The Baby Boomers - "Remember where I Was When...."

Today I stopped at my favorite Caribou Coffee Shop, and for those who drink Caribou coffee you know that they have a question everyday, that if it's answered correctly they take 10 cents off your drink, not a lot, I know- but it's fun to try to answer correctly!  Anyhow, today the question was "What significant event happened for America on July 20, 1969.  Well, of course, I was able to answer that right away!  I told the girls working (all college age) "do you know why I know that?  It's because I was sitting in the living room of my Grandmother's house, with my family watching her color TV (we didn't have color).
We sat there with excitement watching the whole thing and saw Neil Armstrong take his first step, and make his famous statement!  My Uncle from Arizona, was at Grandma's visiting and I remember him telling our younger siblings that this was a big event and they would remember it always no matter how old they got....(I was almost an adult then, so of course I knew the importance of this moment).  The girls  at Caribou weren't around in1969, but they could relate. One of them told me she remembers the day and exactly what she was doing when the Challenger exploded, and she told me the generation younger than her would say "it did what?", that generation not being there.

That got me to thinking how each generation has it's impactful events that are remembered and know exactly what they were doing at the time! Us babyboomer generation...our parents would tell us about "the day and moment they heard that Pearl Harbor was bombed".  Our Grandparents generation would tell us about remembering the day that Charles Lindberg went round the world in a plane, and then about how their baby got kidnapped.  Our children will remember what they were doing and the day that 9-11
happened, which is already 10 years ago...oh my seems like yesterday sometimes!

I do think that us baby boomers really had the most things happen during our growing up years, especially during our adolescent and teen years, traumatic things, and things that shaped the future of our world.   The first significant thing that we remember, the exact day, time, what we were doing and our feelings was the day JFK was shot.  That was so traumatic for us!  But, that was just the start...look what followed... his brother Bobby being killed, and Martin Luther King, for awhile there it seemed like it wouldn't end.  Then we lived through Vietnam, seeing our male peers being drafted, or enlisting before they would be drafted.  We saw the advent of "the pill".  There was Woodstock and the  culture that went with that. We watched all the things that happened down south of us, as they were happening on the civil rights fights...then finally a civil rights bill, which then really changed our country...especially the south.  Schools integrated, etc.  Read the book "The Help" and see the movie that has been made from it, and see the progress that was made after the civil rights bill! Some of the younger generation upon seeing the movie, said they didn't even realize that there were separate bathrooms, separate water fountains, etc.  But, my generation knew it.

The generation of the 20 and 30 year olds, 9-11 is probably what will be their biggest impact.  The generation of teens and younger, today - wonder what their significant memories will be?