there when our car was hit by a pile of snow and ice that crashed down upon us from a snowplow working on a highway overpass. And later that evening my trip back to Manhattan would be delayed because Rick's car became stuck in the driveway, frozen in place.
(Although no books/DVDs for this particular game are available the newly published book The Ultimate Super Bowl Book offers stats & stories about all 43 match-ups while the DVD NFL Films Super Bowl Collection XI-XX recaps highlights of the games played between 1977-1986.)
Those of us born in the generation that came before the introduction of today's whiz-bang gadgets may appreciate them the most since we know what it was like to have "suffered" the various inconveniences of life without them. However, today's advances aren't always viewed as enhancements. With that in mind, the following list offers younger readers a glimpse of what life was like back in the Dark Ages of the 1960s and 1970s:
Pringles, Cheerios, Oreos, M&Ms, Ocean Spray cranberry juice and French's mustard had just one variety - and drinking water wasn't filtered by Brita, it came directly from the tap.
Major League Baseball often scheduled doubleheaders on Memorial Day, 4th of July and Labor Day. And the World Series was played in the afternoon. Additionally, in the years before the first energy crisis in 1974, night games started at 8:05 not 7:05.
When the phone rang you answered it without knowing who was calling - at home or work. And your pointer finger got regular exercise from dialing the telephone. Additionally, long distance calls were considered a luxury because of their expense.
Before violent video games, the most raucous game was Rock'em Sock'em Robots.
Baggies were an advance in storage. There was no such thing as Ziploc anything.
When the weekend approached you'd go to the bank and estimate how much spending money you'd need to withdrawal. Unless you kept money under your mattress. And you stood in line inside the bank for all banking transactions.
Bottles and containers were a cinch to open since they weren't designed to be child-resistant or tamper-proof.
Guests on the Tonight Show stayed put when other guests came on.
There were no signers for the deaf at public events/news conferences.
Fireworks exhibitions happened only on the 4th of July. (And sometimes when your neighbors had a fight.) Jellybeans and marshmallow peeps were sold only at Easter time.
Going to church, school or Broadway shows were all "dress up" occasions. And sneakers and flip-flops were worn only during gym class, play time or vacation.
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Diet soda tasted like a witch's brew of chemicals. (Here's to the advanced chemical formulas of the 21st century that made Coke Zero possible!)
Dentists/dental hygienists didn't wear masks, cashiers didn't wear protective gloves. There was no such thing as hand sanitizer and yet we somehow survived.
If a classmate met with "misfortune" no therapists were called in, you went to school the next day just like any other day.
Neopolitan was about as gourmet an ice cream flavor you could get. And before Starbucks there was was only General Foods International Coffee.
Morning paper boys went out before sunrise by foot and their parents didn't worry (except, perhaps, about the occasional ferocious dog).
You either turned a room light off or on, there was no dimmer switch (or ambient lighting).
To do school work students thumbed through an encyclopedia rather than Wikipedia and never doubted the verity of the information it contained.
During snowstorms ashes were tossed onto roads from the back of dump trucks.
Adults knew that Liberace, Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde were "funny" but it wasn't mentioned in front of the children.
Instant potatoes were a time-saving advance in dinner preparation. And Pop Tarts were an advance in breakfast food.
Suburban households sorted their trash and then openly burned what was made of paper.
When taking a trip you unfolded an unwieldy paper document called a "map".
People who suffered from allergies were alergic only to tree pollen or ragweed - no one knew they were lactose intolerant or allergic to wheat.
Divorce? What was that?
In the winter and summer you went outside without the benefit of a wind chill factor or heat index.
There was no such thing as a bike helmet.
In anticipation of winter, two rituals for my dad in October and November were putting up storm windows on the house and putting snow tires on the family car.
The evening the war began, Jan. 16, 1991, found me sitting at a "welcome" table in a meeting room at the Gay & Lesbian Community Center in Greenwich Village where the gay professionals group Out Professionals was holding its monthly meething. I was treasurer and collecting the meeting fee when a member approached the desk at around 7:30 and excitedly tried telling me something. However, because he had a pronounced stutter it took him a while to get out what he wanted to say - that the U.S. bombardment of Baghdad had begun. (The guessing game as to when this would occur had been the week's #1 topic of conversation ever since Congress voted the previous weekend to give President Bush authority to go to war.)
The following evening, a Thursday, found me at HMV Records on the Upper West Side where I had gone after leaving a work-related function at Tavern on the Green (both establishments are now out of business). Instead of playing music over its speakers a radio broadcast was reporting the chilling news that Iraqi missles were being fired into Israel. At this very early stage of the war I was feeling a bit uneasy, wondering what Saddam Hussein might have up his sleeve for our troops or here on U.S. soil (he had promised the "mother of all battles"). This feeling of unease was in stark contrast to the party-hearty lyrics of a very popular song playing on the airwaves at the time - Everybody Dance by C & C Music Company. To this day whenever I hear the song memories of the war come to mind.
