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 ofr respect fo 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:
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 US 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.
Before HBO, the rise of cable, or the invention of the VCR/DVR, Saturday was a vibrant night of programming for the Big 3 TV networks, not an afterthought, or a repository for repeats, as it is today. In the 1970s it was a night of classic sitcoms on CBS, and in the '80s NBC and ABC had hit shows like The Golden Girls;Hunter;Love Boat; and Fantasy Island. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one of the crown jewels of CBS's Saturday night schedule. Besides Mary's character, the show's other beloved characters included Mr. Grant; Ted; Murray; Sue Ann; Rhoda; Phyllis and Georgette. The sitcom's last episode aired on March 19, 1977. (It was curious that such a big episode was scheduled in between the February and May ratings "sweeps".)
Although I'd been a regular viewer of the show during its first five seasons, once I was away at college I rarely had the opportunity to watch it - but tonight was an exception. I was in my sophomore year at Penn State, where I was attending a branch campus in Beaver County, about 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. It was largely a commuter campus with one dormitory, which I lived in. (I transferred to main campus in my junior year.) The dorm often emptied out on weekends and this weekend, when Mary ended her seven-year run, was no different. However, I stayed on campus and watched the episode alone in my dorm room on my roommate's little black and white set while I sat on my bed doing school work.
This funny episode (everyone at TV station WJM was fired, except for Ted Baxter) ended with the touching group huddle pictured above. It posted a Nielsen household rating of 25.5. Although it wasn't a blockbuster rating like that delivered by the finales of M*A*S*H (60.2 HH rating); Cheers (45.5); or Seinfeld (41.3), it was a solid bump from its 20.5 season average. Hats off to Mary! (Pun intended.)
(Oddly, the final season of Mary Tyler Moore, as of March 2013, had yet to be released on DVD). However, if you'd like to purchase any of the first six seasons click here.)
My grandmother, Margaret Cerovski (nee Revay), arrived in the US from Czechoslovakia in September 1920 (she celebrated her 21st birthday while crossing the Atlantic). After being processed at Ellis Island she continued on to Pittsburgh where her brother Michael lived (their 11 brothers and sisters remained back in the "old country").
After she and my grandfather (from the Croatian region of Yugoslavia) became citizens in the 1930's Grandma thought about visiting her family because her mother was in declining health. She also wanted to take my mother and uncle, who were teenagers, with her. However, Czechoslovakia was being slowly partitioned by Nazi Germany and Slovakia, the eastern region of the country my grandmother was from, was agitating for its independence. For these reasons my grandfather wouldn't allow Grandma to take Mom and Uncle George. And then on March 15, in 1939 Czechoslovakia's beleaguered president (pictured with Hitler, below) signed over the country to Hitler, and the thought of Grandma even visiting by herself ended. WWII would begin six months later.
Although she never visited her homeland, Grandma kept in touch with her brothers and sisters. She was the middle child but managed to outlive all of her siblings and died in 1999 just six months shy of her 100th birthday.
On Feb. 26, 1993 New York, and the nation, was shaken by a terrorist bombing in a parking garage under 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 learn more about the approaching "white hurricane". (And the first day of Spring was just one week away).
The storm's full fury hit New York 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 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 winds gusting between 40-60 mph. 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.
Sheridan Square, Greenwich Village
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 poured out when he poked a few holes in the ceiling.
Compared to other parts of the Eastern US, New York was spared paralyzing amounts of snow (a nearby street in my neighborhood is pictured below). 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 US population and left more than 250 dead, as one of the top five weather events of the entire 20th century.
Waverly Place (March 14, 1993)
If you'd like to read about other New York City snowstorms I've written a post on my weather blog, New York City Weather Archive, that recaps the snowstorms we've experienced since 1970. To go to it please double click here. And on this blog I've written posts on four other famous NYC snowstorms:
March 6, 1981 was a Friday and the streets of Manhattan were a sloppy mess following a snowstorm the day before that dumped nearly nine inches of wet snow (the biggest snowfall of a relatively snowless winter). But the day's big story was the evening broadcast of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite's last as its revered anchorman. I caught the last five minutes of this newscast after getting in from work (ad agency Scali McCabe Sloves).
Cronkite's retirement sticks with me largely because his final week on the air coincided with a big life event for me. After living in Bayonne, New Jersey for two years I had moved into Manhattan earlier in the week. Truth be told, it was an impulsive decision made after my brother got married at the beginning of February. We both lived in Bayonne, so when he moved to another town I figured it was a good time to move into the "big city". I put an ad in the Village Voice and ended up in a peculiar living situation with a family in their TriBeCa loft at 60 Lispenard St., a dreary alley-like street out of a Dickens novel, just south of Canal St. It was me and the Sears family: artist-husband David, his Harvard educated stay-at-home wife Linda (a real chatterbox), their curly red-haired baby Jonah, and a vicious white cat named Mouse.
I lived there for just three months when the landlord pressured us to move because he wanted to convert the building to commercial-use only. (He was probably the one behind our loft being burglarized a month after I moved in.) Happily, I found a much better situation up in the West Village in a 2-bedroom apartment with another family of sorts - Gary and Jason and their doberman, Sabrina. The Sears family moved as well, but Mouse was left behind after he jumped across the air shaft and sat on the windowsill of the neighboring building - and that's where he stayed.
After retiring Cronkite kept a low-keyed presence in the news arena but narrated the occasional documentary and served as a pundit regarding his views on the changing news media. (He memorably had a number of unflattering things to say about his replacement, Dan Rather, in a CNN interview and an article in The New Yorker, shortly before Rather's retirement in 2005). Naturally, he penned a best-selling book, A Reporter's Life, in which he revisited some of the key historical moments that he was a part of as a reporter. Cronkite lived to be 92 and died in the summer of 2009.