Well, I mean, I was only born once, but for the years of my life I've been alive, I can at least tell you folks where I was and what I was doing when all of these other things happened. I was reading through this list a few nights ago, and that's what came to my mind as I was going through them -- where I was both physically and mentally, what was going on in my life, etc. So, as a writing exercise and to get my mind off of everything else going on in this godawful world right now, let's dive in.
1970-1981: I was, um, not alive yet.
1982: The Falklands War Between Argentina and the UK Began and Ended
Well okay then. I was born this year, and remember reading about this/hearing about this as a child, but it mattered little to me as a kid and, even as an adult, is sort of a historical footnote even now.
1983: Soviets Shot Down a South Korea Commercial Airliner, Igniting Controversy
I didn't know anything about this, but in 1983 I was still a baby, living with my parents in West Virginia in a small house about 20 miles west of Morgantown (where my actual father still lives to this day, honestly). Also, sometime in the spring of this year, my mother saw a UFO -- the story of her sighting is for another time, but it is historically significant to the person I would become as I got older (more on this later). I promise my memories of these things will get more interesting as these go on.
1984: Apple Macintosh Went On Sale With the Iconic "1984" Commercial
I sort of refuse to believe this was the biggest news story of 1984. I mean, Ghostbusters came out in 1984, and the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles had a guy with a legit fucking jetpack flying around, and the biggest story is that Apple put out the Mac? Wasn't there a presidential election in 1984, where Reagan got re-elected? 1984 is the first year I remember having real memories that I can recall even now. I went to Virginia Beach for the first time in summer 1984 -- with my parents, my aunt (who had just graduated high school), and my aunt's friend Polly -- it rained most of the time we were there, and I remember watching it rain in the streetlights of the boardwalk there. I grabbed a clam shell off the beach, which my mother still has to this day; it is filled with marbles and is a display piece on the back of the toilet in my parents' house.
1985: Mikhail Gorbachev Became The Last Leader Of The Soviet Union, And Initiated Glasnost And Perestroika
Okay, so I suppose this is a real news story with historical significance. As a child I didn't really have any idea what a Soviet was, nor did I know about the Cold War or anything else. In 1985, Back to the Future came out, and it cemented my love of the DeLorean from that point forward. 1985 also marks the milestone of me being able to remember stuff I watched on television of a child -- I was a big fan of Transformers, Knight Rider (in its 3rd season at this point, and the theme of my birthday cake that year), and was the year I can remember I started paying attention to the pop-culture things that would later shape my life -- movies, music, and so on. I remember HBO in 1985, seeing movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Superman for the first time, even if they were a few years old at that point. I remember summer nights, trips to Idlewild Park, birthday parties for my cousins, and my mother's 1984 silver Pontiac Grand Am. Jesus that car was a piece of shit, but it was better than the rustbucket Malaise-era Dodge Aspen she was driving before that. My father, doing well enough in his job to be able to afford an actual vehicle, bought a brand new Jeep Cherokee, getting rid of his Ford Ranger that constantly had problems.
1986: The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster Occurred, And The Radiation Affected Thousands
Agreed, probably the biggest news story of the year, and around this time my life began to get more interesting. In January 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger exploded -- I watched this happen live on television with my grandmother, who took care of me in the daytime hours when my parents were at work. I remember watching Donahue with my uncle, who lived with my grandmother at the time, and I remember weekend grocery shopping trips with the two of them to Waynesburg, PA. I remember Muppet Babies, He-Man, and Top Gun, and remember how excited I was to get toys from The Real Ghostbusters, which premiered that year -- my mother got me the Slimer figure, while my grandmother got me Ecto-1 (I had to wait for this for a while, because I remember it was $20, and that was a lot of money back in the '80s). I spent the year collecting the individual Ghostbusters one by one until I had the full set. I remember my father, who worked in the coal mines, went on strike that year -- and began selling Kirby vacuums door-to-door (it was, of course, a time before the internet). I would, occasionally, accompany him on his journeys. It was also around this time when I began to be cognizant of some, ahem, problems between my parents, as well. For my birthday that year, my mother bought me my very first cat -- a smoke Persian I named, interestingly enough, Priscilla.
1987: On Black Monday, Wall Street And Worldwide Stocks Crashed, Changing Trading Techniques For Everyone
Yeah, this happened, of course -- but 1987 was a very formative year for me in many ways. 1987 would be the year that began to shape who I was for the rest of my life. For one, my parents divorced in 1987 -- I chose to live with my mother, and we moved into an apartment in the small town in which she (and I, to a certain extent) grew up. I was mathematically too young for Kindergarten -- I was born in December, and the cutoff was September -- but I was put into a "head start" class that year, and was given an IQ test that said I was a certifiable genius, to the point where my parents were called at work to be given the news. Even at that young of an age, I was reading and understanding (thanks to my grandmother basically teaching me how) and I knew I wanted to become a creator of things -- for some reason I was always drawn to comic books and superheroes and sci-fi concepts. I remember a lot of weird times, things that don't really make sense as an adult -- such as, why did I spend so much time with my grandmother and my uncle, all sorts of overnights and almost every day spent at my grandmother's house to the point where it seemed almost 24/7? My mother was working at a dentist's office in Morgantown at the time, my father still in the mines and living (mostly) alone with the cat -- I understand I was in Head Start for a lot of it, but there aren't a lot of memories from that time that involve being at home. Looking back on it now, it seems like my grandmother and uncle basically raised me for a good chunk of my childhood's younger years, not my parents. Winter 1987 also marks a cornerstone moment in my life -- when I had my first major close encounter with a UFO, also witnessed by my two cousins, their mother (my aunt), and my grandmother. That is, of course, a story for another time, but it is one of my life's only events that cannot be rationally explained away, and something that (I believe) helped shape me into an atheist/scientist years later -- there's not a "god" out there, but something is out there somewhere. Also of note -- 1987 is the year of my first and so far only major surgery, when I had my adenoids removed and had tubes put in my ears in an attempt to stop my chronic ear infections (which to this day, I still have some pretty significant hearing loss from). I can pinpoint it to 1987 because we were still living in the apartment at the time...which was right next to the volunteer fire station. The fire siren going off caused me extreme pain because all sounds are amplified when your eardrums are literally being held open by tubes.
1988: Alleged Terrorists Bombed A Pan Am 747 Above Scotland, Killing 270
Well, here it is -- the first event on this list where I can tell you exactly where I was when it happened: I was being babysat after Kindergarten that day by our former neighbors, Josephine and Frank (both of whom are probably dead now, sadly -- our family didn't keep in contact with them that closely after the 80s) and was downstairs in their basement playing with their kids (Shawn and Angel) and their toys, and I remember it being right before Christmas (a date search confirms this; the Lockerbie bombing was December 21, 1988) because all of their decorations/tree was up. I remember it being talked about on the news and I remember Josephine discussing it with my mother, though I don't remember why she was babysitting me -- she only watched me a few times, and my mother and I were living in Morgantown by that time in a trailer park, where our neighbor Nancy watched me after I would get off school for the day -- perhaps Nancy and/or her family were out of town or something, who knows. I had just turned six, and that weekend my mother would hold a birthday party for me that nobody would attend, not one single person. She made me a chocolate-frosted cake with red gel lettering on it, and nobody came to eat it. This was also the year that we had the long-talked-about "Christmas bush," as our tree was short and fat, and looked like, well, a bush.
I was in Kindergarten in two places in 1988 -- Wadestown Elementary for the start of it, as we were still not living in Morgantown at that time, and I remember being there during the 1988 presidential election where the school had an "election day" thing going on where all of us kids would "vote" (I remember voting for Dukakis) and then, after moving to Morgantown -- apparently sometime between election day and my birthday -- I would attend Woodland "elementary," which was a one-room school for Kindergarten only, on its last year of being open, for the rest of 1988 and the first half of 1989. Also of note -- 1988 is the year I saw my first two movies in the theater, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with my mother and The Land Before Time with my father, and it is the year my wife was born, the young whippersnapper she is. My mother also began working part time for a car dealership and was able to upgrade from her shitty Grand Am (I really hope that thing hit a crusher shortly thereafter) to a beautiful, ocean blue 1988 Cavalier Z24 -- still my favorite vehicle my mother has ever owned:
Hot damn that was a cool, fast car, and damn me for not appreciating it until much later in life.
1989: The Berlin Wall Fell, Changing Germany's Political And Physical Landscape
On November 9, 1989, I was in Mrs. Arnett's first grade class at Easton Elementary (another school which no longer exists and was torn town a few years back) and watched this event live on television during the school day. They brought large televisions out on carts into the school's common areas and we watched the wall fall. Thirteen years later, when I was in college, an acquaintance had a brick-sized chunk of the wall (with a certificate of authentation and everything) and broke pieces of it off for some of us to keep. I still have my piece of the Berlin Wall, flecked with spraypaint from the graffiti on it, and it is one of my most prized possessions -- it is a literal piece of history. At the time, I knew the wall coming down was a significant event, but I didn't know why or for what reasons. 1989 was a weird year -- we moved into our second trailer in the same park, and we were struggling financially. My mother never made a big deal about it (she really never said a word about it to me, and I wouldn't really have understood anyway), but it was evident. My clothes were ratty and worn out, and we were barely making ends meet -- still, every Friday night she took me to McDonald's for a Happy Meal as a treat, and she did everything she could to give me a relatively normal life. She flew down to Bradenton, Florida that year for a job interview -- the only time to my knowledge that my mother has ever flown anywhere -- and, while I've written about it before, I can't imagine how much my life would be different if she'd gotten/accepted that job. For those of you who remember, 1989 was the first real year of the back-to-back summer blockbuster movies, and one of the greatest years in summer movie history -- Ghostbusters II, Batman, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade all came out within mere weeks of one another. I was a huge Ghostbusters fan, and my mother took me to see Ghostbusters II in the theater during opening week -- I remember how hot it was that week, and I remember I was wearing my $2-discount-store Ghostbusters II t-shirt to the movie. My father remarried, and I was in the wedding as the ring bearer, my rented tuxedo ill-fitting and uncomfortable. I would see Honey, I Shrunk the Kids in the theater with my daycare's Summer Program -- the same daycare I would hunker down in a week after my father's wedding with two other kids and the staff as Hurricane Hugo rolled its way up the coast and plowed into West Virginia pretty hard on its path:
That was fun.
I remember cuddling up with my mother on hand-me-down furniture in our trailer in the winter, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on WPTT-22 out of Pittsburgh. I remember the winter was cold and wet.
1990: The Gulf War Started, And Coalition Forces Moved To Defend Kuwait From Iraq
1990 was weird, man. Most of the 90s were. 1990 was the beginning of a new decade and a new way of thinking for a lot of the country. I remember a lot of day-glo clothing and parachute pants, I remember COPS and America's Most Wanted on Fox -- which, through Fox 53 out of Pittsburgh, was just beginning to reach people in West Virginia. I do not remember the day the Gulf War started, but I do remember talking about it in my 2nd grade class with Mr. Steel. I remember spending time in the tiny library at my school, reading ghost stories and stories about UFOs (I told you, my experiences really began to shape my life, and this was the beginning of it). In the summer of that year, while I was spending the weekend with my grandmother and uncle (another recurring theme of my life, as you may have noticed at this point) my mother eloped and married her second husband -- this was a mistake all around, which she and I would both pay for many times over for the next four years. I did not like this man. I did not like the way he treated me or my mother over those years, and the less said about him, the better. I did have one of the better pictures taken of me in 1990, though:
Yeah, I know. I was cute once. I have no idea what the hell happened.
1991: South Africa Officially Repealed The Racist Apartheid Policy
I am not sure this is the biggest news story of 1991, as in backwoods West Virginia, South Africa was not really at the forefront of most people's social consciousnesses. Rather, for me, 1991 was a big year of big changes -- the Gulf War ending in February meant that my elementary school, at the bottom of the hill that the city airport sat on top of, got to see the massive C-130s flying in bringing the troops home, and seeing some of those returned troops come down to the school to see their children shortly after landing was a big deal. 1991 saw my first summer with the National Youth Sports Program (NYSP), which always gave me something to do and helped me remain active, and my mother and stepfather bought a house in the rich-white-people part of Morgantown known as Cheat Lake -- where I would live for three more years in a room wallpapered with ice-cream cones and hearts (simply because it was much bigger than the other, spare bedroom).
With a move to a new house came a move to a new school, Oak Grove Elementary -- another school on its last year of life while the newer, larger Cheat Lake Elementary was being built. My teacher was a wonderful, very large woman named Mrs. Weber, who even long after I was her student she would stay in contact with me and my family. She also liked to put bright red lipstick on and kiss her students' papers and cheeks, leaving a big kiss print (imagine a teacher in 2019 doing that without getting fired). I really liked her -- she had passion, she cared about her students. She was one of the best teachers I've ever had.
My mother began working at WVU in 1991, where I would myself begin working and attend college ten years later. In March, my stepmother gave birth to my oldest sister, and I was there in the hospital with her and my father that night when she was born. I watched my Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup versus the (at the time) Minnesota North Stars. In June, I would accompany my stepfather's parents on a cross-country vacation all the way out to South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and finally Idaho, where my stepfather's brother's family lived. On that trip I would see many things for the first time -- massive herds of pronghorn, Devil's Tower, Mount Rushmore, and Yellowstone National Park, amongst other things. I would spend two weeks in Twin Falls, Idaho, where I was able to see Shoshone Falls and go over the Perrine Bridge -- I took many photos of all of these things on a little red 110-film camera (yeah, this was a long time ago, folks) which were developed and later lost to history. I wish I still had those photos.
Also of note, during that trip I came the closest I've actually physically been to a tornado, ironically enough, in Nebraska -- while traveling. It was crossing a field next to the road (I'm guessing I-80) and was about 1/4 mile from the car as we were driving. Even after living in the midwest for thirteen years and in Nebraska for five, I have never been as close to a tornado since.
1992: Riots Erupted In Los Angeles, CA, After Footage Showed Police Mercilessly Beating Rodney King
1992 was a really strange time. Grunge was beginning to take hold, as was hip-hop, and glitzy pop acts and hair metal bands were disappearing from the radio to be replaced with that type of music as well as what is now considered modern alternative. I also began to really get into comic books -- drawing as well as reading/collecting them, thanks to (again) weekend shopping trips with my uncle and his spending $10-15 on me every time I went so I could get the latest Marvel and DC books -- this would continue for the next five or six years, really. I remember the L.A. riots and watching them on television, not knowing that they'd be the first of many or that they would signal the beginning of the downfall of our society over the next 25 years or so. I was, again, a white kid in West Virginia, one of the poor kids living in a rich white school district, and there were maybe fifteen black kids in my entire 1500-or-so school. I remember my first school dances where I was not afraid or nervous to dance with girls in my class as well as some older/younger ones, and I remember seeing my Pittsburgh Penguins win the Stanley Cup again, this time against the Chicago Blackhawks. I later saw Batman Returns in the theater that summer, by myself (it may have been the first movie I ever saw in a theater by myself, actually), and watched a father and son down the aisle spending quality time together, the father showering upon the son Batman-themed gifts and shirts and all sorts of things. I remember, while watching that, how I wished my father actually gave a damn about me and did stuff like that for me. I was already retreating inward into myself by this time -- I was fat and was getting bullied for it quite a bit, I never really fit in at the rich-white-kids-school, and with his new daughter taking up a lot of his time and energy, I began to see my father less and less. Around Christmas of that year I was told upon my visit to my father's house that I would need to take with me whatever I wanted to keep, because none of it would be left there the next time I came back -- and she was right; whatever I had left behind had been thrown away by the time I returned to visit the next summer.
1993: The Waco Siege Of Branch Davidian Cultists Ended In Bloodshed
This is easily the biggest news story of 1993 at least on a national level, but during the almost two-month siege on Koresh's compound in Texas, the two biggest events of 1993 for me happened one after the other. The first one was the birth of my second sister, in early March. This time I was not present at the hospital -- my father didn't even call me to let me know until the next day or the day after, and it was postulated by my asshole former stepfather at the time that it was because of how little I mattered to my father because he now had two new kids to care about (something that, really, seemed to end up being true the more time went on). The second biggest event of the year for me happened a week and a half later, roughly -- the Blizzard of 1993. They called it the "Storm of the Century" and it dumped over three feet of snow on my part of West Virginia. Roads were impassable, if you could even tell where they were. Power was out in many places. Home doors were snowed shut and people were trapped in their houses. Almost everything completely shut down -- water mains had broken, so even if there was water, it had to be boiled before use. I was out of school for almost three full weeks. This was a time before the internet -- I didn't even own a computer -- there was very little to do. I had never seen weather like this, had never seen snow this bad. When schools reopened and stuff started getting back to normal in West Virginia, the raid on the Waco compound was but a blip on the radar.
At home, there was a lot going on in 1993. My mother and stepfather decided to take a beach vacation to Myrtle Beach, and I went with; it was the only time I'd ever been to Myrtle Beach and I have not returned since. I remember it was very, very hot and I got a particularly awful sunburn. I also remember someone getting killed on one of the roller coasters at the amusement park down there when we were there, and being knocked down either by a large fish or a small shark in waist-deep water shortly before the beach lifeguards ordered everyone out of the water as sharks had been spotted. I got a t-shirt from one of the surf shops on the beach for $5, and wore it for many years afterwards until it completely fell apart. I also didn't know it at the time, but my mother and stepfather were on the outs with one another, and that summer began what seemed like a year-long sliding scale downward into the end of their marriage. Thankfully. By the end of the year, my mother and I would be (mostly) living alone, as my stepfather had left the house by that time.
The month of August 1993 was the last time I would spend any time with my father, and it was a turning point in my life. The mines were on strike again, a long, drawn-out strike this time, and I always spent several weeks with my father in August. This time around he seemed like a completely different person -- mostly distant and angered by his job (or lack of one, really, during the strike); he'd picked up smoking, something he'd never done before -- Salem menthols, which I remember because later, when I was a smoker, Salems were always my own menthols of choice -- and my presence seemed to be fairly bothersome a lot of the time I was there. Consequently, I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's house (again, recurring theme of my childhood). As the new baby had come, I no longer had a room in my father's house -- that's why my stepmother had told me to take everything with me upon my previous visit, but never said why -- my bedroom had been gutted and made into my oldest sister's room, with her old room now being the baby's room. As such, I literally spent those weeks sleeping on the couch in the living room with what few belongings I had shoved into the corner. When I had a severe allergic reaction to something in the house and broke out in horrifying hives and a skin rash, as well as the soles of my feet cracking and bleeding, my father took me to the doctor to get some foot salve and once more dumped me on my grandmother to deal with.
That summer, my grandmother's 20-year-old cat died, and lightning struck down the massive sugar maple tree about 100 yards from the house. The day the cat died, we had one of the worst thunderstorms I've ever seen in my life, and it marked the last time I would ever see my father for more than five minutes until I was an adult. I would never spend any time with either of my sisters in person again, either -- to this day.
1994: Nelson Mandela Was Elected President Of South Africa After Decades Of Imprisonment
This is NOT the biggest news story of 1994. By 1994, my life was in its first of many downward spirals. I was failing 5th grade (I had just stopped caring about school, and while I still went, it was primarily to trade comic books with my few friends and kill time the rest of the day). I don't know there was a single class I passed that year, but because of West Virginia's glorious school system, I was pushed along to 6th grade anyway for the fall. I was having a lot of emotional problems that I mostly kept to myself, and had a hard time opening up to anyone.
The first biggest news event I can recall is on a cold morning in January -- I had walked home that morning after spending the night at the home of a family friend, since my mother had been out late the night before, to turn on the news and find that the 1994 Northridge earthquake had struck Los Angeles. I did not have to go to school that morning -- a quick date search tells me that it was apparently Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that year -- and I remember laying in bed with my mother on that cold, gray morning, watching the news coverage.
A few short months later, on April 9, I had spent the night at my grandmother's (yes, I know) and went down to the road to get the morning paper. Unfolding it as I walked back up to the house, I was greeted with the news of Kurt Cobain's suicide. I knew of Nirvana at the time, of course, but really only in passing. Truthfully I was a little too young for the target demographic of grunge, and in the early 90s I wasn't paying close attention to music, really -- I hated country music (which is what the majority of West Virginia listened to) and if I had the radio on, it was on WVAQ, Morgantown's pop/top 40 station. Even then I didn't pay much attention to what it played. So, upon his death, I didn't really know who Cobain was, and wouldn't really discover his music for a few more years until I was exiting middle school and entering high school.
In the spring, my stepfather (who had been out of the picture for some time by that point anyway) would officially divorce my mother; when it was done, it was done -- I remember, from my own experience, that it was a very cordial, businesslike transaction. In the settlement he kept the house in Cheat Lake, and my mother and I moved across town to a large apartment building five minutes from her office; he and his friends even helped us move into said building. After that, he was gone from our lives, and I never saw him again (thankfully). With the move came a move to yet another new school for my 6th grade year only -- North Elementary. With that move also came new freedoms; I was eleven that summer, and was used to being on my own a lot of the time -- I was also too young for a job, so 1994 was my final year of the NYSP summer camp; I eventually just stopped going completely as I'd lost interest in it -- even though I was physically closer to it than ever. During this time, my mother met and began her relationship with the man I have referred to as my "dad" ever since, and while they are still together to this day, they have never married. I personally always thought that was because they didn't want to jinx it. He is, and has been ever since they've been together, the most consistent positive male role model in my life.
The mid-90s are weird for me because a lot of things blend together within them. I was, sort of, a latchkey kid left to my own devices for a lot of those years. I'd get up, go to school in the morning, come home while my mother was still at work, eat and watch TV, and go to bed a few hours afterwards. I really didn't have friends or any true social life, and until my birthday in 1994 I didn't even have any video games or anything to really occupy me -- that was the year that my mother bought me a Sega Genesis. Consequently, a lot of my memories of that time are of television and late-run movies when I couldn't sleep -- I watched the entire run of Gilligan's Island at least twice as it always seemed to be on TBS or TNT back in the 90s. I was a big fan of the Fox X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons, but that was also because I was a comic nerd. The original Power Rangers series was big around this time, and I was really into it -- I had a lot of the toys and several t-shirts, a bedding set, and various other odds-and-ends. I remember seeing Halloween and Halloween 2 for the first time on TNT's MonsterVision with Joe Bob Briggs, and remember how even he made fun of the overdubbed dialogue to make the movies TV-friendly. I saw the Star Wars trilogy for the first time when USA Network started running the films back-to-back on rainy weekends. On September 8, 1994, I was sitting down to watch that night's episode of Roseanne on WTAE-4 out of Pittsburgh when the programming was pre-empted by the news of USAir Flight 427 literally crashing in, well, Pittsburgh.
During the summer of 1994, once we were settled into our new apartment and had a newfound sense of freedom away from my former stepfather, my mother decided she wanted to do a road trip. This was sort of out of character for her, even then -- my mother has never really been the adventurous type, nor did she usually want to set out on any kinds of vacations (she was, after all, once more a single mother recently divorced, and we didn't have a ton of money to throw around -- that apartment we had was expensive). She decided she wanted to see Gettysburg and Amish country, bed and breakfasts and the like, through rural Pennsylvania. Okay, I thought, this could be interesting. So she took time off on a long weekend, we loaded some bags into her shiny, new, less-than-a-year-old 1993 Ford Probe and went to Gettysburg. While there, while walking the battlefields, my mother started feeling really weird -- unsettled, filled with dread, overcome with emotions of grief, panic, and fear. She'd later brush it off as heat exhaustion or being tired/dehydrated and didn't want to talk about it anymore -- indeed, the day was over 100 degrees and the car had nearly overheated during our drive at least once. After staying two nights at two different, unremarkable bed-and-breakfasts, we returned home, and the trip was rarely talked about afterwards.
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