(One of George Clooney's earliest films, 1999's Three Kings, was inspired by the first Gulf War. Other war related films include Jarhead, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Foxx, Courage Under Fire and Towelhead.)
It was shortly after 3:30 on Jan. 15, 2009, a bone chilling Thursday afternoon, when I first got word about a plane crash in New York. I had just returned home from the gym where I had done my weight workout for back and shoulders (I was between jobs at the time). Checking my e-mails I saw a New York Times Breaking 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 in to New York's cable news channel NY1 for further details and was shocked to see an intact USAirways plane surrounded by rescue boats, and then 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. (Click here to view a news report shortly after the incident.)
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 flight would have been doomed and 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 particularly cold and snowy in the Eastern half of the US. On Jan. 13 a snowstorm paralyzed the Southeast and then moved into the mid-Atlantic states. The storm proved deadly for passengers on board a Ft. Lauderdale-bound Air Florida jet flying out of Washington, DC in the middle of the afternoon. Not properly de-iced, Flight 90 was unable to gain sufficient altitude and crashed into the Potomac River after taking off from National Airport, its tail wing clipping 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 US Air Flight 1549's "Miracle on the Hudson" 27 years later, very few passengers survived since this was a crash and not a water landing. Only five passengers 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 New York) 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).
I was suffering from a bad cold the night All in the Family debuted on CBS. For much of the show I was in the kitchen making hot tea with honey and preparing a somewhat flammable throat wrap coated with Vicks VapoRub which I heated over one of the burners of the stove. Because of these preparations I wasn't paying full attention to the program. However, I do remember the warning that came on before the show began about its content. Although I was 13 at the time I didn't worry about my parents changing the channel since Tuesday was my mother's bowling night and dad was dozing in his recliner.
During its first season All in the Family aired on Tuesday but in its second season the show moved to Saturday where it ran for four seasons. It was part of Saturday's legendary lineup along with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett. Some lasting memories I have include Edith going through menopause (a new concept for me) and hearing Archie refer to blacks as "jungle bunnies" (also a first). I watched the show regularly during its first four seasons but that ended once I went away to college. However, this spared me the pain of watching the episode in which Edith died.
The show ushered in a new era in TV in which controversial and political subject matter was addressed. And viewers embraced it - All in the Family became the first TV show to be #1 in the ratings for five consecutive seasons (later joined by Cosby and American Idol). It also begat Maude and The Jeffersons. Indeed, those were the days!
I first heard word of the impending blizzard on Saturday evening while I was out in New Jersey visiting my brother and his family for a late holiday get-together. I was enthralled by the blizzard warning scrolling down the screen of The Weather Channel because I'd never before experienced a full-fledged blizzard. On Sunday, Jan. 7 the snow started falling at around noon and by late afternoon it was coming down fast and furious. That night I walked around my Greenwich Village neighborhood in the teeth of the storm (with howling winds gusting to 40-50 mph) snapping photos that were enhanced by the visual effect the flash had on the snowflakes.
Not surprisingly, my office was closed on Monday (some co-workers from New Jersey were out for two to three days). The snow stopped falling early in the afternoon and again I went out with my camera. The texture and deepness of the snow brought to mind walks on the beach. At one point I trudged over to the West Side Highway and found no rush hour traffic whatsoever. Instead, a phalanx of garbage trucks put into service as snowplows was the only activity there and on most city streets.
The storm was especially paralyzing in Philadelphia and NJ where two to three feet of snow fell. It was such an expansive storm that 1-foot accumulations extended all the way westward into Kentucky and Ohio. Here in New York 20.2" fell, with three and four-foot drifts topping cars and taxis parked on the streets. There was no mail delivery for two days and no trash pick-up for eight. Staten Island reported 29", Newark had 28" and La Guardia Airport picked up 24". Manhattan's normally congested sidewalks were made even more crowded by walls of plowed and shoveled snow (in addition to bags of uncollected trash and discarded Christmas trees) that confined pedestrians to narrow pathways. Persistent cold weather kept the snow around for a number of weeks.
At the time this was the deepest snowfall in my lifetime, topping the 17.6" that fell in a big February 1983 snowstorm. (However, some of the snows of my childhood back in Pittsburgh, especially the 15" that fell in January 1966 and 14" in January 1964, seemed deeper because I was a few feet shorter than my adult height of 6'1".) This blizzard contributed mightily to the winter of 1995-96 becoming New York City's snowiest winter ever. 75.6"was measured in Central Park, close to fifty inches more than a typical winter.
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 1970. To go to it, double click here. And to read about other New York snowstorms I've written about on this blog please see the links below: